bcems107

WOW, Didn't realize there was such a pissing match between Fire service and EMS service on here. I guess coming from a Fire based system, we are all brothers and sisters. And for the IDIOT that says the statement about not rat'n our your fellow worker. I mean serious show your maturity here. WE are here to serve and protect. Apparently you are in it for YOUR GLORY and YOUR GLORY alone. YOU are a sad sad individual.

I often wondered why pulling an ambulance out of service to do a stand by for an alarm or for an odor investigation was important. Well, it all came very clear why it is important to have one on scene with fire. We were call to the "BS" odor investigation. A homeless guy while walking by a buidling in our down town district, stumbled up to a fire station and said there was a odd odor down the street. SO the guys roll out and told the EMS to remain at the station they were going to check a smell reported by a "BUM". As the engine pulled up in front of the building, the Captain and rookie FF jumped off the truck, go and attempt to breech the door, upon breeching the door a huge cloud of Anhydrous Ammonia came out over taking the crew. Chemical burns to Face and Upper airway. The rookie was on a VENT for 3 weeks the captain for 1.5 weeks. The sad thing was why the were responding to that, the ambulance out of their station was sent to Hospital for an EMERGENCY TRANSFER, and they had to wait 15 minutes for another Unit to come across town. I know we all have rare occassions where things go wrong. As much as we complain about having to get up and go with the fire or respond to what we call in EMS a BS call. Just remember, its never a BS call, you are there backing your fellow brothers and sisters. I would much rather set and not be needed than to be 10 minutes behind the ball because "WE" didn't want to run the BS odor investigation. So its 15 to 20 minutes out of our shift. We are paid to be there some for 12 hours and others for 24. Its part of the job we CHOSE to do. Protection and serving our communities. Some times we forget the real reason why we are here doing what we do. WE all have realized that it takes a SPECIAL person to do what we do. NOT everyone is cut out for this service. As for those that are, we need to remember there is NO I in team. We are in this together. We all want to go home at 7 to our families, not having our families come to us in the ER or morgue. Just remember we all have been there, we all have been pissed because we got woken up at 2 in the morning for that BS call. But hey we are on the clock that is our job. No one MADE YOU go into this career. As for the 2 guys that where hurt in the above scenerio, they were family, and it really hit home.