It’s a cold, rainy spring day, and the Brooklyn Terminal Market in Canarsie is a huge wet expanse of cracked asphalt and gray cinderblock warehouses filled with wholesale grocery, produce, and plant merchants moving their goods from soggy wooden pallets onto large trucks. They use golf-cart-sized forklifts that zip around on electricity and make an irritating beeping sound when going in reverse.

My partner, Bronson, and I park beside a wholesale hyacinth vendor for lunch. The scent of the flowers is like grape juice mixed with honeysuckle, and I am so aching for winter to be over I can actually feel it in my legs. Bronson dispatches our coordinates to Central, and we try to squeeze in lunch before the next call comes.

I’m inside the Korean deli, which is hidden behind a riot of purple hyacinths, and am just settling into making my selection from the steam table when the call comes over for an “injury” at the Brooklyn Terminal Market.

“Damn,” I say, drop my juicy sparerib back into its tin tray, and key up my radio. “Ten-four, show us en route.”

We drive about two blocks northward and pull up in front of a tropical fruit vendor, where boxes of papayas sit stacked like a miniature New York City skyline. One of the loading workers sits on a box with a rag wrapped around his hand. He’s pale and dazed-looking. The rag is soaked through with blood.

“He got his hand stuck in the forklift,” one of the other workers shouts over to me.

I shoulder my trauma bag, approach the patient, and take a peek to see what we’ve got. It’s been a while since we’ve had a good trauma, and I’m thinking maybe it’s a laceration or an avulsion, which is when a section of skin is torn away from the flesh and left hanging like a flap.

It’s a degloving. This is when the skin of an extremity is pulled completely off the affected area. In this case, only half of the man’s hand is injured. The skin of all four fingers and half of the palm has been sheared away and lies bunched up at the fingertips, in folds. Underneath, his hand anatomy is perfectly visible: veins, tendons, ligaments, muscles. It’s like something out of “Gray’s Anatomy” or a wax museum for horror-film buffs.

The odd thing is that I’m not freaked out by this. I find it strange that the gross injuries of body parts – the kinds of things that would normally bother a regular person (which I consider myself to be) and scared me in slasher movies when I was a child – just don’t faze me as an EMT. Maybe it’s because EMTs see this kind of thing every day? Debatable. I don’t often see deglovings. Rather, I think it’s because I’m in “practical mode.” The damaged body part becomes almost a cartoon image of itself, and in order to do my job well, I have to fragment the injury into smaller units, break it down into its base components: stop the bleeding, keep the wound clean, treat the patient for shock. This prevents me from seeing the trauma as a whole, an injury deeply affecting the person, and from being overwhelmed.

The first thing I do for this man is take a dry sterile dressing and completely wrap his hand in it. The hanging skin is literally like a calfskin glove pulled halfway off and gathered in folds at the fingertips. I don’t try to pull it back up, as this would do more damage to delicate nerves and blood vessels. That’s something for the surgeons in the ER to handle. My job is to cover the wound to prevent further infection.

“Gimme some tape,” I say to Bronson. He tears off a piece for me, and I fasten the dressing firmly around the man’s hand.

Bronson takes a blood pressure and heart rate. It’s good: 130 over 90, pulse 80. The man is still dazed, but doesn’t seem to be in shock. He’s shocked, in the regular sense of the word, but not in shock in the medical sense, meaning he didn’t lose enough blood to require fluids through an IV, and he didn’t sustain any damage to his vital organs. Were he in shock, we’d see pale, cool skin, a low blood pressure, and a fast, weak, “thready” pulse.

Luckily, the only damage is to the hand itself. Which, though less serious than a multiple-system trauma such as a chest injury due to a car accident, also carries the threat of a reduced quality of life if the man is unable to fully use his hand in the future. For this reason, hand injuries are seen as critical, though not life-threatening.

To help his dazed condition, Bronson gives him oxygen, and we sit him on the stretcher in the ambulance and start setting up for our ride to the hospital.

Traumas to the extremities, while certainly ugly, are less serious than invisible injuries such as internal bleeds or head injuries. They tend to be more distracting due to their graphic, bloody nature, but it’s a false distraction. A little blood tends to look like a lot.

En route to the hospital, I think about a friend of mine who faints at the sight of blood. He would never be able to handle a degloving. But then I laugh inside. I, too, used to get light-headed and dizzy at the sight of blood.

That was back when I was still a regular person.

Ms. Klopsis is an emergency medical technician for the FDNY. This column details her observations and experiences on the job. Some names and identifying details have been changed to protect the privacy of patients.