Silent Alarm

Steven Schrader spent 15 years as a firefighter and an EMT (emergency medical technician), most of them in Atlanta, Georgia, where he experienced the full scan of human distress and misery. Like so many EMTs, he faced these tragedies and various associated hazards with unflagging courage and little fanfare. Unlike other EMTs, he also dealt with other obstacles presented by his severe hearing loss, including bias. Achieving his boyhood dream, Schrader first became a firefighter, then a full-fledged EMT who compiled one of the longest service records in Atlanta at that time. He worked every part of the city, days and nights, and his stark stories of life and death sting with the sharpness of the unanesthetized truth. On one call, he and his partner laugh at gruesome jokes to cope with the rigid regulations that require them haplessly to perform CPR on a patient who is obviously and horrendously already dead from a 20,000-volt charge. After another, he hides away deep in a hospital basement to keen over the death of a drug addict's five-months-premature baby. After so many years of facing the unimaginable, Schrader looks back in Silent Alarm at how he fared as an EMT. He found both salvation and self-damnation, proving above all his own humanity. For all of the self-doubts exposed here, his story confirms his vast resources of empathy and his genuine commitment to help others. Throughout his career he aided everyone who needed his help, ultimately assigning himself the critical task of bettering emergency services for deaf people. Silent Alarm is a gripping story of survival, so overwhelming in its gritty details of an EMT's existence that, remarkably, his deafness becomes an afterthought.