firetender

It's a moment-to-moment thing. Much of the discomfort you describe is about the worry of what might be, what might not be, what is ultimately right and wrong and who's looking. It's mostly about SELF-consciousness. There's another place to be. It is a muscle that you can strengthen, too. By keeping your total focus on the task at hand, placing ALL your attention on your patient and ELEMENTS of the scene as they affect your relationship with your patient, you can pick and choose what you must respond to. I hear you saying you feel like you have to respond to EVERYTHING. You don't. You only have to focus.

I have to chime in with a contrary view that is also supportive. Emergency Medical Services is a highly specific series of actions that are taken, according to the illness or injury, to intervene and prevent further injury and death. As much as I agree that in order to further the profession we must expand our education, I still hold to let's stick to the basics. Personally, I would snooze through your presentation (no offense meant) primarily because it's going to take you an awful long time to build all all the theories it took in chemistry to get to the point where it was decided that administering Glucose to a diabetic can make an unconscious patient conscious. My experience in the field was that rather than getting deeper with theory, I got much more focused on action. The less time I spent in my head, the more room I had for my patient. Rather than Chemistry being emphasized, I would prefer connection, because that's what 80% of our patients need most. If you want to include Quantum Theory, then, since it shows in essence (if you want to take it deep enough) that we create our own reality, then the intervention of the medic would be holding your patient's hand and saying, "Don't think that!" Funny how that goes right back to connection, isn't it? AND I think that the work you do can be pivotal in prompting a lot of medics to go deeper into medicine. Understanding the processes of which you and your patient are a part is important and can help you to reduce future pain and suffering for the patient. But action always comes first.

...and here's another wheelbarrow of them, along with thanks for the thread! You have to look at this in perspective. In the 1950's, in Brooklyn, N.Y. which was beginning to really feel the effects of a changing society and increasingly more crowded conditions, people were dying left and right for no damn reason! Excuse me, there was a reason; nobody knew how to do anything to stop or delay the downhill slide into death. Death seemed to have come much more easily back then, a scant 50 years ago! I lost a Grammar School classmate to a choking incident. In my world, car accidents were usually fatal! Many of us were aware of this lack. Coming across the scene of an accident, injury or acute medical condition was a complete nightmare. Not only was there no one trained on the scene to intervene, but in most cases there wasn't even anyone to CALL! So let's now go to the late 1960's and the advent of American National Red Cross offering basic medical intervention skills to the public. All of a sudden, a few of us could do something! Now what this meant to MOST of us who had the privilege of being trained to intervene, it was completely unthinkable that we would NOT respond if in the vicinity of an emergency! We were trained to AID! How more simple could it be? The value of having someone on the scene that could actually help, if you can imagine this, was APPRECIATED by the people surrounding the stricken one! (Today, the way it boils down, someone who is stricken is expected to be WHISKED away from the scene of the disaster and removed quickly from the sight of the passerby.) On one hand, it's wonderful that there are so many out there who CAN take action. So many, in fact, that a whole lot of us can duck out and not get involved at all! Being able to intervene in an emergency was once a precious gift, well-respected, and a sacred trust. Today, it's taken for granted, and people on both sides of the fence suffer for it.

My intention was to just say "Hi!", introduce myself and lurk but, of course, Death caught my eye and I had to jump in! When I was a kid, I had what I called the "Deathfear". For a couple of years, I could barely sleep at night, obsessing until exhaustion at the thought of all of this ending! But then, one day I stopped, turned and looked death in the face. I realized that when i die, I'd be going back to where I came from in the first place. I had been there a whole lot longer than I have been or will be here, and that didn't seem to hurt me none, so going back there is nothing to fear! No kidding; grasping this simple concept saved me! And then, I became a medic. In a nutshell, what I learned is that life in NOT the body, it RESIDES IN the body. The implication is that the human body is a vehicle that happens to go through a birth, growth, deterioration cycle and is designed to "carry" CONSCIOUSNESS ITSELF! which skips from one life form to another. Don't you sometimes feel like a mechanism that carries around this consciousness thing somewhere at the center of your skull and you're looking out an odd window? (Clinically, a survey was done asking people to describe "where" they experienced their consciousness and their response corresponded -- as above -- to the precise location of the Pineal gland!). Doesn't your consciousness of YOU "feel" essentially the same as it did when you were a kid? You're the same old guy/gal you've always been! That's such an amazing thing I often wonder if that just doesn't keep body-skipping, dragging an experience of "me" along with it. Don't know about you, but I find comfort in the Great Mystery.

Aloha from Maui! I've been out of the field since the mid-1980's. I started in a hearse in 1973, graduated a FL pilot paramedic program in 1976, worked Santa Barbara County EMS until, coincidentally, not too long after I helped usher in the California Paramedics Association, the first AFL-CIO affiliation with a professional EMS organization. I burned out on the politics, not the work. My experience in EMS thrust me into a lifelong exploration of the healing arts. It has been the foundation of a career including Alternative Medicine, Human Potential Movement, Counseling, living/working with a Native American medicine family and 30 years in performance arts, once the medicine of the common people. Throughout, I have been a writer and rabble-rouser and often ask too many questions. But, in 2005, I went back to my roots and got involved in an on-line forum for medics. I (and even some others!) have found my experience before, during and after my stint in EMS has application today. So I've been lending a hand where I can and in the process learning and thinking more about what it is EMT's/paramedics REALLY do. Based on those five years of exploration I fine-tuned and then published a book I've been crafting for about 15 years! I'll say more later, but for now I just wanted you to know I'll be lurking for a bit until I get a feel for how I might contribute to this particular site.