You don’t know what it’s like to be an emergency services provider until you’ve stood in the piss-soaked bedroom of a house and watched a team of medics try to revive an old, lonely guy though 15 minutes of automated CPR. It’s a small part of the job, but unavoidable. When the call goes off for a critical emergency, medics have no choice but to make haste.
“We exist around death, dying, injury, and illness,” remarked Jay Cloud, a paramedic with 33 years of experience outside of Houston. “When we see these horrible situations, we can’t turn off our biological insistence that this is a critical situation. We have to learn to rein in our reactions and refocus that to getting [the situation] resolved. And it is terrible to have to deal with these things. Usually it involves children or senior citizens.”
Indeed, the life of a first responder is one of the most stressful in the nation, one where the non-life-threatening situations can be seen as nuisances, and the high-pressure ones cause nightmares.
—Chase Hoffberger writing in The Austin Chronicle about Austin-Travis County Emergency Medical Services. Austin’s EMS system is one of the best in the nation, but several recent suicides have highlighted structural problems.

You must be logged in to post a comment.