RedbeardtheMedic - An Accidental Career

It’s 3:21 in the morning. The ambulance smells like stale coffee and antiseptic wipes intermingled with UTI from the latest nursing home run. My partner is driving, the monitor beeps, and somewhere in the middle of it, a diesel engine hums like it knows the way to the hospital better than we do. My thoughts wander as my patient rests comfortably, blissfully unaware of her condition thanks to dementia. I find myself wondering just how the hell I got here.

This wasn’t supposed to be my life. In fact, I had no fucking clue what I wanted to do with it. I always thought I’d end up working in a boat factory like everybody else in my hometown did. Becoming a Paramedic? Totally an accident. So, how did I get here? I’ll tell you.

Its 2005, and I have somehow successfully managed to graduate from high school in spite of my numerous attempts at fucking it all up. I was a terrible student and, as my guidance counselor so graciously pointed out, would amount to nothing. I weighed my options while going through high school and had initially settled on going into the military. That is, until my mother got wind and put the kibosh on that with a tearful, ugly-crying tirade about how I was just trying to get myself killed. That closed that door, because who wants to upset their mama?

It was around this time that my best friend from high school, Jason, joined the volunteer fire department in our town and suggested I do the same. I had started working at the same security company he was at in a factory, and I was hesitant at first. I didn’t think I could do the job, others said the same, but eventually I bit the bullet and gave it a shot. Suddenly, my life had purpose beyond menial day to day tasks, security rounds, removing people who caused problems from the plant, and answering the phones for asshole truckers and plant workers who treated me like I personally kicked their puppy in the balls or… slept with their sister.

It was slow-going at first. Mostly medical calls, which I had absolutely ZERO desire to run. I was a firefighter, not an ambulance jockey. I wanted to do firefighter things and EMS was boring. Go to the house, take vitals, hand off to the ambulance crew, and the call was finished. It wasn’t until a few months after I joined that it finally happened. As a volunteer firefighter, you kept your gear with you, so mine was at home in my truck. When a call would come in, you’d take your stuff to the firehouse, don it, and hop on a truck. It was early in the morning, around 5 am, when the pager woke me up from a dead sleep and I heard the words I was most excited for, Residential structure fire. At the time, I didn’t think about the fact that someone was losing their home, I was just excited for the call, so I threw my gear on before I got in my truck and tore off to the firehouse to jump on the engine.

When we arrived on scene, we found a fully involved mobile home, and I had no idea what the hell I was doing. So, I did what any new firefighter would do, I pulled my hoseline, and put the wet stuff on the red stuff. What happened that night lit a fire in me (no pun intended) that persists to this day in whatever I’m doing. I wanted to know everything I could about fighting fire—fire behavior, strategies and tactics, proper placement of people on the fireground, etc. It was also shortly after this that I became an emergency medical responder. If most of our calls were going to be medical, I wanted to be able to respond and help in any way that I could. I still lacked the desire to do medicine, just wanted to assist my community. A few years later, I would find myself a career firefighter in a neighboring town, and for nearly a decade, life was pretty damned good.

“Every new beginning comes from some other beginning’s end”

—Semisonic, “Closing Time”

The thing about life is that it rarely moves in straight lines. Sometimes, the chapter you thought you’d spend your whole life writing closes a lot sooner than you expected. As it were, my time in the fire service came to an end and I found my self wondering what to do next. I had gotten my EMT license just to have, so I started the process of applying to other fire departments while working odd jobs. I was convinced that something would come through. Nothing did. It was disheartening. Looking back now, though, I realize something I didn’t understand at that time., what we think we want stands directly in the way of what we were always meant to become, and I was about to find that out.

I shifted my focus, now applying to every EMS job in every state that I could find. I had lived in Missouri my entire life and I was ready for a change of pace. One morning, while laying in bed, I received an e-mail from an EMS agency in Oklahoma, in a brief phone conversation, I was invited to interview THAT DAY. Problem was, at the time, my children were young and I didn’t have a babysitter and the interview was some three-and-a-half hours away. Jim, the person who was interviewing me and who would become one of my biggest supporters, offered to meet me an hour and a half closer, so I did. Before I left that day, I had a job offer and just like that was on my way to start a new career in Oklahoma.

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