Adventure Territory EMS District

I discovered Emergency Medical Services (EMS) in high school while taking first aid for the first time ever, and while I was studying, Rescue: 911 became my favorite weekly TV show. As soon as I got to college, it didn't take the guys on the campus rescue squad much effort to get me to take the EMT class. I became an EMT in March 1995 and started working at a local ambulance company two months later. It was called Life-Line, in Wakefield, Massachusetts, and our ambulances served almost every city and suburb on the north side of Boston. That company kept getting bought out, I kept having to rip the patch off my uniform to sew another one on, and finally American Medical Response (AMR) took over and turned the whole place upside-down. That's about when I stopped working there. I still hold a national registry EMT card, probably always will, and I try to work on ambulances wherever and whenever I can.

A Great College Job If you're in college or will be soon, I highly reccomend EMS as a job. In most places you can sleep on the night shift, and beds are provided. You get paid by the hour and are on-call at the station the whole time. The shifts are long (some 24 or even 48 hours) but sometimes you get a detail at a football or hockey game that's only five or six hours. That's right, jobs do exist where you get paid to watch football. If you give EMS a chance, you'll learn a number of good skills to put on your resume: leadership, calmness in life-or-death situations, decision-making, how to work with others in stressful situations, and above all, how to save a life. Not All Blood and Guts Contrary to popular belief, we EMT's are not constantly wiping blood and guts off our uniforms. The really serious calls don't come along very often, especially on small volunteer squads. Your average call is usually an 89-year-old lady having trouble breathing, or a warehouse worker having back pains again. Those are 99 percent of your calls. Many of the reasons people call 911 will make you laugh. As one firefighter once told me: "people never dial 911 to say they just did something intelligent..." A lot of EMT's like to watch "Paramedics" on the Learning Channel or "Trauma: Life in the ER" on the Discovery Channel. The 70's TV series "Emergency" is yet another form of down-time entertainment. Yes, many of us really do eat meals while looking at overhead training slides of blood and guts. It seems to add a much more adventurous side to lasagna. Ambulance Stories It was 11:30 pm (or 23:30, as we would say) in Lawrence, MA, the middle of summer. My unit was called to respond to the Store 24 "for difficulty breathing." I'll never forget the guy who came running out of the store, googly-eyed and not-so-coordinated, out of breath. The first words from his mouth were a desperate "you gotta help me man... I can't feel my lungs!" Since I've always been a writer, and always came home from work with interesting stories, I never thought to combine the two when I staggered in the door at eight in the morning, mumbling those stories to Mom as I tried to remember where my bed was. Finally she, and other family members, told me I should start writing about those experiences. Here they are!

So Kenny goes to a party on his motorcycle. Right away, as a South Park viewer, you know that's the beginning of the end. Kenny gets hammered. You know this kid can't resist the sauce. While hammered he smokes a bit o' wacky tobaccy and jumps back on his motorcycle. They told him not to go. He'd heard stories of trees jumping out into the middle of the road when they saw wasted high people coming (trees, like cows, are a lot smarter than anyone gives them credit for...) but never believed them. Well anyway... a tree noticed that Kenny was coming. The laws of physics sort of favored the tree.

Written by Mike Colclough, (c)1999. May not be reproduced for profit without permission from the author. But do feel free to tack it up in the station next to your favorite centerfold.

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