Emergency Medical Technician

The summer after my freshman year of college, I decided to attend Emergency Medical Technician school. I figured staring into the open gaping wounds of strangers seemed like a nice way to spend the summer. I conned my friend into signing up too. It was tough to convince him.

We were the youngest in the class, which was filled with colorful characters.

One man drank at least one 2-liter bottle of Mountain Dew every morning.

This one lady was a Hasidic Jew who wasn't allowed to show her hair to anyone so she wore a bright red shiny wig.

We actually became really good friends with her.

The instructors were characters too. Our head teacher was an EMT named Sergio. He demanded that we refer to him as Serge. The whole summer, I thought he was saying we should call him "Sarge," so that's precisely what I did.

There was another instructor who liked to tell us all about her colon removal. Everyday she would go into vivid detail.

She also had a strict policy for dealing with male suitors.

At some point in the term we got to go on ambulance ride-alongs and hospital shadowings. It was fascinating. One girl in the class had a unique way of dealing with the stress of an emergency situation.

During one of the hospital visits, my friend and I were assigned to clean out a lady's wound.

 

We got the surgical tape stuck in our gloves and were rendered almost entirely useless. 

One of our friends wasn't used to the automatic sphygnomamometers mounted on the wall because he had only used the hand-held kind. When he went to take a patient's blood pressure, this high tech version really tripped him up. He pushed the button on the wall, but forgot the vital step of attaching the cuff to the patient's arm. 

He stood there waiting patiently for the machine to do its thing while it blew up like a big noodle on the wall behind him. The patient requested a real doctor immediately..

After my friend and I passed the class, we were pretty anxious to save lives. And by anxious I mean overzealous. For example, we once saw a woman trip on the sidewalk.

When we returned to college, we decided to major in the liberal arts.