Now that my partner, Bronson, has decided he’s in love with the triage nurse at the Maimonides emergency room, he tries to get every patient to go there on every call.

We arrive at a single-family house in Windsor Terrace for an injury. Our computer screen reads, “65 y/o female, ankle bleeding, foot dangling.”

We’re there in five minutes, and a man lets us into the brick house, a beautiful Victorian with a front porch and a swing.

“She was hanging curtains in the window when she fell off the radiator,” he says. “Her foot’s … dangling.”

We follow a blood trail from the radiator, across the hardwood floors, over the kitchen tile and into the bathroom, where we find Maria D’Ambrosio sitting on the toilet lid. Sure enough, her ankle’s broken and her slippered foot is dangling. The snapped stump of her lower tibia is protruding through broken skin, seeping blood. This is known as an open fracture, and moving her foot to get her slipper off causes her pain.

“Oh mother of God! Mother Mary! St. Anthony help me!” she shouts, clutching at the quilted toilet paper roll, the fluffy pink hand towels, the basket of shell-shaped guest soaps.

Bronson wraps a large trauma pad around her ankle to stabilize it, then secures it with stretchy gauze. Over that, he places an instant ice pack and wraps more gauze around it. Meanwhile, I get the patient’s personal and medical information from her husband. Apparently, she has high blood pressure. She’s practically fist-fighting with Bronson as he tries to stabilize her leg. “Ow! Not your thumb there! Stop touching it! Oh Mother Mary of God!” she yells.

I turn to her husband. “Actually, you’re lucky she’s so active.” Aside from the ill effects of high blood pressure on the heart, active older people, typically nervous, high-strung women, live longer, healthier lives than sedentary ones.

“Active?” the husband says. “She’s up at 4 a.m. cleaning windows! Then she decided she had to wash the curtains.”

Amidst Catholic invocations, I hear the patient shouting various things such as, “Nobody comes to visit me! Why do I even bother with the curtains?” “Don’t have no holidays, no Thanksgiving, no Christmas here no more!” “My boy is in a mental institution. How I’m gonna visit him?” “Oh St. Anthony! Watch over me!”

I take her blood pressure, then try to calm her. “You’ve got to calm down, your BP’s going to go through the roof.” Bronson tells her, “Hey, if the pope can fall and get hurt, so can you.”

To her credit, the woman has a sense of humor. She looks at us as if for the first time. “Thank you both so much. You’re really very kind. But that new pope, he’s terrible. Not like the old one.”

Bronson attempts to lift her into the stair-chair.

“Ow!” she shouts. “Don’t touch me!” Inside the ambulance, I jam a box of latex gloves under her calf so her foot sticks out in midair rather than resting on the stretcher where the potholes we’ll hit will jiggle it around and cause her more pain.

“Don’t hit any bumps,” I tell Bronson, sarcastically. It’s impossible in Brooklyn.

But he’s thinking about his lovely triage nurse. “Want to go to Maimonides?” he asks the patient.

Her husband says, “I was thinking Methodist. It’s closer.”

“But Maimo’s better,” Bronson says.

He sighs. “I really wanted her to be someplace close.”

“Maimo’s the best,” he says.

“We’re going to Methodist,” I inform Bronson and shoo him into the driver’s seat. “At least we’re not going to Kings County,” I tell the husband. “They hire the worst of nursing school graduates.”

“Maimo hires the best,” Bronson says from the front seat.

The husband considers this. “I’ve heard good things about Maimo …”

“Of course you have,” Bronson says. “It’s the best hospital in Brooklyn.”

This is true, and the husband considers it. “Okay …” he defers.

“Then off we go,” Bronson says, radioing dispatch of our destination.

“Oh God,” the woman cries, “Oh St. Anthony help me, we’re going to the Jewish hospital.”

When we get there, she screams at the triage nurse. “Please! Give me some pain medication!”

The triage nurse smiles at Bronson. He grins back, and I can tell there’s chemistry between these two. I know when I’m in the way.

“Third wheel,” I tell Bronson and make my exit.

I sit in the ambulance, organizing our paperwork while waiting for him to come out. When he finally does, I say, “We’re going to come here a lot more, aren’t we?”

He starts up the ambulance, eager to get the next call. “Every time,” he says.

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.