We were sitting around the coffee pot when the first call I’d ever responded to in person came in over the radio. I was doing a ride-along, something Regional tried to get our associated towns to give us when we first start, to get a first-hand look into what our responders experience on a daily basis. As all fire calls, it started with a tone. At the sound, I cut my story off mid-sentence and followed the firefighters around the corner into the vehicle bay.
Liz was driving, and as she prepped for response, she explained what she was doing. “We keep the pants and boots ready to step right into, next to the lockers, so it’s easier when we’re getting ready.” She slung an air tank over her shoulder and told me, “This has about half an hour of breathable oxygen. This will go into the back of my seat.”
I took the seat behind her.
“You buckled?”
“Yep. Now what?”
Thomas threw a playful wink from up front. “Now’s the fun part,” he said. “Now we get on the road and hope for something good.”
I opened my mouth to say, of course we don’t hope that, because that would mean something bad has happened to somebody! But the sirens roaring to life cut me off, so I sat back. As we made our way through downtown, I realized that what I had been about to say was… well, it wasn’t necessary. I was around firefighters, and they were as crazy for disaster as I was. What I’d been about to say wasn’t just unnecessary: it was downright untrue. I was hoping it was “something good.” And so were they. That’s why they became firefighters. Isn’t it also why I became a dispatcher?
It’s not that we want bad things to happen to people. In a perfect world, nobody would need firefighters, or dispatchers, or any first responders at all. Bad things are going to happen whether we do this job or not. The next best thing to having no disasters at all is having disaster-trained people eager to respond when shit hits the fan.
But in a world where disasters do happen, I thought, it sure is good to know that some people are enthusiastic about helping out.
It is my opinion that people who say they get into high-stress fields of work like first response or surgery “to help people” aren’t always telling the truth. Or at least, not the whole truth. Maybe some of them really do wake up and think of nothing else than making the world a better place. And most of them probably do want to help people, and do believe that’s the only reason they chose that field. But there’s another reason we all got into it, and it has a lot less to do with philanthropism than we’d like to believe.
Take, for example, my friend Gabe. This is a man who teared up the first time I ever had a conversation with him, when I told him the story of how my grandfather sold his prized possession, his beautiful, lovingly-restored 1968 Pontiac, when I broke a bunch of my teeth in an accident to pay for implants “so my 18-year-old granddaughter doesn’t have to wake up to her teeth in a glass every morning.” True story.
He’d spoken to me a grand total of once at that point, and he was so empathetic that the sweet story of familial love brought him to tears. How could somebody so compassionate, who seemed to absorb completely the emotions of others, also be an EMT who saw people die, a firefighter who witnessed families’ homes go up in smoke? After a while, you’d think it would just get to be too much. That the allure of maybe helping someone today would give way to the hopelessness of seeing your efforts go wasted the first time you revive an overdose only to have him die of another a week later.
So what was it, then, that kept people like him responding to call after call, day after day? If you ask me, it’s the high.
That metaphor, of surgery being a game, is continued by a doctor later revealed to be the Chief of Surgery: “Each of you comes here hopeful. Wanting in on the game… The seven years you spend here will be the best and worst of your life. You will be pushed to the breaking point… This is your starting line. This is your arena. How well you play? That’s up to you.”
After scrubbing in on her first surgery, Meredith tells the doctor who led it, “You think you know what you’re going to feel… but that was such a high. I don’t know why anybody does drugs.” And in the end, as the pilot winds down, the voiceover returns, and Meredith tells the viewers: “I can’t think of any one reason why I want to be a surgeon. But I can think of a thousand reasons why I should quit. They make it hard on purpose. There are lives in our hands… I could quit. But here’s the thing: I love the playing field.”
Meredith’s words resonate with me, as somebody whose job requires me to be responsible for decisions that could, quite literally, change the course of lives. Even be the reason they end. Dispatch may be lower on the risk-factor scale than police or fire or hands-on EMS, since we sit from afar, linked to the unfolding events only by telephone and a radio connection. It isn’t our lives that are at risk if the traffic stop goes bad or the building comes down or the chest pains turn into sudden cardiac arrest.
But it is my job to run the plates, to see if that driver has outstanding warrants or a violent criminal history. It’s my job to put out the evacuation tones if Command thinks a structure is sufficiently destabilized by fire to necessitate an evacuation. It’s my job to give CPR instructions to keep the cardiac arrest patient’s blood circulating long enough for EMS to arrive and save his life. It actually matters if I make a mistake, because those mistakes can and sometimes do cost lives.
But that’s exactly why I sought this job out. I love the playing field, too. I live for the high of disaster, for the terrifying, high-stakes moments where it really is life or death. Without it, I’m just the owner of a battered heart, listening over the phone and radio as bad things happen all the time. As people get shot and buildings come down and patients code in the backs of ambulances. All there is between us and the despair is that excitement, the thrill of picking up the phone and hoping for “something good.”
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