“Simply being here isn’t enough; I want to immerse myself in it fully. I want to feel every ounce of joy this world has to offer. I need to go back to the very beginning of the pier and retrace my steps, and walk back through my childhood, acknowledging the journey that got me here, and healing along the way.”
– an excerpt from the book
ARPress is honored to publish Saving You and Finding Me by Abby Dubrawski. This book is now available on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and the ARPress website.
Life rarely unfolds the way people imagine it will. Plans change. Dreams evolve. Sometimes a single moment divides life into a “before” and an “after,” leaving people to figure out how to carry everything that came with it. The memories don’t disappear, and neither do the scars. But somewhere between loss and healing, people often discover a version of themselves they never expected to become.
That quiet transformation is what gives Saving You and Finding Me its depth. Rather than offering easy answers or polished life lessons, the book explores what it means to live through trauma, continue showing up for others, and slowly find purpose in experiences that once seemed impossible to understand. It’s honest, deeply personal, and filled with the kind of reflection that lingers long after the final page.
Abby Dubrawski never set out to become an author. Writing began as a way to make sense of her own life while she was a patient in a psychiatric hospital. What started as personal essays gradually became something much larger, a memoir that allowed her to process difficult experiences while offering comfort to readers who may be carrying burdens of their own.
She wrote much of the manuscript during long 36-hour ambulance shifts while balancing nursing school, a fact that somehow makes the book feel even more authentic. These weren’t stories recalled years later from a distance. Many were written while she was still living them, still trying to understand them herself.
Dubrawski has spent years working as a paramedic, responding to emergencies where lives can change in minutes. Her career has placed her in front of heartbreaking realities: serious injuries, sudden loss, addiction, homelessness, mental illness, and families experiencing unimaginable grief. Yet Saving You and Finding Me isn’t built around dramatic emergency calls alone. Those moments become the starting point for conversations about resilience, compassion, identity, and the emotional weight carried by people whose job is to help others.
She makes something clear early in the book: this isn’t a typical emergency medical services memoir, nor is it a self-help guide written by a mental health professional. It’s simply her story, a raw and honest account of how trauma unexpectedly taught her to appreciate life more deeply.
That perspective gives the memoir its emotional pull.
Readers see the victories, but they also see the moments that stay with her long after the ambulance doors close. One particularly moving chapter follows the loss of a fourteen-year-old patient whose death profoundly changed the direction of her life and career. Rather than allowing tragedy to harden her, Dubrawski chose to let it deepen her compassion and inspire her pursuit of pediatric nursing. It’s a painful story, but it’s also one of the book’s clearest examples of how grief can become a catalyst for growth rather than something that permanently steals hope.
The memoir also offers an unfiltered look at what it meant to work as a paramedic during the COVID-19 pandemic. Dubrawski writes about exhaustion, burnout, fear, and the emotional isolation experienced by first responders as they navigated an uncertain world. Instead of presenting herself as endlessly strong, she admits to the anxiety, self-doubt, and emotional fatigue that accompanied those years. That willingness to be vulnerable makes her voice easy to trust.
One of the book’s greatest strengths is its ability to remind readers that every person carries something invisible. Whether she’s describing patients, coworkers, or herself, Dubrawski returns to the idea that pain isn’t always obvious. The people we meet every day may be fighting battles no one else can see, and compassion often begins with remembering that simple truth.
As an author, Abby Dubrawski writes the way someone speaks after they’ve stopped trying to impress anyone. Her prose is thoughtful without becoming overly sentimental. She doesn’t wrap difficult experiences in inspirational clichés, nor does she pretend healing follows a straight path. Some chapters are heartbreaking. Others are unexpectedly warm or even quietly funny. Together, they create a memoir that feels remarkably genuine.
Perhaps that’s what makes Saving You and Finding Me resonate. It doesn’t celebrate perfection or pretend life can always be fixed. Instead, it acknowledges that people can be deeply wounded and still choose kindness. They can carry grief while making room for joy. They can save others, and somewhere along the way, discover pieces of themselves that had been waiting to be found all along.
For healthcare professionals, first responders, or anyone who has wondered how to keep moving after life’s hardest moments, Saving You and Finding Me offers something rare: not a roadmap, but a companion. Abby Dubrawski invites readers into her journey with honesty, vulnerability, and hope, proving that even the most difficult paths can lead somewhere unexpectedly beautiful.
Saving You and Finding Me by Abby Dubrawski is now available for purchase via the ARPress Bookstore.