It’s a slow day and we’re bored, so Bronson pulls out the police scanner he got from Radio Shack.

I call him “Buffy,” meaning he likes to “buff” jobs – overhear them and then drive to the scene, recording in our log that we happened to be passing by and were flagged down. An ambulance is required to stop for a flagdown, even if en route to another call.

He adjusts the tiny knobs and dials on the radio, then listens in. “PD gets better calls than we do,” he says. “More unusual.”

The call comes over for an assault.

“How unusual,” I say, sarcastically.

“Let’s drive over there,” he says.

We pull up to two police vehicles, park behind them, and mark ourselves flagged down. We find out from the police officers that the apartment in question, on the third floor, is locked. The sergeant calls for the Emergency Services Unit to take down the door. Then he shakes his head. “I don’t know who I’m gonna have guard the apartment once they break it down.” He gestures to the three police officers: “I got no cops!”

Sergeants have it hard. Sandwiched between the police officers with whom they recently ranked and the lieutenants above them, they have to manage coverage of the streets with few resources. The lieutenants have to do the same, managing sergeants while answering to captains.The captains, the highest rank a civil servant can achieve before being appointed, have it just as bad. Everybody, right up the line, has to manage the people below them while keeping the bosses above them happy.

As I’m considering this, a woman comes running out of the building carrying a baby. “They’re inside!” she shouts. The officers and the sergeant go running in. Bronson and I try to take the woman into the ambulance. “Not me!” she shouts. “She’s inside!”

We go upstairs. The locked door is now open and the officers are holding a 30-year-old man pinned against the wall. He’s screaming, “I pay the rent. … Don’t you put me against my own wall!”

Also in the room is a hysterical 18-year-old girl wearing a flimsy cut-off T-shirt, tight leggings, and fuzzy pink house slippers. She appears to be about six months pregnant, but I can’t be sure; she’s a petite young woman, barely 5 feet tall and maybe 110 pounds. Bronson and I do a quick physical assessment as best we can, but she won’t let us take her blood pressure – she keeps moving around, complaining of pain across her abdomen. “He threw me on the floor!” she cries.

“Are you bleeding?” I ask.

She sobs and wipes away tears and snot with the back of her hand. “Does it look like I am?”

From the start, her attitude to EMS is antagonistic. She seems to regard us as invaders, suspect, while simultaneously demanding that we help her. Then she refuses our help. I can’t get an accurate heart rate because she keeps pulling her arm away. This makes me suspect the veracity of her “symptoms.” The truly ill never fight us.

I find out that this is her fourth pregnancy. She’s had two abortions, one live birth with a different father, and is now pregnant by the man the officers have pinned against the wall. He is red-faced and splutters expletives. The three officers bring him to the floor and order him to settle down.

The only visible injury I find on the girl is a bruise above one eye. “He punched me.” She mimes the motion. “Wham.”

We bring her downstairs and sit her in the ambulance. She’s still agitated, and instead of settling into the stretcher, starts to fight us again.

“Hey, we’re not the enemy,” Bronson says.

She’s not listening. She clutches her belly, now crying, “My baby! My baby!” Then she pulls a fainting scam so cartoonish I almost have to laugh. I pinch her eyebrow – what I will later notate on my chart as “painful stimulus” – and she swats my hand away and glares at me.

“Then stop playing possum,” I say.

She kicks at the stretcher straps until one of her slippers falls off and lands on the ambulance floor. “Pick up my slipper,” she orders.

“Pick up your own slipper,” Bronson says.

Just before we leave for the hospital, one of the officers comes into the ambulance to take her statement. “Has he hit you before?” he asks, pen poised above his notepad.

She sniffles. “Only once.”

“Well, he’ll never do it again. We’re taking him to jail.”

She looks shocked. “But … I love him. I don’t want to press charges.”

The officer tosses his notepad over his shoulder. “Of course not.”

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