Last year, in the City of San Francisco, the Fire Department responded to 149,000 calls for help.
Each one of them, unique.
None, however, were quite like the call SFFD Paramedic Angela Castro answered in Bernal Heights, California on Friday in November. "This call has impacted my life in such a way," Castro said, "I don't think I'll ever lose faith again."
To understand why the call had such the impact that it did, one first must travel back to Castro's childhood and one of the very reasons she became a paramedic. When Castro was just five years old, her father died of a heroin overdose in an SRO in the City's Tenderloin District.
She knows she was powerless as a little girl to save her father but thought, perhaps, that one day she could help save other people's family members when they were in need.