Silent Siren

Memoirs of a Life Saving Mortician

By: Matthew Franklin Sias

Narrated by: Jonathan Todd Ross

Length: 8 hrs and 42 mins

Publisher's summary

Paramedics save lives. Morticians bury their mistakes.

A 23-year veteran of emergency medical services, paramedic Matthew Sias took a detour in his career to pursue the death-care business and found a complementarity between two seemingly divergent careers. Silent Siren: Memoirs of a Life Saving Mortician is the record of some of the more memorable calls he has responded to through the years.

Often intense, at times gruesome, and frequently humorous, this memoir takes you from the back seat of the medic unit racing to the hospital with a trauma patient, to the brightly lit embalming room of a funeral home, and everywhere in between. Having the ability to calmly assist a person in crisis is, perhaps, one of life's most awesome privileges.

©2018 Matthew Franklin Silas (P)2019 Tantor

Good Book

I enjoyed listening to this book. I personally know Matt and I think he did a great job writing this book. The downside is the reader. he doesn't know how to say a lot of the words in the book and instead of finding out just guessed. Still a good book and worth a read or listen.

Informative. Compassionate.

I love how this author has such a passion for compassion. There are many stories of patients, both here and gone-all told with brilliant observation to each one in order to handle them with such compassion.
It amazes me that a person is compelled to serve the dead with the utmost dignity and respect, even when nobody, including the patient (?) is looking.

Well written book

This was a thoroughly enjoyable book telling the stories of a young boy turned paramedic in the Pacific Northwest. His writing portrayed the scenes vividly and I felt like I was standing in the room. While many stories ended sadly there were plenty of happy outcomes as well. Later in the book he talks about his transition to undertaker and that was interesting how he combined the two jobs for a short time. What I didn't appreciate was his incessant fat-shaming of clients while he went to scenes as a paramedic. Once I could maybe tolerate but clearly he had an issue with overweight people or as he called them, morbidly obese. He talked a lot about how compassionate he was in his job. But his compassion clearly wasn't available for the overweight population. For this I took off one star. Maybe I should have taken off two. It just wasn't necessary. It didn't add anything to the book at all.

I call B.S. on Part V, "Improvising"

What ends up in an urn, after cremation, are only the bones, pulverized. Regardless of how obese a person was, the size of their skeleton does not increase. The claim that this person, around "300 pounds" required two urns to hold the cremains is not accurate.💀🦴

Outstanding book

Started listening to this book out of my interest in everything first responder related.
Well little did I know that this book actually plays out where I live!!
Which made listening even more interesting!
Amazing, informative, great range of emotion invoking.
An absolute joy to listen to and was very sad when it ended!
Could have listened for many more hours!
A must for everyone interested in first responder stories!!

Intense Fatfobia

I wanted (so much) to rate this higher then I did. I loved the storytelling, but what started as slight discomfort turned into full blown cringe by Pt II. The focus on obese people, both as the punchline and the focus of “difficult cases” crossed the line into bullying. It honestly ruined the whole thing, which sucked because otherwise I thought the writing and stories were awesome

OK

This is a medium-interest description of author Matthew Sias's assorted adventures as a paramedic/mortician. Reviewers have noted his frequent references to the many obese patients that he encounters. I have to agree that this does seem to come up frequently, but probably because of the difficulty involved in treating and/or transporting a morbidly obese person.

Narration is fine, except for Ross's seeming inability to scan ahead of the spoken word to see that the sentence he is reading continues on the next line. Repeatedly, he stops where he thinks the sentence ends, only to discover that there is more on the next line that he then treats as a new sentence.
Which then abruptly ends.
He also needs to check out the pronunciation of unfamiliar terms, e.g. atrial.

Interesting, intriguing

Very well written. Interesting stories. A few mispronunciations from the narrator, but good job, overall.

informative, serious , funny , compassionate

told with an honest first person experience , learned a lot about the way things are done that are not in the patients best interests...
I have renewed respect for first responders... especially my oldest grandson , who's training to be a flight paramedic...

Pity about the poor taste in ‘jokes’

Some of the stories are sad, others are gruesome, and I was fine with that. I’m even fine with gallows humour. What made me stop listening were jokes about old and fat people. Many died alone and probably frightened. And he wants to make jokes about giving mouth to mouth to an 70 year old woman because she has hair on her upper lip? I hope the woman’s daughter, who was present and in deep distress, never reads this book. Heroes don’t mock the people who need them.