By Robert Kirby
The Salt Lake Tribune
Copyright 2007 The Salt Lake Tribune
All Rights Reserved
SALT LAKE CITY — I drove down to St. George last week to speak at the annual banquet of the Utah Association of Emergency Medical Technicians. The event was held outside in a park. It was a billion degrees in the shade.
Emergency medical technicians - or EMTs - are the volunteers who operate the ambulances in many Utah communities. They keep injured people alive until they can get them to the hospital for billing purposes.
Since EMTs are highly trained, and I am a moron, I figure the UAEMT only invited me because they hoped I would pass out in the heat and they could then use me as a training dummy.
It would not be the first time. I have not fully trusted EMTs since I was a cop and a gang of them cut my pants off in the middle of Main Street.
They claimed to have had cause. I suspect they were scissor-happy. We’ll never know for sure because I was unconscious from a traffic accident. I woke up on a gurney wearing a gun belt, boots and not much else.
But you can probably trust them. It’s unlikely you ever paged them out of bed in the middle of the night to resuscitate a horse hit by a train. They don’t think that’s very funny, even on April Fools’ Day.
For years I had a front-row seat on ambulance calls. I watched EMTs pound and yell the life back into people who had been shot, stabbed, burned, run over, blown up and stroked out.
Back then, when the call went out for an ambulance, volunteers dropped what they were doing and came running to the rescue.
Housewives, mechanics, grocers, insurance reps, we never knew who would show up. We only knew that they had spent a lot of time training to fix the mundane and the truly bizarre.
You name it and I’ve probably seen an EMT try to fix it. Snake bites, ladder falls, heart attacks, electrocutions - heck, I saw them get a pollywog out of a kid’s nose once.
The most memorable moment was when they brought a 2-year-old back to life after he was fished out of a creek six blocks from his house.
Although it’s been years since I’ve called out an ambulance, I still see people who are alive today only because of EMTs. More than 20 years ago, I watched a teenage girl nearly bleed out from toxic shock. EMTs kept her alive. I saw her last week at the store with her grandkid.
If you have a volunteer ambulance in your town, take a minute and thank the people who run it. Get to know them before they cut off your pants.