Jake Jones

A memoir of the chaos, intensity and occasional beauty of life as a paramedic. A young man has stopped breathing in a supermarket toilet. A pedestrian with a nasty head injury won't let the crew near him on a busy road. A newborn baby is worryingly silent. An addict urinates on the ambulance floor when denied a fix. This is the life of an ambulance paramedic. Jake Jones has worked in the UK ambulance service for ten years: every day, he sees a dozen of the scenes we hope to see only once in a lifetime. Can You Hear Me? - the first thing he says when he arrives on the scene - is a memoir of the chaos, intensity and occasional beauty of life on the front-lines of medicine in the UK. As well as a look into dozens of extraordinary scenes - the hoarder who won't move his collection to let his ailing father leave the house, the blood-soaked man who tries to escape from the ambulance, the life saved by a lucky crew who had been called to see someone else entirely - Can You Hear Me? is an honest examination of the strains and challenges of one of the most demanding and important jobs anyone can do.

A Paramedic's Encounters with Life and Death

Can You Hear Me?

In this book, Jake talks about his more than eighty years of life experiences. He takes the reader from America’s great economy depression of the 1930s through an up-close and personal view of three American wars to a life of relative abundance in this century. His twenty-eight years of flying in the air force took him to beautiful places like Stavanger, Norway, cold places like Thule AFB Greenland, hot places like Sattahip, Thailand, and dry places like the San Joaquin Valley in California. He describes the details of losing fellow crew members in four different plane crashes and the personal hardship on their families. His most memorable events of his military career were in the 1960s when on three occasions he was involved in the work and decision making of President John F. Kennedy. He vividly remembers seeing and being close to President Kennedy just four weeks before he was assassinated.

Jake Jones

About

Books

Join the club