No Big Hero: A Lighthearted EMS Parody

Happy EMS Week!

Like every EMT/firefighter you’ve ever met, I am pretty much obsessed with my profession; I have the requisite bumper stickers and tee shirts, even a collectible “Roy and Johnny” toy fire helmet. Birthdays involve extrication gloves, stethoscopes, EMS pants, and my yahoo page is littered with updates from every department within a seventy mile radius.

            In fact, HERE is the article that hit my inbox the other day and became the inspiration for this blog. 

You don’t have to read the whole thing, lol! Not that it isn't well written – truly, it is. And God knows, I can actually relate to most of it, as can almost any emergency worker. But it is, perhaps, a tad melodramatic, no? Maybe somewhat officious? All of which lead my partner and I, regrettably, to play with it. I share with you now the unfortunate results:

• Until you have spent eight hours on scene with your pants falling down inside your bunker gear because you forgot to put a belt on when you left the house – Don’t judge us.

• Until you have hit the patient’s house at a dead run only to slip in vomit and slide across the room like Babe Ruth stealing home (halting at the feet of your “non breathing” patient, who remarks. “Oh my.”)  – Don’t judge us.

• Until you forget to set the brake on the tanker and don’t realize it until said vehicle is sliding down the boat ramp into the lake – Don’t judge us. 

• Until you've answered a call with shampoo still in your hair – Don’t judge us

• Until you have answered a call for a non responsive medical alarm, torn down the front door and tromped mud across a stranger’s living room, only to hear the “patient” screaming in terror from their shower “Who iiiiiissss it??” – Don’t judge us. 

• Until you've gotten thoroughly lost, after dark, in your ambulance en route to a “trouble breathing” and been subjected to dispatch instructions that involve turning “right at the big Christmas tree and left again after the duck blind” – Don’t judge us.

Too often, our job actually is dramatic – at least when it isn't mind-numbingly boring. We have learned to go from zero to one hundred on the adrenaline scale in five seconds flat. Thankfully, we've also learned to laugh at ourselves, and we really don’t subscribe to the “hero” nonsense at all. Very simply, we love what we do – more than that, it’s kind of hard to get that hero-swagger right when your pants are falling down beneath your bunker gear.          

Frog Song

            Tonight is the night.

I step outside, barefoot on a lawn soft as grave dirt, to inhale the faintly piquant lemon of magnolias and hear the frog song. A thousand chirring, peeping, cheering voices that hold me enthrall, errands forgotten, while all the summers of my life shuttle past, swift and rolling as the downhill rush of a spring-fed creek.

Copyright Steve Polatnick

            “They’re here,” my mother, daughter, grandmother would say – day gentling into evening, a sky the color of tea roses and violets, and through it all, the song. “Summer’s coming.”

            Oh, summer. The languid air in the valley has a presence that is very nearly tangible, and is at least half made-up of memory. My mother played in this yard as a little girl in the years just following the Great Depression. Hair in a smooth Scout Finch bob, neat patches on her cotton dress, fingers blackberry-stained. The frog song brings the little girl back, and I can see her almost as plainly as I see my own children –

            Here in the same yard, beneath the magnolia, and trailing up the hill after lightning bugs, their shouts jubilant enough to puncture the soul, to suck the heart out.

            I think that the happiest moments in our lives are overlaid with the deepest sorrow, as though we need to experience the depth of one in order to feel the other. Time wounds us, always, simply by its forward motion.

            But anyway.

            Who on earth first applied the word “croak” to that sound? And could it be further from the truth?