“A 49-year-old female was flying from New York to Los Angeles for a job interview. During the flight, she began to feel anxious and ill. She contacted a flight attendant (who happened to be a registered nurse) and told her, ''I think I'm going to pass out." The RN walked her to an area in the plane where she could lie down. A registered respiratory therapist on the flight joined them and offered his assistance.”
“Paramedics were called on a "sick case.'' They arrived at a low-income tenement and walked into a room thick with cigarette smoke and full of drunk people. The paramedics recognized one of the bystanders as a prostitute they had encountered on previous occasions. She directed the paramedics to the bathroom, where they found a 35-year-old male draped over the toilet.”
“As she was getting ready for bed, a 52-year-old woman noticed a familiar squeezing or tightness in the middle of her chest. She had experienced cardiac problems in the past and felt this was a resurgence of her angina, so she took a sublingual nitroglycerin tablet. It burned underneath her tongue, yet provided no relief for her chest discomfort. In the next half hour, she took two more sublingual nitroglycerin tablets. The pain, rather than abating, started to radiate toward her back, which concerned her enough to call for help.”
“Paramedics were called to the home of an 80-year-old female who reportedly had fallen down a flight of stairs. On arrival, they found her barely conscious, with a large hematoma on her left parietal scalp and with an apparently fractured left hip. She was at the bottom of 15 heavily carpeted stairs.”
“When a burn changes a life, the aftermath can be a jumble of learning curves, new realities, changed dreams and so much more. It can be weeks or even months before anything resembling a steady life resumes. At some point, though, it could be time to revisit the events that started such a life-changing time.”
“Every month 50,000 U.S. women seek restraining or protection orders against someone who has violated or been violent to them. Almost four million are beaten by their partners every year; approximately 1,500 are killed.”
“The fifty-first floor of a skyscraper may not seem very remote, but when ambulance crews encounter building access problems, elevators that stop at each floor, and no on-floor guidance to the patient, response times can rival those more normally associated with rural areas.”
“One afternoon in 1997, a gregarious American paramedic was practicing his Spanish language skills in a bar in Copån Ruinas, Honduras, when an urgent plea for help filtered through the door. "There's a kid hurt," recalled Rodger Harrison. "They thought I was a doctor. There was not a doctor in town who would treat the poor people, so I got involved."
“When emergencies are your everyday concern, perspective sometimes gets skewed. After a while, it's easy to imagine that every heartbeat is just waiting to wobble… Yet somehow, the hearts in your service area take the licking of daily life and keep on ticking. And when they don't, you get the call.”
“In the summer of 1999 Kate was hand-picked to participate in a National Geographic expedition whose mission was to determine whether it was possible to successfully navigate all 550 miles of the Ethiopian Blue Nile.”
“One of the most noble aspects of rescue work is the impartiality of care. It does not matter who requires freeing or finding— rescuers go. The work is altruistic, meaning that the main goal is to help others. As experienced rescuers know, the satisfaction that comes from a job well done is immeasurable.”
“Within its relatively tiny toehold at the southern side of Mainland China, the British Crown Colony of Hong Kong displays an unbelievable hodge-podge of contrasts, presenting all the elements necessary to a superb EMS challenge.”
“With its relatively moderate climate, abundant plant diversity, and thousands of inland lakes and wetlands, Western Michigan is excellent butterfly territory. About 156 butterfly species live in Michigan… Most rely on "near-proximity" habitat, meaning their entire life cycle occurs right here.”
“When I began my EMS career, one of the most dreadful stories I heard was of a father who ran to his child after the child had been hit by a car. He gathered the sobbing boy in his arms to provide comfort, and instead, finished the job on the boy's spinal cord, killing him. Thankfully, decades later, some things have changed…”
“A friend of mine and I once got together for dinner after she had been awake for 36 hours. It was toward the end of her first year of residency in internal medicine at Harvard. She was haggard, red-eyed and had the waxy complexion of sleep deprivation most rescuers know well. Predictably, she fell asleep at the restaurant.”
“In our eagerness to help others, sometimes it's the simple things that help most, such as checking Facebook. Wait, what? For one 14-year-old Florida girl, it was a post on the popular social media site that made all the difference.”
“To function effectively as an EMS provider, you need three things: a willing heart, a knowledgeable mind and a body that can handle hard, physical labor. Your willing heart helped get you into EMS. Your mind helped get you through school and continues to assist you on each call. But is your body ready and able to handle the constant wear and tear you experience on a daily basis?”
“One of the exciting, but sometimes frustrating aspects of prehospital care is that we cannot choose our "clientele." We have a responsibility to treat all callers with our best efforts, regardless of race, ethnic origin, nationality and religion. But healthcare workers have one additional parameter which can elicit prejudice and the temptation to treat a patient differently: size.”
“One of the most personal liberties given rescuers can be seen on virtually every rescue call: The medical provider actually touches someone else—from head to toe. Everywhere. Every day, people in need submit to total strangers, actually welcoming this relatively gross invasion of space; they realize that someone knows what to do about the situation.”
“As a college kid in the 1970s, I first heard about Cambodia when the American military bombed it ferociously and “secretly” on the justification that such measures were necessary to the war effort in Vietnam. I was later deeply moved by the awful story of the regime of Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge as depicted in the movie, “The Killing Fields.”