Bronson gets into the truck and changes the radio station from the classical music to classic rock. “Enough of that,” he says, as Led Zeppelin pierces my eardrums.

I turn the volume down.”How can an otherwise intelligent and sensitive man listen to Zeppelin all day?”

He slides the driver’s seat back to accommodate his long legs. “I’m a mystery wrapped in an enigma.” He turns the key, then lets out a huge yawn.

“Long day yesterday?” I ask. We work only twice a week now, part-time at a hospital. He’s busy the rest of the week taking a paramedics course: 11 months of intensive training, including hospital rotations and, yesterday, a visit to the morgue.

“I witnessed two autopsies,” he says. “Then I came home and took a 45-minute shower and ran my clothes through the washer three times. Rachel said she could still smell death on me.” His fiancee is pregnant and can sniff out single molecules of odor.

As we drive to our designated crossstreet location, I ask, “What was it like?”

“Cool,” he says. “They had brains in jars. And guess whose brain they had?”

“Abby Normal?” It’s a reference to “Young Frankenstein,” one of my favorite movies.

We’re interrupted by a call for an “injury.” According to dispatch, an 87-year-old woman fell in a senior citizens’ assisted living center on Ocean Parkway, the grand boulevard that runs from Windsor Terrace all the way to Coney Island.

I love Ocean Parkway.The houses are magnificent, and in fine weather elderly Russian women gossip on the benches while their men play chess. It’s a timeless slice of Brooklyn.

We get to the residence, a hotel-like apartment building, and find that the old woman has fractured her wrist. We ask her the standard array of questions: “Were you dizzy before you fell? Did you hurt your head? Did you black out?” She may have had a minor stroke that caused her to fall, or may have hit her head as well as her wrist when she struck the floor. But she doesn’t answer.

Instead, she interrupts us. “Tell me about your family,” she asks.”What language do they speak?”

“Ma’am,” Bronson says. “We’re here to help you. Please let us take your blood pressure.”

She pulls her arm away. “I speak 15 different languages. Ask me to say something in a language.”

“Wait-” I say, struggling with her arm.

She turns away. “I won’t answer you except for in another language.”

Okay, then. I lived in Amsterdam for two years, and am fluent in one of the most useless languages on the planet. “Nederlands?” I ask.

She turns back, smiling, and responds with a whole paragraph about the fine weather and the trees in bloom.

Then I ask her if she understands Greek, in the rudimentary Greek I learned from my grandmother. She replies in a perfect Athenian accent.

Bronson says, “Can you speak Arabic?”

“Which dialect?”

“How about Hungarian?”

She says something unintelligible.

The staff verifies that she does in fact speak 15 languages, and that she routinely talks to the other residents in their native tongues. They say she used to work at the United Nations in the 1950s.

I wrap the woman’s wrist in a bandage and stabilize it on a splint. She reluctantly agrees to let me help her to the ambulance, but she won’t release the plastic bag she holds in her lap. “Why don’t you give me your bag to give to the assisted living people,” I say, “so it’ll be here when you get back?”

She’s offended. “Who you calling an old bag?”

“No, no,” I say. “Your handbag.”

She points a bony finger at me. “You watch your mouth, young lady.”

We get her downstairs into the ambulance, bag and all, and lay her gently onto the stretcher. I strap the seatbelts across her chest and hips. She’s thin, maybe 90 pounds.

“I used to be a dancer,” she says, raising a leg high above her head and wrapping it around her neck in a weird contortion. She twirls her foot in circles.

I try to put an ice pack on her wrist, but she pushes it away. “What languages do your parents speak?” she asks Bronson. “Where are they from?”

I think about all the talk of immigration in the papers these days.

“Eastern Europe,” he says.

She smiles, and speaks first in Russian, then German, then Yiddish, each time eliciting zero response from him. “He only speaks English,” I explain.

“Ah,” she sighs, eyes sparkling in awe, as though that were really something. “Only English.”

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