Beep Beep Beep Beep, “Attention Department 9 and 9 4 personnel, you are responding to an unknown medical call at 20 Killingworth Turnpike. Ambulance duty crew respond to headquarters.”
As a young child, when I was watching cartoons in my family room, I would frequently hear my father’s pager sound off alerting him to an emergency call in our small town. He would grab his orange trauma bag and blue light and head off to the local fire department. I would listen intently as my father and his crew raced to the scene to provide medical care that was necessary to save the patient’s life. He would finally return home after a few calls a night. I would sit straight up in my bed as I heard the garage door open from below my room wondering what kinds of emergencies he attended.
“Nicole, tonight’s accident should never have happened. When you grow up, would you promise me to never get in a car with someone who has been drinking? Although the driver didn’t die, he changed the future of a little girl forever.” When I got older, my father realized I wasn’t going to get nightmares about what calls he responds to. He would tell me about drug overdoses, heart attacks, and trauma from car accidents. Many were gory and bloody. Others were gross, and on many occasions, some were quite minor. Talking to my father about medical calls and hospitals fascinated me. To satisfy my curiosity about these calls, I engaged myself in the ER and medical shows at a young age.
One show in particular caught my interest; it was Untold Stories of the ER. This show addressed the lives of ER doctors and what they experienced in their jobs. These stories ranged from prison inmates swallowing batteries to teenagers facing death after a baseball game. Throughout the years, I watched this show because it fascinated me, but one night a doctor recounted a little girl around the age of three falling down a hill and getting caught in a cactus. Although this incident was not that much different from the other stories on the show in later years, I kept wondering what happened the scared little girl with thousands of cactus spikes in her body. Her frightened face was engraved in my mind. All I wanted was to comfort her and help her even though I knew I could not. This one little girl made me realize how much I wanted to help people when I grew up, especially children.
Throughout my life I always knew I wanted to work in the emergency room. When I had throat surgery at a young age I was frightened and confused about what was going on at the time. The nurses and medical professionals were rushing around in the operating room getting me ready for surgery, while I was trembling on the table wanting my parents to be there to comfort me. I now think of that cold unfamiliar operating room and how terrified I was, realizing that every child needs someone by their side. After I receive training, I hope to work in the hospital helping to care for the patients that my father or another EMT professional has brought to the hospital for treatment.