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Blood, Sweat, and Tea: Real-Life Adventures in an Inner-City Ambulance

Life, Death, and a Cup of Tea: All in a Day's Work.

Blood, Sweat, and Tea: Real-Life Adventures in an Inner-City Ambulance Buy Button

What do you think about when you hear an ambulance's siren? Do think about your favorite television show—Grey's Anatomy, House, or Scrubs? Do you feel frustrated by the inconvenience to your schedule as you slow your car and pull off to the right? Do you consider the family who has just gone through a sudden, unexpected tragedy? On July 22, 2003, an emergency medical technician living in London began writing a blog under the pseudonym Tom Reynolds. One mention by a writer for the Guardian and that blog changed his life—with more people coming to know him as Tom Reynolds than as Brian Kellett. Reynolds details the fascinating, heartbreaking world of an ambulance worker with wit, cynicism, and sympathy in Blood, Sweat, and Tea: Real-Life Adventures in an Inner-City Ambulance (Andrews McMeel Publishing, $12.99).

Through the joy of childbirth, the sorrow of unexpectedly losing a parent, or the frustration felt toward people who refuse to take care of themselves, Reynolds transitions easily through a wide range of emotions and circumstances. Though all of Reynolds's stories occur in a small section of London's East End, his blog has stunned readers with his universal feelings of empathy and disappointment. Stories from Blood, Sweat, and Tea include:

Two-month-old child—Not waking up.

"Not waking up" could mean that the child was dead. There was something about the way the job was written up on the terminal screen that made me fear the worst. Two minutes thirty seconds later I screeched to a halt outside the house, bounding from the car, grabbing my kit, and running into the house. The baby was crying. I was smiling, the crew was smiling, the mother was smiling. The only person not smiling was the baby. But I was happy at that.

Taken from his hugely popular, award-winning blog, Random Acts of Reality (http://randomreality.blogware.com), more than 300 tragicomic entries in Blood, Sweat, and Tea will make readers laugh out loud, cry a page later, and come away from the book with a renewed feeling of gratitude for the things most often taken for granted. As Reynolds points out in his blog, "If I'm still breathing then I realize that things can't be that bad."

Contact: Kathy Hilliard, (800) 851-8923, ext. 6741, khilliard@amuniversal.com

Blood, Sweat, and Tea: Real-Life Adventures in an Inner-City Ambulance

By: Tom Reynolds
ISBN: 978-0-7407-7119-4
Format: Paperback: 5 ½ x 8 ½, 288 pages
Price: $12.99 ($14.50 Canada)