On your graduation day:

France!!! You're graduated!!!! I'm so sorry I couldn't make it to your party or graduation. Riverside has sucked me into the vortex Sunday-Tuesday :(

However, your favorite paramedic has some words for you. :)

Life is hard. But it is beautiful. And fun. Keep your head up, pray constantly and laugh as much as possible.

You are embarking out in your own adventure now. Ask questions, learn from every experience. This is YOUR life. You are now an adult and the choices you make will come with consequences.

Stick to your guns but be willing to listen and hear someone out.

Always do the right thing, but never be afraid to apologize. It takes a strong person to admit that they are wrong.

It is ok to cry. It is ok to ask for help. We cannot live life alone, we weren't created to be 100% self-sufficient. :) Lean on friends and family when you need to. This will allow you to be strong for them when they need you.

Surround yourself with people who bring you up and hold you accountable.

Hold out for the man who treats you like you deserve to be treated (cause I will CUT whoever breaks your heart.......).

In all the stress and craziness that college will be (umm, Finals Week, anyone?), don't forget to take care of yourself. Get enough sleep, drink water and eat good things (but... also eat some junk food... it's part of the college experience...). Find something you love to do and make time for it.

You are smart, beautiful, kind and amazing. You have grown into a wonderful young woman. You are so loved and so worthy of the destiny God has for you. Walk with Him in it. When you think you can't go on or things get too tough to do on your own, remember He is walking with you and will carry you.

I love you!!!!

Defining Moments

(Note to my brother: If you don't want to read the whole thing, skip to the bottom... There's some things I wrote for you)

"They" say that character is who you are when no one is looking. I say character is the person you are when you don't have to be. It is when you see something on the street as you are walking by and something inside you says, intervene, do something. It is when you pull over to help someone push their car out of the intersection (safely, of course).  It is what you do when you don't have to that defines you.

These Defining Moments are full of our own character. In these moments, who we are is revealed not only to others, but to ourselves. We see where our loyalties lie. We see the things that are important. We see where our hearts are. It is in these moments that we see what really matters.

My brother recently had what I believe to be a defining moment. He wrote about it and posted it on his Facebook and I have posted it below. (Background info: my brother is 22, works for a moving company in Vista)

"I woke up around 930 today. I had the day off and I didn't think anything extra about getting some extra sleep for once, but my body woke me up.

Around 10 minutes after waking up, I get called in to work to help some guys who are nearby.

It's what I call a MUL: A messed-up local:

Some ridiculous amount of armoires and china cabinets, estimated way too low, and they tried to send 2 guys on it to start, instead of a recommended 4 since we are trying to go upstairs with some of the armoires.

That's all fine and dandy, situation normal, all fouled up. But after we began loading our MUL, I step out from the house and hear what sounds like a mixture of a diesel truck and a waterfall. I look around and see a geyser about 100ft in the air, which I first mistook for a water main break.

And then I see a car on a front lawn.

It turns out, as I walk toward the center of the street, that a car had hit a dumpster, then a fire hydrant, the source of Vista's most recent geyser, and then came to a crashing halt in a landscaping wall on someone's front yard.

No one else around me says anything other than the usual "Oh that sucks" or "Dude, look at that" type comments, and the four of us just set down our loads in the truck and then take a gander off the side and down the street.

I see the car and people outside of the car, talking to each other and looking at the damage, and I assume these people to be the driver and passenger or homeowner.

I still want to make sure they are all right, since the water was also on our way out from the job site, and I had my natural curiosities spurring me forward to ask if everyone was okay.

Turns out, the people near the car are bystanders, and the driver is still in the car, with airbags deployed, seat belt unbuckled, etc. I see that the lady who was with the driver initially after the crash was unsettled, and very nervous, so I offer to take over, because she had been trying to keep his attention and to keep him from moving around, but was unable to do so at the time.

I ask if anyone had called 9-1-1 yet, introduce myself to the driver, who is very clearly suffering from either a stroke/seizure and a concussion. He had his eyes open, but was having difficulty breathing (Likely from getting punched in the chest by a steering column, or the airbags even), and he also had glazed eyes, a blown-out right pupil, coughing up fluid from his lungs, bleeding from his tongue and cheek, and very scared look on his face.

I talk to him and tell him I want him to keep his head upright, because he was trying to move around and exit the vehicle, and it was clearly a bad idea in his state.

Meanwhile, the property owner returns from calling EMS/Police and thinks it's an opportune time to tell me it's the second time a car has hit his wall in two years, and how much it's gonna suck to rebuild it again.

I tell him "I don't care about your property damage right now", and nothing else. I don't have time for someone who is clearly more interested in some concrete bricks than the man barely maintaining consciousness after a crash.

I turn back to the driver, who had become very active, but still disoriented, seeming to try to turn the car off, or open the glove box, or check the center console, and tell him again that I don't want him moving his head or worrying about anything in the car. I tell him the car is safe, I'm here with him, and that the paramedics are on their way.

I continue to try to talk to him, to keep him focused on me and my face, and I hold his hand while he rests his head back on the headrest. Meanwhile, I hear sirens in the distance, and tell him the paramedics are only seconds away and that I just want him to stay still until they get here.

Before EMS arrived, he looked at me again, and all I thought to say is "My name is Aaron", and then he said the his only words to me, "Thank you".

---------------------------------------------

I don't know his name, I don't know if I'll ever see him again, I don't know if he even survived to the hospital, but his eyes and voice will be with me for a long time.

I needed to type this out, to get a handle on things and just meditate on it as a whole, because if yet another specific set of circumstances did not fall in to place, I would not have woken up naturally at 930. I would not have taken the call to work. I would not have been there at the scene, and I would not have been able to, hopefully, comfort the driver when he needed it."

I had a Defining Moment like this back in the day, read about it here. I, too, felt the need to write about it in order to digest it. Defining Moments bring along with them deep introspection. There is an aching need to sit down and really think about what happened and what you did or would do or would have done or should have done. And then you think about what you want to do. You decide what this moment means and you move on from there.

To my brother:

Aaron,

If you read this (and I'm tagging you in this on Facebook, so you BETTER read it...), I want you to know that not only is this a Defining Moment, but this is a Divine Moment. You were SUPPOSED to be there. There is something bigger than us out there and He has a plan for you. A plan bigger than being stuck at a dead end job, a plan bigger than just making it through the day.

You are destined to thrive. You are destined to do big things. You are destined to touch the lives of those around you.

Don't ever settle for a lackluster life. Even in the bad times, there is amazing beauty and great good. There is happiness and joy even when there is little else. While there is always room to improve, don't ever forget that there is a life worth living right now. I used to think "when will my life really start?" And then I realized that life started the day I was born and I had been wasting it while waiting for it to "really" start.

I have loved you since the day you were born. I walked around the house calling you "my baby". You drive me absolutely insane but if anyone tried to hurt you, I would come at them like a screaming female banshee going through a hot flash during menopause. I will love you no matter what you do (though I may not always like you...). I want the absolute best for you and I want you to want the best for yourself. I will never lie to you or tell you what you want to hear. I'm not your babysitter, I'm your big sister (er, um, your older sister... You're quite tall...) and I don't care if you like me, so long as you know that I love you.

Well.... I didn't expect this to turn into an open letter to my brother. :)

My challenge to you (to anyone who is reading this),  take note of your Defining Moments. Pay attention to the Divine Moments. Know that you are exactly where you are supposed to be, even if where you are sucks monkey balls. Take responsibility for your actions, accept the consequences, make changes if you need to. There is joy in life even when everything is falling apart. You just have to choose to look for it.

Open letter from Kelly Grayson

I didn't write this, but I read it and fell in love with it! I saw it in a post by EMT/Paramedic on Facebook.

 "Recently, I was asked by a colleague to write an introduction letter for her EMT class. I had read David Givot's excellent commencement speech for paramedic graduates, and I thought long and hard about what I wish someone had said to me on my first day of EMT class, before I even embarked on this career path. This is my answer.

Welcome to the profession whose entry-level practitioners — you, in a few months — rank 4th from the bottom in the Bureau of Labor Statistics salary rankings. The only people paid less than you are pre-school teachers, dishwashers and meatpackers. The guy riding on the back of the garbage truck, or holding a sign at a highway construction zone, makes more money than your EMT instructor. Likely, a lot more.

And none of those people are required to make life-or-death decisions. You will.

It is a profession where the line-of-duty death rate is comparable to firefighters and police officers. For those of you who aspire to flight paramedic status, that particular niche is by far the most dangerous profession in America — ahead of loggers, miners, and Alaska crab fisherman.

It is a profession whose divorce, suicide and substance abuse rates soar far higher than the general population. The average career expectancy of an EMT is five years.

Five years.

Some of you will go on to jobs in nursing or other healthcare fields. Those of you that don't move on to nursing or PA school will leave EMS with a career-ending back injury, or leave EMS healthy but not whole; jaded and cynical, your idealism burned away in the furnace-like reality of our profession, your faith in the innate goodness of man gone like so much ash and smoke up the chimney.

You'll be disrespected
You will be disrespected by patients and bystanders who don't know any better, and belittled by doctors and nurses who should. And many of you will endure the abuse for free labor, donating your services as volunteers.

So why do I tell you this? Well, they call it informed consent, a concept you'll learn about in the first few chapters of that EMT textbook you're carrying. Before you agree to the abuse you're about to suffer, it's only fair that you know what you're getting into.

And it's not what you think.

You will sift through broken glass and twisted metal, wade through urine and feces and vomit, weather heaping torrents of verbal abuse from the people you're trying to help, all for the prospect of a few dollars on payday, and perhaps…just perhaps…a show of gratitude now and again.

I'm here to tell you that what you've been promised is a lie, if only a little white one. When you're green and idealistic, the romance and thrill of EMS is powerful. All of us were adrenaline junkies at some point. Plus, there's a decent chance it might even get you laid. What's not to like?

You won't save that many lives
But you will soon discover the hidden truth, the one that drives most people out of our profession:

We don't save that many lives.

Lifesaving may be what we train for, but the opportunity to actually save someone comes all too rarely, and when it does present itself, the outcome depends more upon luck and timing than our skills. In my career, I've had my share of code saves. Some of them even made it out of the hospital alive. Others hung on just long enough for their families to tell them goodbye. I've made the critical diagnosis, gotten the tough airway, turned around the crashing asthmatic, and stabilized the shocky gangbanger with multiple unnatural holes in his person. I've needled chests, paced, defibrillated, and cardioverted, and given countless drugs.

But, other than a handful of exceptions, I can't state with any certainty that my actions were the difference between life and death. In that handful of exceptions, all but one or two were saved simply by applying the techniques that any John Q. Citizen with a basic first aid course could have done. Ask your instructor if you don't believe it's true. They'll tell you the same thing.

The reality of the profession
The reality of your profession isn't exciting rescues and cardiac arrest resuscitations twice a shift. Your reality will be dialysis transfers and people who can't poop. It will be toothaches at 3:00 am, and you'll have to maneuver your stretcher around five parked cars to get to the front door, and weave your way through five able-bodied drivers to get to the patient with a complaint so minor you can't believe they called 911 for it.

So why, if you're not going to save all that many lives, should you even bother?

You should bother because EMS is a calling. Even when you leave EMS, it never really leaves you. It's what Henry David Thoreau meant when he said, "Do what you love. Know your own bone; gnaw at it, bury it, unearth it, and gnaw it still."

You should bother because, even if we're not saving lives, what we do matters. It matters in ways unnoticed by us, to people you may not even remember tomorrow.

You should bother, because EMTs are privileged to play in life's great game. Too many unlucky people watch the action thunder by, stuck at a desk, or watching it on television at home.

You should bother, because it's the little things that matter. Most of your patients are ignorant of your skills. Few of them understand the technology you wielded so expertly. But they'll remember the smile you gave them, or the way you tucked the blanket in to ward away winter's chill, or the way you stood in the rain, getting drenched as you held the umbrella over them as your partner loaded them in the rig. They'll remember calm competence, and gentle speech.

They'll remember the joke you made to lighten the tension. They'll remember those things and more, and they'll remember your face long after you've forgotten theirs.

You'll be remembered
They'll remember you because, even though they were just another call to you, you were a major player in a defining event in their lives. They'll come up to you, years after the fact, and say, "I remember you. You take care of me when I had my heart attack."

And likely all you did was apply oxygen and take them to the hospital. Maybe you helped them with another dose of nitro or encouraged them to take an aspirin — really nothing they couldn't have done themselves. But you're the one they remembered, and you're the one they thanked.

You should bother, because in the tapestry of human existence, you get to contribute your own unique stitch. You get to make your mark in ways that cannot be quantified on a spreadsheet or a profit and loss statement. Not everyone gets to touch the life of another, but EMTs do.

You should bother, because when people are at their most vulnerable, they will invite you into their homes and tell you things they won't even tell their priest. And they'll expect you to make it better somehow. I'm not sure you understand now how profound an honor that is, but hopefully one day you will.

The question is, can you be worthy of that honor?

If you think so, then welcome to EMS. Do us proud.

-Kelly Grayson"