Beyond the EMT van: An outsider’s perspective on what it means to be a New Orleanian

From the emergency to the hospital, there are a lot of lives changed in between. (Photo: Wiki Commons)

He lay on the floor where he had died, eyes wide open and piercing blue. I held his gaze, almost pleading with him to blink. The paramedics on my crew were packing up, ready to relinquish the scene to the coroner. The commotion blended in with the background, and, for a brief second, it was just me and him. He was my first dead body. A victim of a drug overdose.

When you come to New Orleans as a visitor, it is easy to pick and choose which parts of this city and its history to see and hear. My picture of New Orleans during my first year of college had been made up of Tulane, Uptown and the French Quarter. I took the simplest, most digestible parts of this city and pieced them together, creating an uncomplicated palisade, the walls of which prevented me from seeing this city through a lens that was not my own. But this body lying in front of me, with jaw stiff and eyes wide, was a wake-up call. 

Opioid-related deaths in New Orleans doubled between 2015 and 2017. The city of New Orleans was founded upon the purveyance of mass slave labor in the 1600s, and that landmarks in this city today still promote these foundations of oppression. The median income is decreasing, and rent is increasing, resulting in an increase in homelessness and a virtual halt in resources provided to the homeless population. The staggering racial wealth divide in New Orleans has displaced over 100,00 African Americans post-Katrina, even after the repopulation and rebuilding following the disaster. The median income for households of color has made homeownership impossible for 57% of families of color, even with the median value of African American-owned homes being half that of white-owned homes in New Orleans. This city’s last public hospital, Charity Hospital, was shut down in order to begin the construction of a privatized medical center, marginalizing the health of an entire community in crisis. 

In other words, New Orleans is complicated. New Orleans is a tumultuous amalgam of a hundred different things at once, a kaleidoscope of color and culture, of beauty and pain. Every city in America has problems similar or identical to those of New Orleans — the difference is that there is a depth to this city. This city is made up of people who have looked destruction in the face and have overcome it together, and the unseen and the unheard populations are a part of that. As a transplant, it is easy to hear and see the beauty of this city, to appreciate the culture, spirit and legacy that make New Orleans so special. It is perhaps even easier to ignore these unseen and unheard populations for the sake of preserving the rosy image of this city that we have created for ourselves. 

To this day, I am embarrassed that it took a dead man lying on the floor in front of me to realize what it means to be a New Orleanian. Being a New Orleanian does not mean going from Uptown to the French Quarter and skipping everything in between. Being a New Orleanian means realizing that simply residing in a place does not make it home. True New Orleanians are not selective about who or what they choose to hear and see. They do not take fragments of a society and piece them together in an attempt to paint the picture they want to see. Being a New Orleanian means seeing the beauty in the pain, the trauma, and the good and the bad of this city. This is what it means to be a New Orleanian from someone who doesn’t know, but is learning. What I do know, however, is that it should take a lot less than a dead body to make this clear.

A lot of seasoned medics say that being around dead bodies gets easier if you don’t look them in the eye. A certain level of conditioning is necessary to be a professional medic or even a professional human being, but it serves neither our community nor ourselves to be apathetic to those who have lived their lives behind the scenes of our society. It is a privilege to be able to exist without hearing or seeing marginalized populations, and it is our responsibility to recognize apathy within ourselves and do something to change it. There is an innate nobility in being a human being, regardless of where we have come from, regardless of where we are destined to go, and regardless of our reason for being in the back of an ambulance. Every person’s eyes are worth looking into— New Orleanians have taught me that better than anyone else.