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.