Of Sisters, Mountains, and CEU's

For fire and emergency medical services in my town in rural New Hampshire, volunteerism is the catchword. So eight years ago when the captain of our ambulance squad suggested I'd be a "good EMT" and should "join the ambulance," after not too much thought I plunged in headlong. As a stay-at-home parent and small, organic farmer, I was "in town" just about all the time. Surely I could drop everything now and then to help a neighbor in need (and in our town, we're all neighbors).

What would subsequently blindside me was the incredible amount of time I needed to expend on initial training, testing, ambulance meetings, continuing education, and vehicle and supply upkeep. In the midst of all of this I actually got to slip in some ambulance calls! And when the department unanimously and bigheartedly elected me as secretary (ironically while I was out of town!) all thoughts of weeding carrots while simply waiting for my pager to erupt me out of my stupor with its succession of beeps went out the greenhouse window.

But like for others, the vast amount of time and energy spent to prepare to be and remain an EMT becomes inconsequential when before your eyes is a young, hysterical mother watching her one-week-old baby choking, or when you're enroute to the hospital holding the hand of a neighbor who is in the end stages of cancer.

There are particular folks in this town, who after taking the dive into local emergency services, could not even think about cutting and clamping the umbilical cord between themselves and the town's ambulance department. I am one of those EMT's. I find it not fun to regularly face the heartbreak of trauma, disease, untimely deaths, alcohol and drug overdoses, psychiatric behavior, domestic abuse, car crashes, and the multitude of other calamities but what I do find is a deep, personal reward in helping these fellow earth travelers.

We make not a cent but the payments trickle in anyway--perhaps in the form of an appreciative hug at the local store a few weeks after a transport or an EMT buddy treating you to a giant brownie and piping hot cup of coffee for the long, ethereal drive home from the hospital at 3:30 in the morning.

One of the biggest challenges in small town EMS is remembering everything. (The respiration rate of a one year old should be...mmmm. You take Norpramin for... can you give a multiple choice on that? Epinephrine may cause the heart to do what?) Thus many times I can be found racing to the station (six miles away from my home over back roads), steering wheel in one hand and my condensed protocol book or EMS Field Guide in the other. For instance, when I recently took my practical exam for recertification, I realized I had not used the KED board for two years--that being the last practical examination!

Being a walker of the woods, I have also invested a fair amount of training into managing wilderness emergencies for those times when there is no ambulance or even a jump kit on the immediate horizon. I learned how to make splints out of deflated sleeping pads, identify the circular rash of Lyme disease, transform a fanny pack into a C-spine collar, make a femur traction splint out of hiking sticks--all sorts of neat stuff. I couldn't wait for the woods to "bring it on." And finally, while deep in the mountains, my services were called upon--on the Appalachian Trail no less!--the episode being a giant, fluid-filled bubble of a foot blister because a hiker didn't heed a "hot spot" earlier in the day. Thus, after all my training, that was the totality of my wilderness first aid administration after well over 2000 miles of periodic backpacking. Until recently.