Hey y'all! I'm Arabella from Maryland. I am currently enrolled in an EMT-B program with a vollie fire department in Eastern Shore MD. My class and I are at chapt. 28 in the pre-hospital emergency care 10th edition (not sure what everyone else learns from). We've basically finally moved from our A&P, legal/ethical, and medical assessment studies. We are now entering trauma assessment and care. We are also finally halfway through.
I did have some questions about starting out, if that hopefully doesn't over extend my greeting?
Q: If you could give any advice to an EMT student, what would it be? With riding in the ambulance doing my patient contacts (required a certain number of contacts to pass) I hear a lot of different things from different crews from things that make me second think like "this profession is the kind that chews up and spits out the new and isn't the best thing for someone new" to great advice like things from keeping yourself from burning or techniques to make things easier than what the textbook says.
Q: How many young EMT's do you really know? I recently turned 18, I have retarded growth, and pretty soft spoken. In other words I look about 16 in person :-/ ... during my medical contacts I have a good amount of patients that ask for my age and obviously are all surprised in my answer and don't really believe I am an EMT student. Which this sort of puts me down because it makes me a little more nervous (which I am pretty nervous to start out with) because I feel as if the patient doesn't trust and/or have faith in me. Once I graduate and I am the only one in the back of the ambulance without my FTO there I don't know how patients will react.
Q: Going back to the nervousness, do you still get nervous? If not, did it just fade? Or did you find a way around it? I feel as being nervous sort of effects my performance and I can't effectively work as great as I picture in my mind. This is a question I haven't shared with my FTO or classroom instructors yet. I feel as if it might make me out to look weak and incompetent to preform the duties of an EMT.
Anyways thanks for your time