This post has been rattling around in my head for a while and the noise has finally driven me to put the thoughts into writing.

Every once in a while an article comes out in some EMS trade journal telling us how EMTs and paramedics are “Trauma Junkys”, what ever that means. Apparently we’re driven not by a desire to help people, like doctor and nurses, and real medical providers. No, we mere ambulance driver types get all turned on by blinky lights and hearing loss inducing sirens. It’s how we get our jollies, if indeed it’s jollies we’re getting. Apparently we’re not interested in saving lives, helping to reduce the severity of illnesses and injuries and mundane things like that. We sacrifice, nights, weekends, holidays, and family time for the thrill of the chase.

Let me reply to these “studies” with a few erudite words of my own.

Horse.

Crap.

As with any new profession, especially one with fairly high stakes, new comers to EMS are certainly going to be excited and apprehensive for a while. This period can last from a few months to a few years depending what type of and how many calls the service responds to. As the EMT becomes more experienced, more and more calls that were once exciting and even challenging become routine. Even at the ALS level, calls become easier to respond to and handle as experience grows. When I first became a medic, I remember how complex CHF calls were. I had to remember the symptoms, the physical findings, which drugs to give in which order, not to let the IV “runaway”, to keep reassessing the patient, run an EKG strip, decide the best time to start moving the patient to ambulance, notify the hospital, recheck vital signs, remember the last drug administration time, … Whew, that’s a lot of stuff to do, even with a more experienced paramedic partner. No wonder I sweated all throughout the call and well afterward too. Now? Routine. As much as I think CPAP is a great tool for treating patients, after the first few times using it became as routine as taking a blood pressure.

The point is not that I am Supermedic, but that after a while just about any task in EMS becomes pretty routine. Sure, there are exceptions, but they are not frequent enough that I or anyone would stay in EMS on the off chance we’d run into one of them. The point is that like any other profession or trade, we work in EMS because we find it interesting, we can make money at it (some), and for the most part we’re pretty adept at it.

In fact, it’s better that people in EMS become somewhat inured to the very things that the “scientists” that study people in EMS think are the very reason we do it in the first place. If you’re in EMS, think about your first couple of years on the job. Every call it seems was like the CHF call I described earlier. There was a lot to remember, it sometimes seemed overwhelming. After a while though, it’s not overwhelming. As your skill increases, your comfort level increases. As that increases, the excitement, if that’s what you want to call it, decreases. And believe me, if you’re more comfortable and confident, you patients will sense it and they’ll be more comfortable and confident that they are getting the best care possible.

If you’ve been in EMS for a while and still find your heart racing on every chest pain call, I’d suggest that maybe it’s time for a career change. Before you start having chest pain of your own. Which might sound harsh, but is true. A long time ago I had this discussion with someone in my paramedic program. She was from the frozen north, up in Walt Trachim country. She’d regale us with every call that she did, telling us how she’d saved their lives. I finally had a enough and told her that EMS was a job, not a mission from God. Which might sound cynical, but is true none the less. Sadly, it didn’t shut her, but then again nothing did. Story for another day, and probably not on a blog.

If you’re a “trauma junky” take up sky diving or something because ultimately you’ll become disenchanted with EMS when you realize that most of what we do is pretty routine after a while. On the other hand if you’re willing to put up with the plethora of routine, even boring, calls for the few where you will actually make a difference in people’s lives, then hang around. We can use people like you.