The woman, who had collapsed in a fit of tremors minutes before, opened her eyes. She regarded the man before her – lean, all-business attitude, blue uniform exuding some kind of authority – and sprang awake. She placed both feet on the ground and rose with barely a wobble, muttering that she was okay. Then she turned and started up the stairs, unaware that she was walking away from one of the best-trained paramedics in the country.
For Mr Kleisner, 55, the case was not much of a challenge. But it was still better than his old job working on Wall Street.
“We get a lot of nothing calls like this,” he said, after he and his partner had packed up their gear. “But our bread and butter is big stuff. I’m talking amputations, people hit by trains, bodies in pieces. Catastrophic stuff.”
Mr Kleisner’s transition from millionaire commodities trader to rookie paramedic came 13 years ago, when he traded what he viewed as nihilistic self-enrichment for the mission of saving other people’s lives.
By the time he abandoned Wall Street, he said, he was making millions of dollars a year. He was also miserable.
“I was a person who created nothing, gave nothing to anybody,” he said of his time on Wall Street, where he ran his own investment fund. “Sometimes I feel like an outlaw who’s trying to get to heaven. Or maybe a few good nights of sleep.”
He could comfortably retire tomorrow to his cabin in the Catskills, where he goes fly fishing, reads novels and keeps bees. Instead, he remains a rescue paramedic, effectively subsidising the Fire Department of New York, where his starting salary in 2012 was US$32,000. He now earns US$110,000 (S$141,000).
“People ask me, ‘Why would you risk your life for US$18 an hour?’” he said.
The answer he gives is not so different from what he might have said as a Wall Street trader. “I am a hugely competitive person. I’m pretty good at what I do.”
Among the department’s 4,500 emergency medical responders, fewer than 60 are, like Mr Kleisner, rescue medics, who are specially trained to save firefighters from active fires, retrieve people trapped beneath subway cars, reach injured people by rappelling down lift shafts.
Of this elite crew, Mr Kleisner is one of five lead instructors who train other rescue medics how to do the job.
There was no “Aha!” moment. Mr Kleisner’s break with Wall Street occurred in stages. After 17 years in finance, in 2008, he was about to reach the summit of Mount Rainier, in Washington state, when a woman in his party blew out her knee. A snowstorm was approaching, and the group needed to get off the mountain immediately. They were rescued by a team of mountaineering medics, who suggested to Mr Kleisner that if he wanted to continue such extreme wilderness pursuits, he should get some medical training.
He was intrigued by the medics’ ability to perform such complex, high-stakes work in a demanding environment. When he returned to New York, he signed up for an emergency medical technician class at Hunter College. When he was offered a chance to sign up for a future slot at the Fire Department’s training academy, he put his name down.
“It was like a protest,” he said. “I wasn’t serious. But I was sick of Wall Street.”
In the meantime, while still working in finance, he volunteered one day a week as an emergency medical technician with the Central Park Medical Unit. He and his partner restarted a man’s heart by delivering a shock from a defibrillator, saving his life. The story was covered by a local newspaper, which his mother clipped and framed.
“I don’t think I ever saw my mum more proud of me,” Mr Kleisner said. “That was a seminal experience.”
After two years of this double life, Mr Kleisner was invited by the Fire Department to try out for the paramedics’ academy. He had a wife, two children, an apartment near Central Park and an intense and well-paid job on Wall Street. Training would begin with a physical exam in downtown Brooklyn. Mr Kleisner was 41, nearly twice the age of most recruits. He aced it, completed 14 weeks of training, and was asked where he would like to be assigned.
“I said the Bronx, because I knew it was hard, and I wanted hard,” said Mr Kleisner, who eventually quit working in finance.
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Minutes into his very first shift, he responded to a fatal shooting, which unnerved him. He signed up for more training and completed it as quickly as allowed, rising in four years from basic emergency medical technician to a paramedic trained in hazardous materials response to the pinnacle of the Fire Department’s emergency medical service: rescue medic. And then he rose again, becoming an instructor of other rescue medics.
His next posting put him in Manhattan, which paramedics call “Hollywood” because of its high call volume and high-profile jobs.
Despite his status among medics, Mr Kleisner is not an officer, but a Fire Department grunt. He disdains the bosses who insist he wash his ambulance before reporting for duty, and who sit in air-conditioned offices as he and his partners contend with sweat and urine and blood. Early in his tenure, he got a tattoo with the Latin words “Sic transit gloria mundi”, or “Thus passes the glory of the world”, part of what is now a mosaic of ink from his wrist to his shoulder.
After a decade as an emergency medical worker, Mr Kleisner’s drive to do the toughest work on the biggest jobs carried him to the deadliest fire in New York City in more than 30 years. He had come to believe that no matter the call, even a five-alarm fire in the Bronx, he could handle it. But when he opened the door of his ambulance on Jan 9, 2022, the scale of the emergency overwhelmed him.
Funnels of black smoke were pouring from the roof of Twin Parks North West, a 19-storey residential tower in the Fordham Heights neighbourhood. A paramedic was giving a toddler cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) on the hood of a sport utility vehicle. Firefighters kept running out of the burning building with victims slung over their shoulders. Some were unconscious. Others were dead. They laid them on the pavement.
Mr Kleisner readied Cyanokits, which are batches of a chemical compound to neutralise cyanide deposited in the lungs by toxic smoke, a crucial first step before firefighters could begin attempting CPR. He placed IVs in a number of patients so the chemicals and other drugs could be delivered. Then he turned his attention to a girl in a pink sundress.
Before the fire, someone had carefully braided her hair with beads. Now she was lying among the dead. After starting an IV and delivering the anti-cyanide medicine, Mr Kleisner placed her inside the ambulance, then climbed in back to deliver CPR.
He knew it would not work. The girl could not be revived. With every chest compression Mr Kleisner administered, the beads in her hair clicked against the metal stretcher.
Later, he learnt that the girl was 11 years old and had emigrated with her family from Guyana. The entire family – the parents, the girl, her older sister and younger brother – died that day. As he retells the story, Mr Kleisner interrupts himself to address his body’s stress response to the memory: His neck had started to sweat, he pointed out. His heart rate had jumped to over 100 beats per minute. He felt short of breath, and his fingertips tingled.
“I can feel it now,” he said. “I carry her with me all the time.”
After two careers of full-tilt competition, he finally found his limit. Now, when a 911 dispatcher calls his ambulance to a medical call involving a child, Mr Kleisner pauses. He performs a breathing exercise and takes a moment or two to meditate.
Paramedics receive few mental health services from the Fire Department, and their health insurance plans generally don’t cover therapy. Unlike most of the paramedics he knows, Mr Kleisner said, he can afford to see a therapist regularly. He can also escape the city for his cabin in the Catskills. He takes all of his holiday time and can afford to turn down extra shifts.
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He cannot escape his memories. Instead, he talks right through them.
“That’s a misguided concept, processing all this trauma,” he said. “It’s not going anywhere. You have to learn how to live with all of this.”
Finally, Mr Kleisner finds, his goals have changed. There is nothing to win. The only question is how to endure. NYTIMES
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