EMTs in Action - TV Has Nothing on THIS

Anyone who has read my blog much already knows that I live in a very small, secluded Hawaiian town. Everyone knows each other, jobs are held by community members and so on. Neil runs the General Store, Ma’ano runs the pre-school, Jimmy is in charge of the County workers and so on.

Such is the case for the public service workers. Our EMTs, all of which I know, either as friends or students, spend most of their time just hanging out. We laugh, we joke, we bitch about our kids. The firemen? Cleanest firetruck on the island! I swear they wash that thing daily. And some of my favorite goofballs in the world work at our firestation. I tell ya, if it wasn’t for the fact that our police officers are allowed to keep their bullets IN their guns, it would be Mayberry, local-style. We hear sirens, but it usually means there are rocks on the highway that need to be moved quickly.

So when I heard sirens today, I didn’t think much of it. Then I head the ‘beep, beep, beep’ thing that backwards moving vehicles make. Still nothing. But when I glanced out my window…holy shit…

Apparently my neighbor, whose Alzheimer’s may or may not be related to this, had a seizure or something that prompted her husband to call 911. She will probably be ok, by the way, and is not the subject of this post.

What blew me away is watching my friends and neighbors turn into professional emergency workers… right before my eyes.

It was amazing.

First of all, the husband was kind of upset and didn’t really call the address in right, so they went to the house next door. Secondly, he doesn’t have a driveway, so they had to park on the street and walk up a small hill. And of course the EMT folks have to coordinate with the Fire Dept folks and this includes every piece of equipment that they might possibly need. They did it and they did it FAST. Totally coordinated effort.

And coming out, with the lady on the stretcher, they had to deal with the gawkers (who, in this case were also friends and family of even the Emergency Workers), getting the stretcher down the hill, and the fact that the only medical facility out here is VERY limited. So on top of everything else, our EMT workers have to make a judgement call regarding whether or not to request an Air Ambulance. Yeah, by the way…this is life on an island.

Anyway.

The next time I run into any of them, it’ll be in our usual goofy, joking, me doing my usual Auntie Wahine shtick. But I don’t think I’ll ever see them in quite the same way again. And if anything ever happens to me, I hope those same people are the ones who get called. And yes…one by one, I will let them know that.

Still tentative

I blog elsewhere and am thinking of doing some of my posts over here as well. However, I do not yet have any interactions, so this post is sort of yelling across the canyon:

Is anybody outttttttt ttthhhhheeeerrrrre???????

(was supposed to look like it was echo-ing)