A riveting narrative of daring lifesaving rescue told by a veteran medevac helicopter pilot who fly critically injured patients out of chaos and into survival

Over the course of two decades flying for UMass Medical Center and Boston MedFlight, O’Meara and his crews were dispatched into the worst moments of people’s lives: children falling from windows, families trapped in highway conflagrations, farmers crushed by equipment, heart-attack patients racing against the clock.

Medevac Blues brings readers directly into the cockpit and the cabin, where pilots, flight nurses, and paramedics fight gravity, weather, exhaustion, and trauma in order to keep strangers alive long enough to reach a Level 1 trauma center.

O’Meara is not just flying; he is making life-or-death decisions about weather, fuel, visibility, and risk while a medical crisis is unfolding inches behind his seat. The tension between aviation judgment and medical urgency creates a constant, gripping moral and physical pressures that runs through every chapter.

The book is built around unforgettable true stories – like the young woman whose severed leg O’Meara carries into Mass General on her twenty-first birthday, or the infant burned in a car fire on the highway. These scenes are harrowing, visceral, and deeply intimate, but they are balanced with humor, camaraderie, and the gallows wit medevac crews use to survive emotionally. The result is a book that is as humane as it is shocking.

Medevac Blues is not just a collection of dramatic rescues – it’s a moving, immersive portrait of people who live on the knife-edge between life and death, and of how that kind of work changes you forever.

Paul O’Meara is a pilot (rated to fly airplanes and helicopters), a flight instructor, Army veteran, and mariner. He flew medevac for 23 years. Before his career as a medevac pilot, he worked as a charter pilot and corporate pilot in Boston for two years, and prior to that as a helicopter flight instructor, charter pilot, and corporate pilot in Miami for three years.

Martha W. Murphy is an award-winning narrative nonfiction writer. She is the author and/or co-writer of more than two dozen books, and scores of magazine articles, including for The New York Times and the AARP Bulletin.