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"Bad Call: A Summer Job on a New York Ambulance" (Encore Presentation)

Aired on Monday, November 5th.

(Note: This show originally aired back in July.) Our guest on ST Medical Monday is Mike Scardino, whose debut memoir is "Bad Call: A Summer Job on a New York Ambulance." The book details his experiences working an ambulance job in Queens, New York, in the late '60s and early '70s. As per a starred review in Publishers Weekly: "Fresh and powerful...Scardino looks back on his summers during college...when he worked as a New York City hospital ambulance attendant. Working 56 hours a week...Scardino recounts in short chapters the many emergencies he witnessed and assisted in that showed him 'the entire catalog of horrifying things that can happen to a human body.' From accidental deaths to suicides, Scardino writes with the detail of a crime reporter ('What had been his left side had grown into the carpet. Just coalesced with the carpet.... Instead of a face, there was a flat oval plane covered with maggots'). Scardino admits that what bothers him 'more than seeing how people die, is seeing how people live': in one example, he describes a diabetic woman whose legs are gangrenous below the knees, who weighs over 400 pounds, and who needs somehow to be carried down from her second-floor apartment.... Scardino's unsparing memoir offers an empathetic look at human pain and suffering."

Rich Fisher passed through KWGS about thirty years ago, and just never left. Today, he is the general manager of Public Radio Tulsa, and the host of KWGS’s public affairs program, StudioTulsa, which celebrated its twentieth anniversary in August 2012 . As host of StudioTulsa, Rich has conducted roughly four thousand long-form interviews with local, national, and international figures in the arts, humanities, sciences, and government. Very few interviews have gone smoothly. Despite this, he has been honored for his work by several organizations including the Governor's Arts Award for Media by the State Arts Council, a Harwelden Award from the Arts & Humanities Council of Tulsa, and was named one of the “99 Great Things About Oklahoma” in 2000 by Oklahoma Today magazine.
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