The woman lay slumped in a subway stairwell, so Jonathan Kleisner knelt to look her in the eye.
“We’re here to help, OK?” he said. “Can you tell me what happened?”
Someone had called 911 to report a woman having what appeared to be an epileptic seizure in the subway station at the corner of Seventh Avenue and West 12th Street. Arriving in his ambulance, Mr. Kleisner said he was doubtful about the diagnosis. This would be a drug case, he believed, a hunch soon confirmed by the half-dozen used needles scattered beside the patient.
The woman, who had collapsed in a fit of tremors minutes before, opened her eyes. She regarded the man before her — lean, all-business attitude, blue uniform exuding some kind of authority — and sprang awake. She placed both feet on the ground and rose with barely a wobble, muttering that she was OK. Then she turned and started up the stairs, unaware that she was walking away from one of the best-trained paramedics in the country.
For Mr. Kleisner, the case wasn’t much of a challenge. But it was still better than his old job working on Wall Street.
“We get a lot of nothing calls like this,” he said after he and his partner had packed up their gear. “But our bread and butter is big stuff. I’m talking amputations, people hit by trains, bodies in pieces. Catastrophic stuff.”
Mr. Kleisner’s transition from millionaire commodities trader to rookie paramedic came 13 years ago, when he traded what he viewed as nihilistic self-enrichment for the mission of saving other peoples’ lives.
By the time he abandoned Wall Street, he said, he was making millions of dollars a year. He was also miserable.
“I was a person who created nothing, gave nothing to anybody,” Mr. Kleisner, 55, said of his time on Wall Street, where he ran his own investment fund. “Sometimes I feel like an outlaw who’s trying to get to heaven. Or maybe a few good nights of sleep.”
Mr. Kleisner viewed his career change as an escape. What surprised him was how much of his old self fit seamlessly into his new one. The adrenaline. The mastery of arcane lingo and byzantine rules. The constant competition to prove he’s among the fastest, the most decisive, the smartest.
He could comfortably retire tomorrow to his cabin in the Catskills, where he goes fly fishing, reads novels and keeps bees. Instead he remains a rescue paramedic, effectively subsidizing the Fire Department of New York, where his starting salary in 2012 was $32,000. He now earns $110,000.
“People ask me, ‘Why would you risk your life for $18 an hour?’” he said. The answer he gives is not so different from what he might have said as a Wall Street trader. “I am a hugely competitive person. I’m pretty good at what I do.”
Among the department’s 4,500 emergency medical responders, fewer than 60 are, like Mr. Kleisner, rescue medics, who are specially trained to save firefighters from active fires, retrieve people trapped beneath subway cars, reach injured people by rappelling down elevator shafts.
Of this elite crew, Mr. Kleisner is one of five lead instructors who train other rescue medics how to do the job.
“Jonathan is the top of the mountain,” said Capt. Frederick Saporito, a 40-year veteran of the Fire Department who led the agency’s rescue medic program until his retirement in February. “He has it all.”
Mr. Kleisner talks about his work with a swagger that does not bother with false modesty. (One thing he appreciates about working on Wall Street and in emergency medicine is that “neither are patient with stupid people,” he said.)
He once rescued a man who suffered a stroke on the observation deck of the Empire State Building. (Except for the setting, the job was “pretty vanilla,” he said.) Another man experienced a heart attack in the Chrysler Building; Mr. Kleisner provided lifesaving care in an elevator. He has responded to medical emergencies in the Holland Tunnel, in the Hudson and East Rivers, in the audience during a Broadway show, and inside the Sephora on 34th Street, where cosmetics shoppers gave him a standing ovation.
This February, when a possible case of Ebola was reported at walk-in clinic in Harlem, it was Mr. Kleisner and his partner who took the call. (The man was later found not to have Ebola.)
“When the biggest jobs happen in this city, we go,” he said.
Jonathan Kleisner didn’t know what he wanted to be when he grew up, except a success. After attending Fordham Prep, a Jesuit high school in the Bronx, he went to Boston University, dropping out a semester before graduation to take a job at a small trading firm on Wall Street for $40,000 a year. It was 1991, it looked as if the recession was over and the mood on the street was buoyant.
“It was more money than I’d ever seen in my life,” he said.
Even as he strove to make money as quickly as possible, he grew bored with people who only cared about being rich. He realized “the guy next to me would stab me with a pencil in my eye for the $30 bucks I had in my wallet if he thought he could get away with it,” he said. He realized he might do the same in return.
“Candidly, I was absolutely a part of all that,” he said.
There was no “Aha!” moment. Mr. Kleisner’s break with Wall Street occurred in stages. After 17 years in finance, in 2008, he was about to reach the summit of Mount Rainier, in Washington State, when a woman in his party blew out her knee. A snowstorm was approaching, and the group needed to get off the mountain immediately. They were rescued by a team of mountaineering medics, who suggested to Mr. Kleisner that if he wanted to continue such extreme wilderness pursuits, he should get some medical training.
Mr. Kleisner was intrigued by the medics’ ability to perform such complex, high-stakes work in a demanding environment. When he returned to New York, he signed up for an emergency medical technician class at Hunter College. When he was offered a chance to sign up for a future slot in the Fire Department’s training academy, he put his name down.
“It was like a protest,” he said. “I wasn’t serious. But I was sick of Wall Street.”
In the meantime, while still working in finance, he volunteered one day a week as an E.M.T. with the Central Park Medical Unit. He and his partner restarted a man’s heart by delivering a shock from a defibrillator, saving his life. The story was covered by a local newspaper, which his mother clipped and framed.
“I don’t think I ever saw my mom more proud of me,” Mr. Kleisner said. “That was a seminal experience.”
After two years of this double life, Mr. Kleisner was invited by the Fire Department to try out for the paramedics’ academy. He had a wife, two children, an apartment near Central Park and an intense and well-paid job on Wall Street. Training would begin with a physical exam in downtown Brooklyn. Mr. Kleisner was 41, nearly twice the age of most recruits. He aced it, completed 14 weeks of training and was asked where he would like to be assigned.
“I said the Bronx, because I knew it was hard, and I wanted hard,” said Mr. Kleisner, who eventually quit working in finance.
Minutes into his very first shift, he responded to a fatal shooting, which unnerved him. He signed up for more training and completed it as quickly as allowed, rising in four years from basic emergency medical technician to a paramedic trained in hazardous materials response to the pinnacle of the Fire Department’s emergency medical service: rescue medic. And then he rose again, becoming an instructor of other rescue medics.
His next posting put him in Manhattan, which paramedics call “Hollywood” because of its high call volume and high-profile jobs.
“Jonathan is a very intense gentleman,” said Capt. Dennis Rehberger, who took command of E.M.S. Station 8 in Midtown, where Mr. Kleisner is based, in February. “Midtown Manhattan is on everybody’s radar.”
One call that took Mr. Kleisner out of Midtown remains a fixture of Fire Department lore. The patient was on the top floor of a six-floor walk-up in Harlem. He was having trouble breathing and needed an ambulance ride to Harlem Hospital.
The man, who weighed 985 pounds, was too large to fit through the doorways of his apartment. So as firefighters attacked the walls with axes and sledgehammers to create a path, Mr. Kleisner and others helped the patient into a cargo net, which they carried to the stairwell with the intention of using a pulley to lower the man to the ground.
But the man, who was laboring to breathe, began to lose consciousness. The regular methods of anesthetization and intubation were impossible because of the patient’s size. So Mr. Kleisner drilled a hole directly into the man’s sternum, and his partner performed an adapted kind of intubation. For the next six hours, as the man was lowered to the ambulance and taken to the emergency department, Mr. Kleisner and his partner took turns squeezing a compression bag to keep the man’s lungs working.
“A regular medic doesn’t have those devices,” Mr. Kleisner said. “It was epic.”
Despite his status among medics, Mr. Kleisner is not an officer, but a Fire Department grunt. He disdains the bosses who insist he wash his ambulance before reporting for duty, and who sit in air-conditioned offices as he and his partners contend with sweat and urine and blood. Early in his tenure he got a tattoo with the Latin words “Sic Transit Gloria Mundi,” or “Thus passes the glory of the world,” part of what is now a mosaic of ink from his wrist to his shoulder.
After a decade as an emergency medical worker, Mr. Kleisner’s drive to do the toughest work on the biggest jobs carried him to the deadliest fire in New York City in more than 30 years. He had come to believe that no matter the call, even a five-alarm fire in the Bronx, he could handle it. But when he opened the door of his ambulance on Jan. 9, 2022, the scale of the emergency overwhelmed him.
Funnels of black smoke were pouring from the roof of Twin Parks North West, a 19-story residential tower in the Fordham Heights neighborhood. A paramedic was giving a toddler CPR on the hood of an S.U.V. Firefighters kept running out of the burning building with victims slung over their shoulders. Some were unconscious. Others were dead. They laid them on the sidewalk.
Mr. Kleisner readied Cyanokits, which are batches of a chemical compound to neutralize cyanide deposited in the lungs by toxic smoke, a crucial first step before firefighters could begin attempting CPR. He placed IVs in a number of patients so the chemicals and other drugs could be delivered. Then he turned his attention to a girl in a pink sundress.
Before the fire, someone had carefully braided her hair with beads. Now she was lying among the dead. After starting an IV and delivering the anti-cyanide medicine, Mr. Kleisner placed her inside the ambulance, then climbed in back to deliver CPR.
He knew it would not work. The girl could not be revived. With every chest compression Mr. Kleisner administered, the beads in her hair clicked against the metal stretcher.
Later he learned that the girl was 11 years old and had emigrated with her family from Guyana. The entire family — the parents, the girl, her older sister and younger brother — died that day. As he retells the story, Mr. Kleisner interrupts himself to address his body’s stress response to the memory: His neck had started to sweat, he pointed out. His heart rate had jumped to over 100 beats per minute. He felt short of breath, and his fingertips tingled.
“I can feel it now,” he said. “I carry her with me all the time.”
After two careers of full-tilt competition, he finally found his limit. Now, when a 911 dispatcher calls his ambulance to a medical call involving a child, Mr. Kleisner pauses. He performs a breathing exercise and takes a moment or two to meditate, steps he never needed before Twin Parks.
“Jonathan, he will always take lead — every job,” said Nigel Ramsook, who used to work as Mr. Kleisner’s partner. “Since Twin Parks, he realized he’s got to take care of himself.”
Paramedics receive few mental health services from the Fire Department, and their health insurance plans generally don’t cover therapy. Unlike most of the paramedics he knows, Mr. Kleisner said, he can afford to see a therapist regularly. He can also escape the city for his cabin in the Catskills. He takes all of his vacation time and can afford to turn down extra shifts.
“The work is hard, we do not get paid a lot,” he said. “I’m in a better place than many of my peers. Sometimes I feel almost like an impostor because I have an easier road.”
The money, the time off and the therapy help only so much. His mind is full of gory and traumatic scenes.
He cannot escape such memories. Instead he talks right through them.
“That’s a misguided concept, processing all this trauma,” he said. “It’s not going anywhere. You have to learn how to live with all of this.”
Finally, Mr. Kleisner finds, his goals have changed. There is nothing to win. The only question is how to endure.
Christopher Maag is a reporter covering the New York City region for The Times.
The post The Millionaire Who Left Wall Street to Become a Paramedic appeared first on New York Times.
