Black Flies #4

In Shannon Burke's novel Black Flies the life of a medic in Harlem during the 1990s is revealed. Ollie Cross is a young medic, fresh out of college, who can't quite make it into medical school so he becomes a medic to get some experience. He discovers that being a medic is a difficult job, both physically and mentally. He works on the most damaged victims and struggles to understand the mindset of the world he entered. In this section, Ollie sees one of his fellow medics sort of lose it. This medic, Verdis, takes up ventriloquism and uses a pupet to talk to patients. Ollie starts to realize just how much the job can mess with one's head. He later works the Harlem Street Festival where the crowd continually surges due to fights, gunshots, and general unrest. At one point, teenagers begin to shoot guns into the crowd and the crowd stampedes. There are lost children, people burned by oil from the food carts being tipped over, asthmatics having attacks, multiple broken bones, and even mothers giving birth all at the same time. However, instead of being overwhelmed Ollie is thrilled. He feels the excitement of the pressure and his desire to help people. He realizes how he truly comes alive in the face of a crisis. Ollie witnesses LaFontaine, another medic, soaking a man's bandage in hydrogen peroxide and putting it on his head so that his hair became a brilliant orange as a practical joke. He is also warned about his partner, Rutkovsky, and how he is getting old and might not be able to keep up with the pressure. Ollie continually defends his partner and says Rutkovsky is the best medic he has ever seen. One day, Rutkovsky and Ollie go to the beach just for fun. They learn more about each other, and, for the first time since his girlfriend broke up with him, Ollie feels like he has a friend. Rutkovsky repeatedly tells Ollie to get out of the medic lifestyle. He also shows Ollie his Silver Star Medal from the war and Ollie realizes how special his friend is.



While working as a medic, Ollie sees some pretty weird things. One hot summer day, a woman is walking naked down Broadway, obviously out of her right mind. The medics bring her to a physc unit and she enters, "and sat in front of the intern: naked, tangled hair crawling with lice, rolls of grime-covered fat on her belly, black toenails, sweat running in clean rivulets down her filthy skin" (Burke 94). This is just disgusting to think about and, if this is what Ollie experiences every day, I understand why medics could get a little bit messed up. This is not normal society. If a person is continually around people with mental problems, they lose sight of normal. I think this helps contribute to the medics having weird habbits, such as speaking to patients through puppets.



Ollie and the medics often receive many fake calls. Ollie explains that, "By law, EMS was required to respond to all calls equally, so every night Rolly got loaded on vodka then called the ambulance and got a free taxi ride to a free place to stay with a free dinner and breakfast. He had over 320 ER visits that year" (Burke 98). This just shows how our health care system in the United States is often abused. While it is good that all calls are responded to equally when there are actually emergency calls, these fake calls can take away from time that medics spend treating people that actually need help. Ollie sees how he is often just used. The medics see this and it affects how they treat patients that actually need help. They can never be quite sure that every problem is real. They might then not treat every patient fully because they might think the person is faking. In a place as violence ridden as Harlem, the medics are always busy and they shouldn't have to waste time on fake calls.



So far Ollie is staying slipping in his morals. While he no longer speaks up when another medic might be abusing his patient, Ollie does not abuse his own. However, to me, being a bistander to injustice is participating in injustice. I was hoping Ollie would be able to change the medics and how they treat their patients. So far he hasn't done anything, but there is still time.

Source
Burke, Shannon. Black Flies. New York: Soft Skull P, 2008.*Black Flies should be underlined