Christell Cadet, a New York Fire Department paramedic, loves her job.

I know because she told me. When I asked her last year what it was like to be on the ambulance, she spoke of the thrill of saving a life, of racing toward danger to help when others were running away.

Ms. Cadet has been on a ventilator for the better part of a month, sick with the coronavirus and fighting for her life. She is 34 years old.

“I just want people to know that she’s a very beautiful person. She has a good heart,” her mother, Jessy Cadet, told me by phone this week. “She’s always ready to help anybody, everybody, everywhere.”

Much attention in this terrible pandemic is being focused on the country’s hospitals, and rightly so. But the battle is also being fought by the nation’s front-line emergency medical workers, paramedics and E.M.T.s. These skilled professionals are responding to a deluge of calls, risking their lives to aid millions of sick Americans.