Back In The Day

A Guest Post By: Chris Framstead

If you’ve worked in EMS anywhere near the Denver Metro area in the last 20 years you’re probably going to really like today’s offering by EMT Spot guest author Chris Framstead. I’ve had the pleasure of knowing Chris for over a decade now and I’ve hounded him to put his fingers to the keys for The Spot. Chris is an uncomparable teacher and an insatiable student of all things EMS. Is his twenty year career he has been an EMT, a paramedic,  a firefighter, an EMS administrator, a chemical weapons and explosives specialist and a teacher at various colleges around the nation.

Today Chris is the International Training Coordinator for the famed Texas Engineering Extension Services, the worlds largest emergency responder training facility and a division of Texas A+M. If you happen to be one of the 80,000 responders who pass through the facility for one training or another, you might run in to Chris. Buy him a cup of coffee and ask how things were … back in the day.

Back in the Day

I’ve been in EMS and fire service for twenty years now, and have been a certified EMS provider for the past eighteen years. Over this time (which is not all that long compared to my other friends in the Denver system who have been playing the game a lot longer), I have seen a lot of change. Lately I’ve heard, what feels like, a lot of brand spanking new, right off the lot new Paramedics, and EMT-Basics, standing outside the EMS classroom, or outside the volunteer fire station, talking about “back in the day”. I have to laugh, not to belittle their stories, but because “back in the day” to a twenty year old EMT-Basic, was….well…..2007. So my mind started racing and memories started flowing, as I thought back to my wonderful career and the “back in the day” memories I have.

So as I was sitting in my kitchen this morning drinking my first (of many) cups of coffee….and I thought…what a cool article….”back in the day”. I am certain if I presented this article title to any one of my friends who have been around the Denver system for as long, or longer than myself, they we could easily write a book about “back in the day”. I simply had my memories flowing this morning and wanted to share them with you readers, in hopes of striking up your memories of “back in the day”.

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Wrong Medicine

Some of the stacks of trip reports were nearing four feet high and they filled the musty closet. Dividing them up, we started sorting through them in earnest. The dates indicated that the calls had been run between 1972 and 1978. Most of the narratives were as brief as the treatment lists.

Hall Ambulance’s station one was an older house in an early residential area of Bakersfield, California. It had been, at one time, the residence of the company’s owner, Harvey Hall. In the early days of the ambulance service, Harvey had both lived in the home and run his fledgling ambulance service out of it. 

One of the crews stationed at the home had gone digging in the dusty storage closets and struck EMS history gold. Stacks and stacks of old trip reports from the Mother, Jugs and Speed days of EMS. That’s where we found it. A call run by our medical director back in his days as a paramedic for the service. A cardiac arrest, no less. The total list of treatments given; CPR, BVM, Epinephrine 1mg, Sodium Bicarbonate 2 amps.

The year was 1991. We found this hilarious. We were still in our ACLS infancy. There was no CPR first or AEDs or Amiodarone. Nobody had heard of capnography and there was nothing therapeutic about hypothermia. Yet we felt very advanced looking at our medical directors run report. The massive Sodium Bicarbonate doses of the seventies had long since gone away. 

More than happy to reminisce about the call, our doc read the report with a bemused sort of faraway look and announced, “I remember this guy.” He told us the story of the overweight, mid-sixties male who had collapsed in the parking lot across from the hospital. And then he made an observation that has stuck with me my whole career.

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