Snow, Barbie Jeeps and the death of professionalism in EMS

Much to the chagrin of those dedicated and professional members of the Emergency Medical Services community, both basic and advanced, they will never be on equal footing with their brothers and sisters in the Police and Fire Services. This is because of volunteers.

Now I know what you are thinking. He is going to rant about Volunteer First Aid squads. Well, as accurate as that would be in many instances this hypothesis is based on the behavior of a more specific type of EMS Volunteer. The paid professional who freely prostitutes himself in the hopes of public adulation.

So I was making lame attempts to clean my garage today. (Bear with me. I will get to the point sooner or later) In the course of this activity I endeavored to discard items belonging to two categories. Those that are useless to anyone and those that were only useless to me. Falling in to the second category was a six year old electric Barbie Jeep which since its purchase has given countless hours of joy to both my niece and my daughter ages 12 and 8. Now they spend their leisure times in activities more age appropriate. Polack (I am allowed to use the P word because I am one) that I am I could not bear the thought of just throwing out an item that was both a)very expensive when I purchased it and b)still in very great shape. So, I began working the phones in an attempt to give it (yes, we Polish are thrifty but not entirely mercenary) to someone with a daughter or effeminate son of an appropriate age.

Success was realized with my first call to Mikey the Fisherman an EMS colleague of mine who has a young daughter, a large yard and probably much to his chagrin a recently cleaned garage that is just screaming for a large item like a Barbie Jeep. He was happy to have it and as a bonus was working the ALS truck in my town this very night. After making some quick arrangements I loaded the thing in to the millennium Falcon with plans to leave early for my midnight shift and make the drop off thus ridding myself of the thing once and for all. I then went to bed for a quick nap. Then the plan began to fall apart.

Having been ripped from my tropical paradise (hey, you dream the way you want to) by my daughter and niece and their never ending need to run around the house like marauding buffaloes I went outside to make some preparations for the forecasted snow tsunami when my cell phone rang. Sadly he had to defer delivery tonight as the truck that he is normally assigned to was not going to be staffed tonight and he was being moved to our northern location. Historically there has to be a near world ending catastrophe for this truck to go out of service. And while that sometimes causes me some personal inconvenience I don’t complain because being well over forty and fat it gives me great comfort that there is a Paramedic Unit only minutes from my home. And since there is supposed to be a major snow tonight it raises my comfort level exponentially.

Naturally I was curious as to why the truck was going out of service. He explained that he was supposed to be alone tonight (not an unusual occurrence on the weekend) but then a medic assigned to the north truck called out and he was being moved since no one else would come in. Then he told me why the medic had called out. It was at this point I should have put on my shower cap in case my head exploded.
The guy that was supposed to work tonight is a nice guy. Personally, I really like him. He is smart, well educated runs a really big EMS operation in a neighboring city and enjoys a sterling professional reputation. We have worked together frequently over the years and have enjoyed each others company. But he called off tonight to be ready to respond to snow related emergencies in his role as a VOLUNTEER EMERGENCY MANAGEMENT COORDINATOR. Are you freakin kidding me! It is no wonder why people in the other two services never take us seriously.

First, there are very few paying jobs in Emergency Management. There is a good reason for that. Its like the Land of Make Believe. A guy with good emergency services credentials spends many hours in a cubicle coming up with written protocols as to how State, County or Municipal agencies will respond to a large scale emergency. Great idea. If you have an emergency, you have a plan. That’s the idea. When the emergency happens, you roll out the plan and those resources needed to implement it. Nowhere in this myriad of protocols does it necessitate middle aged men putting on a queer plastic helmet and vest to heroically sit in front of a bank of radios to wait for a little snow to fall. This is New Jersey, we see snow periodically. In fact sometimes we see a foot of snow. There is no reason to be alarmed. If we were in Phoenix, well ok. I might even overlook the helmet and vest. But in the name of all that is right and natural in the universe why must we take a needed ALS unit out of service in order to sit around and do nothing based solely on the firm possibility of a slim maybe? Do we station an ambulance outside of every location fat people and smokers congregate? No.

This is really simple. Cops and Firemen get to do the hero stuff. We in EMS do a dirty and under appreciated but really important job. With the exception of some really odd circumstances we are not going to get the adulation that the other two uniformed services get. It’s a fact. It’s not a secret.

So put away the helmet and the vest. Store the stork and CPR save pins. Sleep the sleep of the just knowing that in your career you have probably saved more lives than both of the other services combined. Just get in the truck when the pager goes off and save a life. Maybe, just maybe when you get there the volunteer squad will say "canceled" instead of pudding.

And for no reason in particular a video of King Louie from Disney’s The Jungle Book.