Volunteer firefighters are a breed unto themselves. Amazing people. These men and women I worked alongside would devote countless hours to training, carried pagers 24/7 and were called out at all times of day and night--often to seriously tragic events for many hours at a time. I was in it for a career but many of these guys and gals just wanted to give back to their community… probably the most dangerous kind of community work you can do, I suspect. I admired them all. They attended fires, cardiac arrests and car accidents and trauma that ranged from minor to horrific and it was often the smiles and good nature of these folks - who after working all night at a fire scene would still have to go into their regular job in the morning - that got me through hard nights.
At nineteen of course, everyone is invincible. No danger, known or unknown would have changed my mind about becoming a Paramedic. I was thoroughly hooked. As soon as I was out of high school, I was trying to get into Paramedic school, and in practically every waking moment in between, I was “at the firehall”. My family hardly saw me.
I graduated from the Southern Alberta Institute of Technology in 1985 and worked rurally in Mayerthorpe (an eye-opening and wonderful experience - the owners of the service took great care of their people) briefly, then was back in Airdrie as a Paramedic/Firefighter for nearly twenty more years before returning to SAIT, this time as an instructor in the Paramedic and Respiratory Therapy programs. I feel exceptionally lucky to have had two such rewarding and challenging careers.
Thank you for reading. Ash Keller has been through a lot through the course of this book, but I don’t think her adventures are quite over, do you?
Maybe you’ll come along with me for the next one. Stay tuned.
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A Note on Post Traumatic Stress Disorder
In the first few chapters of this book, Ash Keller tells her therapist that working in EMS is a little like being a boxer, and I think she is right. If you work in emergency services, sooner or later (and on a regular basis) you are going to attend calls with some potential to traumatize you. You might see actual physical trauma that devastates a human body, bear witness to a death, perhaps even of younger patients and infants. Frequently, you will be exposed to the emotional traumas that patient and/or families experience during life changing events. In the analogy of the boxer taking hits, some of these will strike minor, incremental blows that accumulate (perhaps hardly noticed) to do their damage over time. Others may be big hits that drive you immediately to your knees, sometimes literally. But one way or another, damage is done. No one escapes it.
In 1980, the American Psychiatric Association (APA) added Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) to the third edition of its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-III), but it would be many years before the notion of PTSD or attempts to mitigate it filtered into the Emergency Services and the concept of Critical Incident Stress Debriefing (CISD) and then Critical Incident Stress Management (CISM) were born. Today there are many excellent resources for those who are in need of help, most just a hyperlink or a phone call away.
Every year, we lose Paramedics, Firefighters and Police Officers (people who have given their all to their communities and sacrificed some portion of their well-being in doing so) due to the effects of PTSD. Some are debilitated and some take their own lives. Please, if you’re experiencing difficulty, I beg you, reach out. You are not alone. And things can get better.
The Beast in the Bone Page 39