"You shouldn't have coded her," my partner for the day instructed me. Wiping my mouth after my first CPR attempt, I began to learn that on-the-job reality doesn't always follow the formal rules. Twenty years ago, just a couple of months after taking a course to become an emergency medical technician and a week or two into my new job with a private ambulance company, I had a lot to learn. The three-month EMT course …showed first 75 words of 744 total…

…showed last 75 words of 744 total…every code cost the hospital thousands of dollars. The patient was young, the wife frantic, even the doctors didn't give up right away. Of course, if he'd been older we too might have said there was nothing we could do. I wondered even then where I would draw the line. But this time, neither of us regretted the effort. "I'd do it again," I told my partner. By the book, if I had the chance.