Reflections on being a college EMT
Isabel Wood
By the time I returned to campus for my senior year of college, after the worst of the pandemic had subsided, I had forgotten much of my EMT training. As I ascended the campus hills to begin my first shift after a nearly two-year hiatus, the navy cotton tee shirt that identified me as “EMS” in large block letters chaffed against my arms and neck, this ill-fitting uniform another reminder that much had changed. Sweat began to accumulate under my shirt and I longed for an end to the summer’s heat and humidity, and for the spectacular New England fall that I knew would soon arrive. I entered the dining hall and scanned the tables for a student wearing the same uniform as I, finally finding her in the cavernous back room occupied mainly by the hegemonic student-athlete population. “I don’t think we’ve met before,” the sophomore cheerfully shouted at me over the clamor of the 8 pm dinner rush. She passed me the radio and medic bag and I explained that I had been living off-campus for the last two years. After re-familiarizing myself with the dial on the radio - station 1 for monitoring incoming calls, station 2 for communication with the police station as well as the two other students on call with me for the next 12 hours - I headed back to my senior dorm, the temperature appreciably cooler as the sun had dipped below the horizon.
As first-year students, those of us joining the student-run emergency medical services had stayed behind during winter break. I had only been in college for four months then, but I missed the friends I had made in that short time, none of them interested in the five-week course composed almost exclusively of pre-med hopefuls. It snowed regularly, and with so few students around to tread paths in the large banks or necessitate its removal, my trip down the hill from my dorm to the building that housed our training grew more hazardous each day. We learned about airway management, bleeding control, anaphylaxis, alcohol poisoning, ankle sprains and drowning, eagerly strapping each other into backboards and practicing compressions on practice dummies. In the course’s final days, other students began returning to campus, the once pristine snow quickly muddied by their footsteps and the gradually warming temperatures.
Despite my initial concerns, this EMT training came back to me quickly upon returning to campus for my senior year. It also helped that my main responsibility was transcribing the events of the calls to which we responded, rather than the more directly clinical roles of the EMTs holding the ranks both below and above mine. While I assumed that I would quickly certify into the final rank of our organization upon returning to campus, I nonetheless found myself enjoying the role of scribe. As the semester went on my documentation skills improved as I differentiated between subjective and objective findings, noted important context and excluded the superfluous, asking patients questions that helped my team better select the appropriate medical interventions.
The firework show had just started when I was dispatched to my first call of the evening. It was the anniversary of the college’s founding, and no expense was spared in commemorating the occasion. The excitement of students still happy to be reunited with each other, not yet worn down by the stresses of the protracted and dark winter term, reverberated in the buoyant mid-October air. My friends had been celebrating since the afternoon sun had reached an acceptable height, and their protestations that I should stay enveloped me in a warm embrace as I set off for the location indicated by dispatch. We were being called to the first-year quad, so I settled into a comfortable jog up the familiar hills, aware that I would probably be the last from my team to arrive.
I finally made it to the room, and in my clumsy shrugging-off of my medic bag and rummaging through its contents, failed to notice the somber tone of the scene. What was conveyed over the radio as an accidental injury were actually many wounds self-inflicted by a first-year student. “Their heart rate is 70,” the youngest member of our team directed at me, tactfully reminding me of the task at hand. I had found my writing supplies but suddenly felt that my presence in the room was inappropriate, that to record any of the events unfolding before me would be a profound invasion of privacy. I made my way deeper into the scene, past a series of individuals perfectly performing their roles, from distraught friend to stoic professional. Finally, I reached the patient and retrieved their ID card. By the time I hastily scrawled their name and birthday into my clipboard, it was time to leave.
I solidified my commitment to medical school a few months later by studying for and taking the MCAT over winter break. By the time I returned to campus for my final semester of college, I eagerly certified into the highest rank of our EMS organization. I hoped that placing myself more centrally in the clinical management of future patients would help me feel less voyeuristic and more helpful. As the weather warmed and my classmates and I hurtled closer to graduation, the few calls I responded to were of the rolled-ankle or alcohol-poisoning variety. Still, I hoped that I would be ready the next time I met someone on the worst day of their life.
Isabel is a first-year medical student who studied English and Neuroscience at Amherst College. She enjoys reading and writing and thinking about medicine from a humanities perspective.
