• The Seat Doesn’t Remember You

    Thinking back on time spent at my current agency, and the replaceable nature of EMS positions and the care and effort we take to make sure we are able to move on to other jobs while the wheels keep turning behind us.

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  • How do you say Goodbye?

    How do you say Goodbye?

    Two weeks ago, during what I thought would be a routine telepsychiatry appointment, Monalisa told me something I wasn’t prepared to hear. Our next appointment would be our last. We were reviewing how the medications were doing. A recent increase in Effexor had helped resolve a brief resurgence of depressive symptoms that had begun to…

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  • The Chair

    The Chair

    On Location My first real job out of college wasn’t in medicine, or anywhere near an ambulance. It was in lighting — the kind that makes concerts glow, trade shows sparkle, and corporate galas look like the Grammys. The company was called On Location Lighting Systems, or OLLS, based out of northern Kentucky just south…

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  • A Mental Health Odyssey – Still Here

    A follow-up on A Mental Health Odyssey, revisiting mental health themes, and exploring where I am now, and where I’m headed from here.

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  • A Mental Health Odyssey

    The author shares his journey through major depressive disorder, anxiety, and social phobia while working as an EMS provider. Despite having effective treatment for years, he experiences a decline in mental health in late 2023, prompting medication changes and the need for a temporary leave of absence. The narrative includes personal challenges, medication adjustments, struggles…

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  • Elijah McClain, Paramedics, Qualified Immunity, and Other Thoughts on Professionalism

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  • Out with the old…

    Out with the old, and in with the new, they say, right? It’s a small thing, but the red penlight on the right has been with me for the better part of 15 years. I think it maybe was a gift when I graduated from paramedic school. It’s been in my sleeve pocket or shirt…

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  • Ask any EMS or other public safety professional what stereotypical trope in conversation they hate the most, and they’ll probably tell you not to ask “What’s the worst thing you’ve ever seen on a call?” – and for good reason. We don’t like revisiting those calls. We don’t need to trudge them back up into…

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  • I wrote about the Code Green Campaign back in 2016 in my post about calling a code on our mental health. I was talking about how some of my “ghosts” haunt me, revisit me, remind me of some of the worst calls I’ve ever been on. It happens to me frequently. At night. During the…

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  • Lifesaver? Hardly.

    This lifesaver pin was presented to me to celebrate my first CPR “Save” – when, early in my EMS career, I worked as part of a team of EMS professionals to apply CPR (Cardiopulmonary Resuscitation) to a Sudden Cardiac Arrest victim, and this resulted in the patient having their pulse restored long enough to be…

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