Frontline Builders

Ashley Diaz remembers three things from September 15, 2022: being on the ground, her mother screaming, and telling the first responder how to apply the tourniquet to her own leg.

She'd been an FDNY EMT since 2017 — Coney Island, Station 43, the calls she said she absolutely loved. Overdoses. Shootings. The work where the difference between living and not is the speed of your hands. She was loading her car outside her mother's house on Staten Island when a driver impaired by fentanyl hit her. The EMT became the patient. She did the work anyway.

Thirteen surgeries later, her right leg gone, she's back at FDNY EMS — not in the rig, but in the agency. She raised over $150,000 on GoFundMe for the prosthetic, child care for her son, retrofitting her home. The wage doesn't cover what the job costs.
National EMS Week runs May 17–23. Median EMT pay in 2024 was $41,340. Entry-level starts at $14 an hour in many states. 73% of EMS providers report burnout or compassion fatigue. More than a third say they're leaving within five years.
Ashley came back. She names what keeps her: her son, the people she worked beside, life itself.

Ashley Diaz | FDNY EMT, Station 43, Coney Island