StraightAhead

Ok, so here I am making lots of medical calls. Many are serious, many aren’t so much. I think you have to have some compassion for people and their problems to stay with a job like this. I see compassion in some of the folks that I work with on these calls, but I know that many just see it as a job. The volunteers that do it definitely have compassion or they wouldn’t be doing it, but part of their motivation is just the pure excitement of certain kinds of calls and being able to rush to a scene and do some exciting work that may help someone.
You definitely see a side of life that you are not otherwise privy to. That other side is sometimes pretty seamey. People live in all sorts of ways, some not so clean and wholesome and healthy. In my opinion many people bring on the problems, health or otherwise, that is their plight. This is an obvious truth I suppose, but it is easy to get to a place where you don’t really care what happens to certain folks, because they obviously don’t care enough to do anything about the problems in their lives. As health care providers we are supposed to treat all people the same and I guess think of them the same and for the most part , that happens. It messes with your mind though. I keep thinking survival of the fittest, and oh well. I definitely see people not being treated the same by the police and some ems people. I know that there is a burn out factor and I think to myself on the scene sometime that a particular person needs to take a long break from his job and get back to some normality, if that is possible. Many times on a cpr scene, it is obvious to me that the particular person is dead and after many shocks and all the chemicals possible, the person is still flat lining. They are still loaded into the ambulance and cpr is continued to no avail. I realize that this is done for the benefit of the family members that may be there. I guess it should be done too. It is so obvious sometimes but I don’t think the family wants to see “obvious”. There are the really good stories though, like the little boy who was at the bottom of a swimming pool, nobody knew how long, who was revived and saved by the quick thinking of one of the neighbors at the pool and by expert paramedic from my town. Those make your day. I’ve rambled long enough.