Through rough, crowded roads and stagnant waters – we race against time to reach you!

V. Gokulakannan

Emergency Care Technician, Ambulance and Emergency Services, Kauvery Hospital, Chennai, India

Being a paramedic has transformed my humdrum life into an extraordinary and adventurous one!

There is never a day that is not challenging! Every single day poses us different challenges – often we tread through rough roads, and climb through treacherous heights, to reach the patient. There have been times when we had to swim through deep and dirty waters (especially during the Chennai floods), search the location of a wrong address shared, break open locked doors, walk through tiny corridors, and unravel the mystery of why our patient landed up being the way he/she was found. We evaluate, stabilize, inform the status to our ER and rush back. Almost every time we race, both ways, against time to save a patient’s life.

Behind every ambulance call – there is a clouded mind, jittery heart and a panicked voice, that is waiting eagerly for our help, hoping that we are that someone who can, and possibly will, save their loved one’s life. It is darkness at noon for them, when they encounter and witness their loved ones suffering either in pain or feeling short of breath, or while trying to help that someone they love who has been in an accident. Those frantic eyes and ears wait only to hear our steps. Once we reach then and they witness us helping their loved ones, they begin to sense a small ray of sunshine breaking into their darkness. They never forget our service as we are the ones who came to help and became their hope when their world seemed to be falling apart.

I am delighted that I get to be that person, one of a trained and confident team, for the ones who truly need us. I gain immense satisfaction from giving that hope to someone who has trusted my team and blindly believe that we can be that force to mold the survival of their loved ones.

The challenges we face are multiple, as we handle patients outside the hospital, with the most limited of resources and in the most difficult of situations. But we are trained to deal with these situations with utmost skill and speed.

Many times we get a call, and when we rush to the spot, there would be a multi-storied building with no functional elevator. “Oh no, not again” is what comes to my mind as we race up the stairs to reach the topmost floor which is where our patient resides!

These humongous challenges become minuscule when we recollect that the patient and his family are eagerly waiting for us to come and make a difference. They are experiencing deterioration in the patient’s condition and yet fervently praying to hear our footsteps at their doorstep. At that moment, a paramedic’s quickest thought process, presence of mind, complemented with fast decision making and timely intervention with skillful hands only can save the patient’s life.

That is not the end of our job; after initiating initial first aid and stabilization, we must transport the patient to the ambulance, which is the most herculean task that can encounter a paramedic but we carry this out with utmost ease. Though our hearts are pounding very hard, our faces always wear a pleasant smile and offer comforting words to the family and the patient until we have successfully transferred the patient to the care of our able doctors and staff in our emergency department.

That’s a day, which is never like any other day, in the life of a paramedic. The patient and the situation never cease to surprise us and yet again, we raise our bar on every occasion, and deliver the quickest and the most appropriate care for our patients, in the limited time and with the limited resources that we have in our hands.

People make a living by what they get, but we make a life by what we give.

I am proud to be a paramedic!

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