Earlier tonight, I posted for my Facebook status the following: "remembering why I like rescue...and it took a 90yo to remind me."
It wasn't long before Therapist texted, asking "so why is it you like rescue?"
Which got me to thinking. Why do I?
I think it was 11 or so years ago that I took my first EMS training class, to become a medical first responder. Several of us got together to take the class, mostly for knowledge. We didn't really have any plan to become deeply involved in emergency medical care. We just wanted the information so we could assist EMT's and paramedics on the occasional motor vehicle accident, or if someone got hurt in a house fire. But it wasn't long before we were taking calls for sick people. Heart attacks, strokes, asthma, all that good stuff. Overall though, trauma topped our list. So much so that we even sought out extra training to somewhat specialize in trauma care. Trauma patients are different than patients who are ill or sick. While trauma is sometimes induced by a true accident such as a fall, too many times it is inflicted by someone else. They may be a drunk with a knife and a score to settle. Or a drunk armed with a car, an open road, and innocent passengers. Or an angry spouse armed with a gun. I've seen the result of double shootings, of people attacked with iron pipes, and even one vicious attack with a milk crate (much worse than you'd think), and what's left when a youngster on a bicycle meets a car in the road. Many times it's raw emotion that causes these things, and many times that emotion is fueled with alcohol, drugs, or both.
Most of the patients remain faceless. We purposefully "disconnect" from the situation so that we don't become emotionally involved. Privacy concerns also cause us to quickly forget the details of a call shortly after we've written the reports. Well-meaning friends and neighbors in a small town will naturally ask how the patient is, but don't seem to understand our reluctance to talk.
Of the hundreds of faceless patients, though, a few stick out. Sadly, most of those faces in my memory are some of those we couldn't help. Those for whom our bag of tricks and treatment wasn't deep enough to find the magical tool or technique that was needed to save them. And sometimes the faces of their family, when they come to realize that there's nothing more we can do.
But among those few, are the faces of the ones we've been able to truly help; those who truly needed whatever it was that we could offer them. The face may be of a young teen struggling to inhale the air around him as asthma closes his breathing passages, his eyes pleading with you for help. The face may be of a trauma patient, with whom I'm sitting under a blanket in her mangled car as my firefighting brethren work to free her, while she squeezes my hands in her pain, but tells me of her grandchildren. The face may be of an elderly person, filled with a lifetime of stories that, despite their illness or injury, is just glad to have someone in their house to talk to.
Those people are the reason I like rescue. I just have to encounter one now and again to be reminded of it.
Well said.
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