I sit in my lazy chair in the apartment that my wife and I had worked for. I am a skilled paramedic for the city of New York. I deal with the sick and injured people of the city. Looking back at the last ten years they have not been easy but if nothing else they have been worth it. From the time I took my first ride in that ambulance and saw how much those people do for you I knew I wanted to become one. There is a mystique about them! They do there job and make you feel so comfortable and never let the look of fear or terror come across their faces. I don’t believe that I could be in a job were I do anything more helpful. Besides it never hurts to be given a license to drive excessively fast.
When I got out of high school I had a couple of months to goof around and just go hang out with my friends. We went on several road trips and had a lot of fun but that soon came to a end, for the majority of us it was the time for the armed forces. I was the only one to go NAVY but they were the only ones who would be able to give me a great head start toward my ultimate goal to become a paramedic. My first two years were absolute hell! For the first 6 months I was put threw what all sailors have to p
This is a very physically demanding job. You never know when or where you may be called upon to carry or move a patient. Yes you do have a partner to help but what if there are multiple patients? Car accidents are a great example, many times the paramedics will be the first on the scene and you may be called upon to pull a person out. So to prepare for just about any physical situation I may come across I constantly go to the gym and work out. There is no set part of the body that is used more then another so I am forced to work the whole body. Now physical is not the only mental is too. You see blood, guts and horror on a daily basis not to mention some of the sites you see. Many times you will get called to go pick up a person and when you get there and you see the house they have been living in it’s a wonder that they made it as long as they had. One of the hardest things is when you know that your going to loose somebody right there in the ambulance. That is the hardest! Sometimes the only thing you can do is give the person some comfort so they don’t go alone. When you see the family of the person say good bye it is a heart breaker too.
When I finally decided that what I wanted to do was become a paramedic I started by doing a several ride alongs as they are mandatory. During this time I was a curtsie clerk at a local super market. The ride alongs are another way of thinning out the group that can handle it and those who can not. When I finished the ride alongs I went to several medical-training classes. To become a full time paramedic you must attain a minimum of a level three medicine card which more or less means you have to have the ability to give CPR, take vitals and prescribe medication, witch you need a license, along with various other medical aid. Many misconceptions about being a EMT is that you must be a doctor, which you do not. Driving is a major part, you need to have a standard drivers license some divisions actually require a higher level license. Some other things that are expected of you is to prepare and get the medical back ground of the patient so that when they get where they need to go the physician there is able to give the person what is needed as soon as possible. The ambulance is not designed to be a hospital but it is more to be a placed designed to keep the person alive until they can be helped by hospital.