The call comes over for an injured 11-month-old. We fly lights and sirens. In a job where we routinely handle violent people who hurt each other, depressed people who hurt themselves, and drunk people who feel no pain, calls for children involved in accidents remind us of why we took this job in the first place.

My partner, Bronson, and I pull up to a three-story brick row house in the Sunset Park section of Brooklyn and hear a baby crying. From the front door, a Puerto Rican woman comes out holding a tiny girl with a bloody towel wrapped around her hand. She is wailing, her little face beet red. The woman speaks only broken English, but the general translation from bystanders is that the baby was playing near the apartment door and it accidentally shut on her finger.

The woman looks frozen in shock. Of course, I think. I would be too.

I unwrap the bloody towel from the baby’s hand and see that the tip of her pinkie is hanging by a thread, severed just below the fingernail, and bleeding. She was probably holding onto the doorframe for support while learning to walk, and the door pinched her finger. These buildings, converted into apartments from one-family houses in the 1940s, all have heavy metal doors, and I shudder as I rewrap her hand in gauze and wind a roller bandage over

it, making it look like a giant mitt. I smash a chemical ice pack and place it over the bandage, and then escort the woman and baby into the ambulance.

We prepare to leave, but the woman tells us to wait. “I no baby’s mother. I her sister. We wait for mother.”

Bronson’s already behind the wheel. “No way. We’re going now.” He calls in a note – a notification – to Lutheran Medical Center, the Trauma One hospital nearby, keying up the radio and identifying our unit: “41-Nora, we’re four minutes out of Lutheran with an 11-month-old female, severed distal tip of left pinkie.” He gives the baby’s heart rate and rate of breathing, which I note on my paperwork.

“Where’s the mother?” I ask the woman.

She gestures to the top floor of the building. “Upstairs somewhere.”

I can’t imagine she didn’t hear the sirens or her baby’s screams.

I’m not going in search of her. “We have to leave,” I explain to the aunt. I strap her, holding the screaming baby, onto the stretcher.

Bronson puts the truck in gear, and while we’re on our way, the woman takes out her cell phone and speaks loudly, over the baby’s crying, in Spanish. She hands me the phone. “The mother. She speak-a Engliss.”

Although I can barely hear the mother over the cries of her daughter, I explain where to meet us.

When we get to Lutheran, a young doctor and a horde of nurses take the baby into a cubicle and unwrap her hand. They hover over her, starting an IV, administering pain medication, and sterilizing the wound. Soon the crying subsides.

“That’s the thing about babies,” the young intern says. “She’s already forgotten about it. “He looks at the baby’s aunt, who’s biting her fingernails. “It’s the adults who never get over it.”

I think about the absentee mother. “Or so one would think.”

“She’s gonna lose the fingertip, right?” Bronson asks.

“Yeah, probably,” he says, getting his sutures ready on a sterile table. “But maybe we can sew her up. Let’s see.” He flips on a bright light and pulls the curtain shut. Blood vessels can knit together. So can flesh and bone. The baby is very young.

I finish my paperwork, getting information from the aunt as best I can. Then I tear off the white copy and hand the pink sheet to the triage nurse. I walk over to a less-than-clean sink and step on the hot water lever, squirt antibacterial soap into my hand, and work up a froth.

As I’m drying, the mother comes rushing into the ER. She’s in her late 20s.The nurses show her into the cubicle. After a few minutes, she’s brought out to give insurance information to the staff. She looks pale and dazed, her eyes wide and wet.

“It’s all my fault,” she whispers, fishing out her insurance card.

I try to soothe her. “It was an accident.”

She looks at me like I don’t know the first thing about motherhood. “Yes,” she slaps the Medicaid card on the countertop and spells it out for me in case I wasn’t listening: “And the accident was all my fault.”

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.