Bronson gets into the truck grumpy.

“Trouble in paradise?” I ask, meaning Rachel, his fiancee, who’s now living with him in his tiny apartment in Bay Ridge.

He looks back at his coffee and sighs. “She’s pregnant.”

I roar. “A nurse and an EMT!” Bronson waits out my laughing fit until I catch my breath and consider the situation. “A child is a blessing.”

He says, “We’re not even married yet.”

“So get married. Her synagogue can whip one up tomorrow.” I tell him I think he should quit the Fire Department, work part-time for a hospital, work part-time for his dad (an electrician), and take a paramedic class.

As for Rachel, she can work while pregnant, go on maternity leave, and then return to work part-time, two days a week. Nurses work 12-hour shifts. “Her mother can look after the baby two days a week,” I say. “Or your mother. Bella would give her right arm to take care of a baby.”

For the past year, Bronson and I have spent eight hours a day together in the compressed space of this ambulance. We eat together, nap together, laugh together. Bronson and I work seamlessly, reading each other’s minds. I don’t want to start over with a new partner. I still enjoy the job, but I’d like to do it less, work part-time as an EMT for a hospital, and go to nursing school. I get health benefits from my husband. I don’t need the FDNY.

The radio gives out a long, irritating tone specifically designed to get our attention if we are talking and wake us up if we are sleeping.

It’s a call for a heavy bleeder, and when we get to the building in Bensonhurst, we’re greeted at the first floor apartment by a 90-year-old man who frantically points us toward the bathroom, where his wife is lying on the cold white tile in a small puddle of blood. “She’s got Alzheimer’s,” he says, shaking in his flannel pajamas. “She doesn’t speak.”

The woman is thin, her white wispy hair matted with blood, her blue eyes open and startled. Alzheimer’s patients who don’t speak can sometimes still understand, so I reassure her we’re there to help, and then take out my shears and cut off her nightgown to see where the blood is coming from. She has no cuts or abrasions on her body. The blood seems to be coming from her mouth. “Did she fall?” I ask the husband.

He says she was brushing her teeth but seemed to be taking a long time, so he went in to help her, and found her lying there.

The woman’s blood pressure is low, but her breathing is fine, and I don’t see any injury to her mouth. I take her pulse, and notice the tattooed numbers on her inner arm, blue and blurry with age. She’s a concentration camp survivor.

We get her on the backboard, elevate her feet above the level of her heart, cover her with a blanket, and carry her down to the ambulance. Her husband sits on the bench seat, wide-eyed in the bright overhead lights. I ask him his wife’s name, age, and medical history while Bronson drives. I think about what they went through in Europe, and when and where they met. I wonder how it felt for him when she started forgetting their past. The loss of memories. The death that comes before death.

We leave them at Maimonides in the hands of Rachel, who deftly prepares an IV for the woman’s thin arm. She shakes her head when she sees the numbers, but she isn’t thrown by them. She taps the woman’s paper-thin veins, finds a good one, and starts the IV. I watch as the husband takes his wife’s fragile hand and holds it tight. Many people this old who go into a hospital never come out. I feel sorry for the old man. I feel my outer shell thicken to ward off the sorrow that is trying to enter.

Back in the ambulance, I tell Bronson, “Definitely part-time.”

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.