Ghost Towns

     In working in EMS, you experience everyday life a little differently than everybody else you may know. It may not bother you to eat your lunch while your co-workers talk about blood and guts, but to see a bicycle laying in someones front yard brings back memories of a particular bad call you had with a child. I know that EMS workers have a warped sense of reality about the world around us. Some people that work in emergency services may have a spouse  that also works as a responder so dinner time could be a time to vent and share, to maybe reset back to normal. I do not take my work home with me to share the things that I see everyday. There are two reasons; one, most people cant wrap their brains around some of the things that we get to experience, emotionally and physically. People think that they want to know, but its not like that, even when we are being "honest" we tend to sugar coat it a bit. The second is that we don't want to re-live it again, even for the sake of telling a good story. I cant tell you how many times I have been on a call that any major news company would kill for, but I go home and never speak a word of it. This is where pre-hospital medicine differs from other jobs such as law enforcement and fighting fires, what we do is a secret. The newspaper prints the calls the other agencies do, but not EMS. Could you imagine if newspapers had columns listing the medical calls and details of the patients...pretty scary.

     My family thinks they have a good understanding about what I do. They are probably about 45% correct. Its like when your standing in line at the store and the clerk or someone ask you "Have y'all been busy?" You always reply "yeah, pretty busy". Their response is "Lots of car wrecks and stuff?" Sure cowboy, working wrecks, shootings, stabbings, delivering babies, jumping out of helicopters and still had the time to go to the hospital and visit with all the people that I saved with CPR yesterday. I just don't have it in me to explain that my day has pretty much just been hand holding, moving elderly patients in and out of bed, and explaining to a 20 year old why he isn't dying of a heart attack because he has gas. The only blood I have have seen today is from the I.V. I missed on the 96 year old DNR patient I was transporting from the nursing home. Where is William Shatner and his dramatic pause as he describes the race against death on the next episode of Rescue 911?

     Then you always have the brand new rookie EMT student that rolls in the door to do ride time with you, with their brand new uncreased black boots, $20 stethoscope and clean white shirt and a head filled with aspirations of saving lives, ready to be a hero and acquire some good stories to tell while standing around the bar with their friends. I think back to the days when I was in school, and the head full of dreams about working in EMS and wondering what it was all about. Looking back now, I have to say that I had no idea what would really happen to me. The places I would learn my lessons were most unexpected , and my most rewarding calls didn't ever involve heroics. I look into the eyes of these incoming students and try to instill the patience and control that it will take for them to have a truly rewarding experience in EMS. That they will have a far less impact on people, than people will have on them. The joy of seeing someone in Wal Mart that you know wouldn't be there if you hadn't been with them late one night, and they might not even know it. To share a bond with a family because you grew close to them as you cared for a family member over and over as they died slowly over a year with some sort of terminal disease. EMS is a fickle bitch as they say, you lose some of your soul there but you gain so much more from the people you reach out to help everyday.

     I often feel like I could be a real estate agent in our community because I can drive down any street and my wife will point out houses and remarks how much she likes this one or that one or hates the way this one looks and all I think is, "yeah I remember being in that house doing CPR, or in that one trying to comfort an alzheimer's patient that had fallen. The ones that look nice from the outside but are stacked to the roof with stuff on the inside because of hoarding or smell so bad of pet urine that your eyes burn when you are in them. I truly see the world through different eyes. I also drive the highways and roads and remember each corner, straight away and slight bend that we worked to extricate a patient in a race against time. Noticing the small memorials erected at roadside by grieving family members as you remember how different that scene looked the night of the accident. It gets inside you, it becomes a part of what you are. The wise ones wont let it get them down, but use it, learn from it, to make them a better Medic on the next call.

     I opted to write this blog based on my EMS experiences because I am always asked about  my job from the people that don't do it, and to maybe let others that work in this field know that they may feel the same as I do about things. People ask us to come into their lives when they are at their worst and to guide them back to normal. Sometimes it takes great effort and knowledge of Pharmacology and Physiology, but most of the time its just holding a hand and reassuring them that things are going to be okay. To walk into a chaotic scene and take control and make it all better and make some more memories.