A Thousand Naked Strangers - Kevin Hazzard Page 0,4
is medicine as modern anthropology. I stare at it for a bit, then circle back and add a question mark.
“All right,” Alan yells. “Let’s take a break.”
• • •
Our class begins in March and wraps in December, putting the education of an EMT—one of two people sent to save your life should the worst happen—at eight months. Our school amounts to nothing more than a certificate program and doesn’t count toward any college degree, associate or otherwise. That first night I buy a hardback textbook and its accompanying workbook, which neatly organize the course material into sections—medical emergencies (all of them), trauma (a rainbow of injuries both accidental and intentional), CPR certification, and a federal course on the toxic material sloshing around in the back of semi trucks.
Alan opens by explaining exactly what it is we, as EMTs, will do. We’ll bandage, we’ll splint, we’ll immobilize suspected spinal fractures. We’ll start IVs and give oxygen and ventilate anyone not breathing. Over the next few months, he says, we’ll learn the Heimlich and get CPR-certified. He’ll show us how to drive the ambulance, when to use the lights and sirens, how to navigate around other cars and—when they crash—how to cut them open with the Jaws of Life. Alan explains that an EMT is the junior member on the ambulance, the understudy, hands operating at the behest of the paramedic’s brain. Medics—as paramedics are known by everyone in the field—undergo an additional eighteen months of training. They dispense a long list of drugs for a dizzying array of complaints. They are trained to read twelve-lead EKGs, detailed tracings of a heart’s electrical activity. Should a patient stop breathing, the medic will intubate: the art of slipping a breathing tube through the vocal cords and into the trachea. It’s a medic who uses the infamous paddles to shock a heart back to life.
Alan says that either the EMT or the medic can drive, but if the patient is sick and needs critical treatment, the medic will be the one in the back rendering care. If you have a serious medical emergency, the medic will help you. If things are bad enough, and sometimes they are, the face of a medic may well be the last thing you see.
Every medic was once an EMT, and nearly every EMT will eventually go back to school and become a medic. Though lifelong EMTs exist, they’re a rare breed—by upgrading to paramedic, an EMT can increase his pay by as much as ten dollars an hour. Alan tells us that in some states, two EMTs will work on an ambulance—known as basic life support—but in Georgia, all 911 ambulances are advanced life support, meaning they carry at least one medic. For budgetary reasons, few services staff double-medic ambulances. But Alan assures us that we won’t merely be low-paid underlings. EMTs exist, he says, to serve as a safety switch. They function as roaming eyeballs, their minds uncluttered by drug doses and defibrillator settings; they can see the simple explanation for what seems complicated. “So pay attention,” he says. “This isn’t just your job. It’s also your legal obligation.”
Turns out, until we finish school, we’re still innocent bystanders, and should we harm someone in a rescue attempt, we’ll be protected from litigation by Good Samaritan laws. But once we finish and become official EMTs, we’ll not only be fair game in a civil suit, we’ll be required to save any and all lives in need of saving. Whether we’re on duty or not.
When he tells us to open our books to chapter one, the only sound is the soft whoosh of pages turning.
During our first break, I meet a guy named Brian who’s been working at a motorcycle repair shop. He’s bored and looking for something new, and being an EMT or a firefighter or, frankly, anything sounds better. Brian chain-smokes, and I crack jokes, and little by little we attract a couple of others until we’ve assembled what will be our group for the duration of the course. Aside from Brian and me, our gang includes Justin, a former high school baseball star; Randy, a thick, surly redneck bursting at the seams who burns off excess energy by racing on the dirt-track circuit; and Tim, a part-time mailman who doesn’t look a day over fourteen.
None of us has a particularly compelling reason to be here other than the vague and difficult-to-describe notion that perhaps, maybe, this will be a cool job. That’s probably not what Alan