It should hold

The stress of paramedic training finally reached a head. Its not that its hard, its just that there is so much of it. I have to memorize so many different things that my brain feels as thought it will leak out of my ears.
So I did what anybody would do. I took a vacation.
But my vacations are a little bit different. While I did go to Block Island with my long time girlfriend Colleen, I also took the advanced rope rescue class offered by the Mass Firefighting Academy.
Four three days I hung off of buildings on ropes that I anchored to various structures and outcroppings. I rescued fellow classmates and hauled other rescuers with the help of a pulley system.
My basic rope class served as a foundation for this class. While in the basic class, one rapelled down to the victim, the advanced class had a a complex lowering system designed to completly package an injured or unconcious patient. With the use of a Stokes basket, one can immobilize and transfer a patient to stable ground so as to continue care.
We practiced a seemingly simple yet delicate technique called slope evacuation. As the name emplies, the victim is at the bottom or on the slope itself and rescuers must secure themselves and him in order to safely traverse that slope. Through the use of a pulley and haul system, Stokes basket and a good deal of personel, the victim can be safely moved.
For three days I worked upwards of three stories above the ground, practicing these techniques and working to broaden my understanding of technical rescue. As it stands I am two classes away from acheiveing the rank of Rescue Technician, a certification I have coveted since starting in the fire service.
Instructors at the MFA have a running joke before starting each day's training. The go through a rigorous safety screening of the entire rigging system and then turn to the students and say "It should hold," and nothing more.
At the conclusion of my rope course, my girlfriend and I spent the long weekend on Block Island. It was the perfect capstone to a well needed stress relieve.
But now I am back to the grind, after spending nearly five hours memorizing anatomy and physiology, loving refered to as "That fuckin' A&P stuff again." I am going to collapse into bed.

Street Doctors

When basic life support is not enough, EMTs call for paramedics. A patient in the field still needs the same kind of care given in hospitals, so paramedics need to be able to provide that type of care.
Having said that, it is easy to see why I have to memorize eight books in order to become a medic. By May I will be able to push over forty drugs into the bloodstream of a dying man, I'll be able to push a tube down his throat (through either his mouth or a surgical incision that I cut in his Adam's Apple)shock his heart and do anyone of seemingly countless other things which will hopefully prolong a patient's life.
A paramedic basically does what doctors do in the first twenty minutes of treatment. While I have only completed one day of medic school, I can already tell it is going to be dramatically different than working as an EMT. I'll still be responding to emergencies but now I'll be the one that is in charge. My decisions will have a direct and dramatic impact on the outcome of a patient's future. As an EMT I worked under paramedics, I made independent decisions before the arrival of paramedics but I was still working under a paramedic. As a paramedic I can decide exactly how to treat a patient and what to do for that patient. Drugs and electrical treatments can do a whole hell of a lot more that CPR.
Paramedic will eventually take more than five hundred hours to complete. By the end of it I will not only have completed one of the most rigorus and demanding emergency service programs but I will have a new role. No longer will I be simply following a cook book type recipe for keeping people alive, I will be baking from scratch. As an EMT I followed a set path based on the work and thoughts of people with a lot more training than me. Now I will be able to think like them and hopefully perform like them.
Our lead instructor is a night shift paramedic on one of Boston EMS' busiest trucks, Medic Five in Roxbury. He has seen just about everything and performed just about every paramedic intervention there is in his seventeen years. He tells us that his wife tells those who ask that her husband is a street doctor.