I get the feeling it’s going to be a slow Saturday, and sure enough, when I get to the battalion I find Bronson in the lounge sitting in front of the TV watching “Popeye” dubbed into Italian.

“Whaddaya got?” I say.

He points to the screen with the remote control. “Bluto sees Olive Oyl and decides to put on some aftershave. He has a few choices: Night in Paris … Morning in Brooklyn…. He ends up using Chanel Numero Quattro.”

Poor Bronson, I think. He looks perfectly normal from the outside.

“Then, Popeye eats his spinach and punches out an alligator who’s trying to attack him. The alligator flies up into the sky and comes down in pieces, as luggage: shoes, a belt …”

I turn up my radio and toss Bronson his set of keys. As I do, a call comes over from the police for an “aided case.” This means they need help with something weird, usually not life-threatening.

“Now what did you have to go and do that for?” Bronson says.

I clap my hands. “Chop chop.”

He hoists himself up out of the Barcalounger and clips his radio to his belt. “Hi-ho Silver. Away.”

En route, I feel like I’m missing something. I check my neck. I left my stethoscope in the lounge. I check my wrist. No watch. What kind of an EMT am I? I look in my toiletry bag, to see if it’s in there. Instead I find eye shadow, lipstick, a travel toothbrush.

I hold it up. “I can brush the patient’s teeth.” We get to the parking lot behind the Kings Plaza shopping mall and find a police car parked by the curb, one officer sitting inside doing paperwork, the other one standing beside a woman sitting on the concrete near a shrub. She’s painfully thin and her skin has a grainy quality, like she’s made of sand. She’s about 30 years old, but looks 60.

“She says she’s a diabetic,” the police officer says. We can see she’s nodding out. She has the waxy, catatonic movements typical of heroin addicts. And her teeth are rotted and missing. I check her arms for track marks. Nothing. She must shoot it in the leg.

She’s sucking on a chocolate bar melting from the sun. The sticky sweetness coats her teeth and lips, creating spider web strands whenever she opens and closes her mouth.

“You say you’re a diabetic?” I ask.

She slurs out her medical history: noninsulin dependent, on anti-depressants. “Paxil I think,” she mumbles, eyes at half-mast.

“What other drugs do you take?” I ask. She hems and haws. Then nods out again.

“Hey. Wake up.”

She opens her gummy eyes.

“This officer found you passed out.”

She protests. “I wasn’t passed out. I laid down.”

“Why’d you lie down?”

She tries to think. “Cause I felt like it. That against the law?”

I take out my chart and start to fill it out. Ideally, I’d do this inside the ambulance, but I get the feeling this woman isn’t going to want to go to the hospital. She’s not drunk, it’s hard to prove she’s on drugs without a urine test (which can only be done in a hospital), and she could conceivably be a diabetic who’s stupid enough to eat a chocolate bar. She could also just be a very sleepy person by nature.

I fill out her personal information. No doubt the address and social security number she gives me are false. “You want to go to the hospital?” I say.

She shakes her head, sluggish. “No need to. I’m fine.”

“Well, this police officer here seems to think you were in pretty bad shape.”

She shrugs. “Nope. I’m good.”

I keep staring at her.

She pats her thin belly. “Fit as a fiddle.”

I sigh and ask her if she knows her name. She does. I ask her if she knows where she is.

“Kings Plaza.”

I ask her if she knows what day it is.

“Umm… the weekend. Sunday?”

Close enough. I mark “Alert & Oriented times three” and flip the page. “Sign here,” I say, and tap the release form with my pen. She can nod off all she likes, melt into the concrete for all I care. I just don’t want to get called back here.

I take my pen back. It’s sticky. “Now why don’t you get on home.”

As she begins to fumble with her possessions, the officer’s radio crackles and a voice cuts the air like piano wire. “Six-Three-Adam, respond to a vicious raccoon in house, East Three-Two Street, Fillmore on the cross.”

The officer keys up his mike. Static. He waits until it clears, then says, “Six-Three-Adam.” There’s silence for a good half minute. “Oops,” he says, and turns a tiny knob. “Wrong frequency.” He keys it up again. “Six-Three-Adam. 10-5 that raccoon address?”

Dispatch repeats the address, and the officer is off to this more interesting call.

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.