I'm an EMT. I have regulars - people who call 911 hundreds of times per year, usually to get a place to sleep and maybe a sandwich or a shower.

A lot of people grumble and roll their eyes when we get called to a particular street corner for the "drug" or the "edp"(psych pt) and can start filling out the patient dob and SSN from memory.

By and large, these are my favorite patients. They tend to be pretty cool, and can tell you some crazy stories. I've also had an army of hobos get my back when my partner and I were about to get assaulted. That was literally the most surreal experience of my entire life.

I got called for a psych patient at an intersection that I am all to familiar with and immediately know it's going to be a friend of mine. Dude was great. Schizophrenic as the day is long and had a resting heart rate of like 40, which we would always use to mess with new EMTs. We get there and he's in a screaming match with a lamppost as two cops look on, scratching their heads.

As soon as he sees my partner and I he perks up and is all smiles. We hadn't seen each other for a while. We caught up for a minute and eventually he decides what hospital he wants to go to. As usual, he sings Michael Jackson songs the entire way to the hospital.

When we drop him off all the nurses groan and we both laugh. When I'm about to leave he grabs me in a huge smelly bear hug and says how good it's been to see me.

About a week later I hear two coworkers saying they took him to the hospital the previous night and that he had looked like shit. A few days later one of the nurses tells me he died.

I've done cpr on infants, I've run into friends from school who are now full blown crazy or horribly addicted to drugs, I've had knives pulled on me multiple times, but for some reason that dude dying was the only job-related thing that has ever made me cry.