It’s your first day here. You might be a new volunteer, a paramedic student, or a fresh hire. This may be your first time in an ambulance or maybe you worked ten years for a service in another state. You might be nervous or you could have so much confidence you had trouble fitting your…
Month: June 2011
Astray
I read a recent article in the New York Times that disturbed me. A Crash. A Call for Help. Then, a Bill tells the story of a 70-year old man in Chicago who was in a minor motor vehicle accident, not his fault, who was nevertheless forced to pay the local fire department $200 for their response. The…
Jesus Took the Bullet
The call is for a GSW. The address is familiar. I did another gun shot there many years ago. When we pulled in that night, everyone was running out the doors, while we ran in. The D.J. was on the ground, shot in the chest. He’d spun his last disc. But this time it’s different….
A Lift
I worked with one of my old partners last week. Jerry and I used to do the dedicated Hartford car. Jerry is just a few years younger than me, although he doesn’t use Grecian formula like I do so he has had a mane of silver hair for almost as long as I have known…
Change
They wrote everyone up for not doing the new ambulance maintenance checklist. A couple weeks ago, they started handing out the checklist. Lights, motor oil, mileage, cleanliness, tire pressure. Scratches, dents. You name it, it is on there. I did it the first couple days and then stopped doing it because they stopped passing it…
The Grand Tour
You drive the streets of the city or towns where you work and you go by houses, intersections, businesses where you have done calls. The longer you are at it, the more memory pins are dropped on your street map. Over here on our left was the great lumber yard fire. I sat on that…