What would you bet your life on?
In 1996 I took a job about 40 minutes south of San Jose, California with a small mom-and-pop ambulance company. The service was named after the owner and had been serving a mostly rural area of northern California for a couple of decades before I arrived in town. They were, without a doubt, the worst ambulance company I ever served under.
The owner ran the place like a dictator. I started work the day after my interview on a dirty ambulance wearing an old uniform that was two sizes too large. My partner was the grumpy silent type. The station conditions were deplorable and the policies and procedures were down-right unethical. (As an example, the owner would frequently order crews to respond to scenes, after they had been canceled enroute, so that they could gather billing information from the caller.)
I worked at the service for about three weeks, then I left. I knew that nothing about that service matched with who I was as a paramedic and nothing I could do would ever change the two decades of tradition and old guard thinking that had brought them to where they were. Unlike my uniforms previous owner, I washed my threadbare shirt before I handed it back in. Then I hit the road and I didn’t look back.
I could have wasted years in that joint.
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In Greek tragedies, the hero typically displays some form of hamarita, also known as a “tragic flaw.” Hamlet was brooding, Othello was jealous, Macbeth was ambitious. For the most part, it is their tragic flaw that is usually the key to their undoing. When the hero ultimately falls, they tend to sow the seeds of their own demise with their respective tragic flaws.
People often use the word hero when they refer to EMS caregivers. EMT’s, paramedics, firefighters, we all get the hero moniker pinned on us from time to time. I cringe at the term. Most of us are uncomfortable with it to different degrees. And, if there is any truth to our hero title, it is certainly closer to the heroes of Greek tragedy that the comic book heroes we grew up with.
In other words, we all have our tragic flaws. Yes, all of us.
Here are eight of the most common tragic flaws of the EMS hero persona. I have, at one time or another in my career, embodied each and every one of these flaws to one degree or another. I’ve lived each one of them. I would guess that most of us do.
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OK, I can’t keep this to myself any longer. It’s time for the big
announcement. With the final draft still in the mail from my editorial team and the final design still lacking a few details, it would probably be best to just keep this under wraps for a few more weeks, but I can’t wait.
My first E-book is scheduled for release on January 21st, one week from today. The e-book will be free and it will be available right here at The Spot.
The Book is called The Non-Conformists Guide to EMS Success. This book is the culmination of two decades of EMS experiences, mistakes, failures, trials, and errors that lead to my ultimate success. My goal was to write something that would be useful to EMTs at any stage in their career. And I didn’t hold anything back. This is my road map to finding true success and fulfilment in EMS work.
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Sure, this site isall about being a better EMT, but perhaps you’ve asked yourself, “Why?” OK, granted, it was probably one of your more cynical moments. Perhaps you had a bad day, a couple of frustrating calls or a less than optimal interaction with a patient, your partner, another agency, your boss … or
perhaps all of the above.
Then you went out and threw down your stethoscope. Or maybe you didn’t throw it down because you remembered it was a Littmann and a gift from your aunt, but you raised it over your head and thought about it. And while that stethoscope dangled over your head in your clenched fist you thought, “Why? Why do I work so hard to try to be better at a job that pays so little and offers so little in return?”
“Why?”
We’ve all had these moments. Moments when we contemplated, “Why don’t I just phone it in? The bad EMT’s make the same amount of money as the good ones. I clearly already meet the minimum standard. Nobody’s really pushing me to be any better. Nobody seems to recognize my growth or effort. So why do it?”
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Circus elephants present a containment problem. It’s hard to keep a big elephant cage around wherever you go. So when baby circus elephants are trained, they are staked down to a pole with a chain. The young elephants pull and struggle against the chain for a while and then learn the limitations of the situation.
Soon the elephant can be staked down with a wooden stick. The elephant could easily break the confinement but it doesn’t try. It’s already learned what it can and can’t do. To add further insult to the awesome, unrecognized power of the beast, by adulthood many of the elephants can be training to pull up their own stake and move it on command and then remain in the spot that they re-staked themselves too.
I think about the circus elephant staking itself down often. Mostly when I hear my colleagues and friends talk about the obstacles that prevent them from recognizing their goals. You know what I’m talking about. All that stuff we’re waiting for before we can start really moving toward our vision for our life.
When I look at the awesome human potential that we carry around within us and then I consider the little, insignificant things we chose to see as barriers, I think about the elephant.
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From Your Computer
As you might imagine, I’m a big fan of E-learning. I also have a soft spot for the social media craze. But there are still a few things that you just can’t learn staring at a computer screen. OK, there are a LOT of things you can’t learn staring at a computer screen. Here are ten:
1.) You can’t learn pattern recognition.
If you’ve ever wondered about how experienced EMTs and medics can figure out exactly what’s wrong with the patient two steps inside the front door, it’s not magic. It’s pattern recognition. When you’ve seen what CHF looks like a hundred times, you can pick out the pattern almost instantaneously. Watch a hundred people have cardiac chest pain and you’ll be able to see it from across the room. But it doesn’t matter how many times you read those chapters in your books. You need to see it.
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We do our job, and while we do our job we think about how we do our job.
And we certainly decide what we think about our job.
But we don’t often think about how we think about or job?
Do you ever think about the way you think about your job?
I think it’s important.
What do you think?
Still struggling with the good EMT thing. I’m glad to be at your service. Grab a pen and answer these
questions for yourself.
- What’s your internal bias toward dealing with patients and their challenges? When patients have needs that don’t meet with your expectations how do you tend to react? Could you do that better? How?
- What’s it like to be your partner? How do people feel about you after they’ve run calls with you? Is that by your design?
- How do you handle it when you fail? When you have a bad call or things don’t go right? Are you willing to be fallible before your peers and own your mistakes? If you really felt that you were good at what you do, what would be the ideal way to address these inevitable errors?
- What is your tolerance for learning. Are you still in an active learning process or have you stagnated in your growth since you entered the field. What did you learn today?
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I’m blessed with two kids. They are amazing. My kids changed my whole perspective on the world. They re-framed my purpose. It’s wonderful, the way a few minutes with your kids can put an entire bad day in perspective. They also force you to evaluate some of your own behaviors. (If you’re lucky.)
Here are a few of the more valuable lessons I’ve learned from my kids.
1.) Test Your Limits.
Kids know this instinctively. The moment you create a boundary they begin testing it. There is no running in this area. How fast is running? Can we just walk really fast? What about jogging? It’s like they just instinctively know that life is more fun when you’re testing the limits.
Sure there are boundaries that we all have to live within but when was the last time you gave them a little test or maybe tried to actively redefine them? “OK, are you saying that I can’t attend this training or that you’re not willing to pay for me to attend this training? So are you saying we can’t use the conference room for an EMS journal club or we can’t use it during business hours?”
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Did you see that? That’s what I’m talking about.
Recently I took a bit of flack here for a suggestion I made. A New Jersey volunteer squad was having their funding cut by the governor and there was a lot of online press with the squad members explaining how devastating this would be to the community and how essential their service was to the sick and injured.
I made two observations:
1.) If you are certain that your service is essential, the best was to make your point is to call the governors bluff. Start shutting the doors on certain days. … Stop providing the service.
2.) If the community feels your service is essential they will rally around you. No need to shout your own praises, they wil do it for you.
I took some e-mail heat from New Jersey volunteers explaining that the public can’t be trusted to understand what’s truly good for them. The idea of not responding to an emergency was reportedly reprehensible and the fear that the community wouldn’t understand what they had lost until it was to late was evident.
I disagreed. I still disagree. And to further stand by my claim, I give you The Pinnup Boys of Atlantic Shores.
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