Book Review: ‘Trauma Sponges’ a Gritty, Honest, and Well-Written Look At Firefighter EMS Response

The life of an EMS professional is a physically tough, emotionally draining, and psychologically challenging profession. Minneapolis fire captain Jeremy Norton provides a gritty, honest, and well-written look at life from a firefighter’s perspective in his new book, ‘Trauma Sponges: Dispatches from the Scarred Heart of Emergency Response.’ It is published by the University of Minnesota Press and hit the shelves this past October. 

“We are trauma sponges: call after call, shift by shift, week by month, year by year, we absorb the boundless sadness and fear, the abuse, the blood and viscera, the sights and sounds and smells of tragedy and loss,” Norton writes in Trauma Sponges. “There’s no relief or release: it’s just dying, death, loss.” 

As a 20-plus-year veteran of Minneapolis’s mean streets, fire captain Jeremy Norton provides insights into life that are eye-opening and often searing. This is a book that will startle and shake the general public while eliciting knowing nods from those in the first response. It is an encyclopedic ride-along with Norton from EMT training to his job as a captain, and the events he has lived through in that time — including responding to the scene of George Floyd’s murder by Minneapolis police Officer Derek Chauvin.  

“A funny thing happened on the way to writing a memoir about firefighter/EMTs, the street-level realities of health care, and the punishing cold weather of Minneapolis,” he writes in Trauma Sponges’ introduction. “A few things, actually. And none of them was at all funny. But there you go, and here we are.” 

Life in Emergency Response 

The unending emotional brutality of the job: Firefighters expect to spend their career fighting fires, but they actually devote most of their time responding to EMS calls, writes Norton. Not only is this draining reality a disconnect from their heroic expectations, but the randomness and powerlessness they experience on so many of these calls repeatedly rattles them to the core. 

Norton writes, “We cannot control what we get. No matter what we are dispatched to, we must show up and address whatever the actual issue is. Sometimes that is saving a life; sometimes it is resolving a traumatic injury. Sometimes it’s providing assistance until the person can get to the hospital; sometimes it’s being calm and reassuring. Sometimes, it is holding in our laughter at something so deliriously goofy and dopey, a situation so far removed from medical and emergency that it’s galling. Except that is our job: to respond and investigate someone’s perceived emergency. And, some calls, we must look someone in the eye and say, ‘I’m very sorry. Your [person] is dead. They are beyond help.'” 

The persistent racism and misogyny found in firefighting culture: “I extend a smidgen of sympathy for the old guard,” writes Norton. “The men who existed in an all-white, all-male workplace for generations. They inhabited their artificial environment, believing it was the rightful and natural order of things. They put out fires, had throaty drama and petty intrigues, bickered and yelled and fought, sat in companionable or seething silences. It was a man’s man’s man’s man’s world. They didn’t necessarily do much to make it how it was: they applied for the job, tested, trained, worked. Essentially, they didn’t make the rules. But: the mass of them were concertedly hostile toward anyone else’s attempts to join; they made life miserable for the rare nonwhite men; rampant chauvinism and racism and homophobia were pervasive.”  

The dangers of being Black in America, as repeatedly witnessed by a white fire captain: “I am struck by how thin-skinned white culture is, that the response to the cries of Black citizens against extralegal killings is hysterical, racist reactionary fits,” Norton writes. “To petition to be seen as human is perceived by the majority as a threat. That says all we need to hear about America’s fatal flaw.”

The Cost of Macho Culture

The human cost of firefighting’s relentlessly macho culture: “Why? Because, men. Honestly,” writes Norton. “I feel we do not make adequate real-time safety assessments on the fireground, and that leads to danger and harm. Suggesting this, I run afoul of a lot of the macho chest thumpers: We FIGHT fire! Do your job or quit! ‘Safety’ is for cowards. Roar!” Responding to the George Floyd murder scene.

“I was sitting in the same chair [in his fire house] the night of May 25, 2020, when the Minneapolis Police used overwhelming physical force on a forgery suspect, a man who stated from the beginning of their interaction that he was anxious, claustrophobic, and hyperventilating,” Norton writes. That man, George Floyd, died on the street six blocks from where I sat. He was not fighting the police: he was fighting to breathe.” 

All told, Trauma Sponges is a very tough but rewarding read. Jeremy Norton pulls no punches in his memoir, but he writes to enlighten the reader and open their hearts and minds to the realities of EMS work so it can be changed for the better. 

Granted, such change will require a level of conscience and social justice that Norton admits seems unlikely.

“After the spasm of anger and upheaval in the wake of Mr. Floyd’s killing, white America briefly attempted to consider the plight of our Black citizens,” he writes. “But, wow, that was hard. And so much to untangle! And people were angry! And we had to listen, and apologize, and then there was talk of reparations! I mean, I feel bad for, like, centuries of ingrained and legislated inequality, of financial injustice, of property denial, of sub-par education and health care, but can’t we just put a sign on our lawn and call it even?”