The service entrance doorways slid to the correct and, as Molly Humphreys and I exited the Berkeley Medical Heart, we stepped into an unseasonably heat night. “It’s the golden hour,” Molly stated as we surveyed our environment and eliminated our masks, exposing flat faces with creased noses. Behind us stood a chilly, somber hospital and we had been engulfed in an empty parking zone, one flooded with radiant daylight. My sense of time had been so warped by the COVID-19 pandemic that I had forgotten the date, Friday, November 6, 2020. We had been conducting interviews for Healthcare is Human and, after just a few hours of this emotionally laborious challenge, we would have liked recent air. I inhaled deeply and, earlier than I spotted what was occurring, two girls had been sizing us up, questioning why we had emerged from the again of the hospital, considered one of us holding a microphone, the opposite with a digital camera. Angel Poe and her EMS associate had simply delivered a affected person to the ER and had been leaning towards the hood of their ambulance because it sparkled within the solar. We began a dialog and, within the moments that adopted, Humphreys took a candid photograph of Angel, a picture that continues to work on me. I glanced over to see that, throughout Interstate 81, the solar had dropped behind North Mountain. The helipad on the hilltop glowed like a firefly as I turned my gaze southward into the silent Shenandoah Valley. Because the digital camera clicked, I rubbed my nostril and puzzled what this photograph would appear like.
Within the ensuing picture, Angel stares immediately into Humphreys’ lens and a waterfall of rusty hair streams down her again, which Humphreys pops towards her masks and the ambulance’s good white hood. Her expression is in no way clear, however she tasks knowledge and, whereas her eyes are compassionate, a world-weariness can’t be unseen. Humphreys’ portrait has, since 2020, posed so many questions, most of which I can not reply. I discover myself questioning what, precisely, EMS staff see as they work night time and day in Berkeley County, West Virginia. And regardless of being an inside drugs physician in Martinsburg, WV, for twenty years, I guess I don’t even know half of it.
Final yr, there have been 15,795 EMS calls in Berkeley County, with the Berkeley County Emergency Ambulance Authority servicing 321 sq. miles, a territory the dimensions of New York Metropolis. For 9,100 of those calls, the sufferers had been so sick that they had been transported directedly to the hospital. The Berkeley Medical Heart, situated alongside Interstate 81, is house to the busiest emergency room in West Virginia with 55,000 visits in 2024. A very democratic enterprise, 911 doesn’t, really, care who you’re. Once they reply the cellphone, their response is “911, what’s your emergency?” This speaks volumes about their dedication to the work, the hazard, and the necessity. Regionally, 9 crews work each day with over 100 subject workers. A exceptional public service, 911 is one thing that almost all of us take as a right. That’s, till we want it instantly.
Sixty-three p.c of native EMS transports final yr concerned superior life assist companies, with a median response lower than eight minutes, delivering 3,323 individuals to our native emergency division with chest ache, and a pair of,603 for vomiting and stomach ache. These diseases and accidents are, in a really sensible approach, pedestrian occasions for subject clinicians like Angel. And but, I’ve to marvel in the event that they ever turn into “regular”? Is that even attainable? Are you able to think about performing a job the place you routinely encounter useless individuals? Final yr, 187 individuals had been pronounced useless on arrival by our native EMS. When that occurred, eyes like Angel’s tried to consolation the residing, these poor souls who had been rendered into spasms beside their family members who had been limp and lifeless within the driveway. Some had bled to dying inside their crashed automotive alongside the roadside. Others had been shot in a parking zone by somebody with a handgun. And too many had overdosed on a front room sofa, the TV nonetheless flickering. West Virginia’s persistent diseases and acute tragedies often share a standard shrieking 911 cellphone name. EMS staff’ eyes take up all of those pictures and their our bodies swallow this ache.
What number of of our neighbors have regarded into these eyes for solutions about what simply occurred, and why? Regardless of a workday that contains a parade of sickness, harm and ache, on this Humphreys photograph we discover essentially the most female portrayal of bodily energy. We regard a girl who’s dressed to drive a truck and bodily carry sufferers into her ambulance, all whereas she administers remedy and communicates with the hospital. This lifting, pushing, pulling, driving, and loading is completed by girls in well being care on a regular basis, but this labor is usually buried behind the “anticipated” work of caregiving, equivalent to nursing, social work, and the like. Ask a toddler to attract a girl in a hospital and you’re prone to get a crayon drawing of a smiling nurse. The media typically portrays girls because the suppliers of Kleenex and hugs in well being care with dramatically much less emphasis on the ladies who contort their our bodies to stabilize burn victims within the subject as visitors whizzes by at eighty miles per hour.
A big print of this Humphreys’ {photograph} hangs on my workplace wall, one of many “Mona Lisa” portraits of Healthcare is Human. It has turn into a touchstone for a lot of of my ideas and emotions about emergency medical companies, one thing I take into consideration typically. I’m grateful for these amongst us who race to the scene, “run to the hearth,” as we are saying in West Virginia. They know that one thing tragic is probably going ready for them once they arrive. Molly Humphreys helps me see these people in a radiant new mild. Or, perhaps, to see them for the very first time. Both approach, whereas I’ve seen their eyes, I battle to know what they really see.
That is the second article in a collection about Molly Humphreys and her influence on healthcare because the principal photographer for Healthcare is Human, a storytelling challenge primarily based in Martinsburg, WV. Healthcare is Human will be discovered on social media and Humphreys’ industrial portfolio by trying to find Piccadilly Posh Images.
Ryan McCarthy is an inside drugs doctor.
