Bronson is back from his vacation in Key West, where he proposed to Rachel, the triage nurse at Maimonides. “And …?” I ask.

He gives me a look. “Would I be here if she said no?”

Of course not: He’d be on the floor in a ball. “You knew she’d say yes,” I say. Just like I knew my husband was going to propose, and he knew I’d accept. He asked me in the Japanese temple at the Brooklyn Botanic Gardens, by the carp pond.

“I was worried you’d drop the ring in the sand,” I say. “When’s the wedding?”

“ASAP.”

My husband and I also did it fast. Why wait?

“Why wait?” he says.

I grin. “Bronson, you rock.”

His face slowly drops. “But now I’m afraid. Now I have everything to lose.”

I know the feeling, and smile. “Welcome to love,” I say.

We get a call for an elderly “injury.” Apparently, the woman fell on the fifth floor of a five-story walkup. “Great,” Bronson says, trudging upstairs.

I prod him to move faster. “All the other EMTs have muscles. You’re the only one who’s skinny.” I try to picture him in a bathing suit in Key West, and shudder.

We knock on the apartment door and go in. The place is occupied by four elderly sisters, all with varying degrees of senility. Three of them approach us and say inappropriate things. A middle-age woman emerges from the kitchen, drying her hands. She explains that she’s their niece and takes care of them. “They all have Alzheimer’s,” she says.

The patient, the middle-age woman’s mother, is on the living room floor holding her arm close to her side. Upon inspection, I note a deformity to the wrist. Probably fractured.

She likely has osteoporosis: Even a small knock in the right place will fracture a weak bone. As I’m assessing her, the other sisters crowd around and talk silliness, grabbing my stethoscope, pulling on my duty belt. I kindly but assertively tell them to back off.

The patient is quiet. When she does say a few words, she makes pretty good sense. “I tripped on that damn carpet. Landed on my wrist.”

“You don’t have Alzheimer’s,” I say.

She blinks at me. “No, and I don’t take no s— from no one.”

I splint her arm and sling it to her chest with a cravat. Bronson tries to hoist her up off the floor, but she refuses to budge. “C’mon, Grandma,” he says.

She glares at him. “I ain’t goin’ nowhere! You can just dig my grave here!” She blinks again. “And don’t call me Grandma!”

The daughter comes over. “Mom, you have to go get an X-ray. It’s broken.”

“But you’ll be fixed in no time,” I say, “and be right back home.”

She glares at her daughter. “Traitor,” she says.

We gently lift her into the stair chair. Luckily, she’s not too heavy. But as we’re rolling her past the bedroom door, I accidentally knock down a picture frame, and the glass cover breaks. “I’m sorry,” I say quickly, and pick it up. Inside is a photo of an elderly man. “He’s handsome,” I say, and I mean it. He looks like Gregory Peck in his later years, with longish white hair and a dashing mustache.

The patient’s voice grows misty. “My husband, God rest his soul.”

The daughter says he passed away a few years ago. “He really held everything together,” she whispers. “I’m barely hanging on here.”

I ask her if she’s coming with us.

“Right,” she says, gesturing to the closed bedroom door. “And who would look after Moe, Larry, and Curly?”

Outside, we roll the patient past the next-door building’s ground-floor apartment. The curtains are drawn and the windows are in need of a good washing, but through the cloudiness of one I can see, taped to the glass, a yellowed piece of paper with a sun bleached snapshot of a smiling elderly couple. The scrawl beneath it reads: “Lord Jesus, make my wife happy in Heaven. I trust in You. This was her favorite window. I love her.”

I point it out to Bronson. He looks at it and his face falls. “Thanks,” he says.

En route to the hospital, the patient is quiet. I imagine her missing her husband. I imagine Bronson missing Rachel. I imagine missing my husband. Death: You’d think working on an ambulance would make you immune.

At Maimonides, Rachel greets us with a huge, beautiful smile, Bronson’s ring glittering on her finger. “Hello!” she says to the patient. “You fell and broke your arm?”

The patient stares at Rachel. Then she cackles and breaks out into song, loud enough for half the ER to turn and look, screaming, “Que sera sera. Whatever will be will be.”

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.