A Moment To Remember

We've all had moments that, for whatever reason, were memorable in such a way that we still can't help but smile, laugh, or cry when we think of that moment in our lives. Many of these might involve our children, or when we were children ourselves, but they can be anything, and sometimes the momentousness is lost in the retelling. That's what this thread is for.

I have one... well, I have several, but I'll start with one that I thought back on tonight. As many of you know, I was a paramedic for about twenty years. I worked on the Texas-Mexico border while I was in my first paid position as a paramedic. I was the EMS director of a volunteer ambulance service, so I didn't always know who I would get as a crew when a call came in. Unlike most paid services, which would have a crew of two, we sometimes had three or four, and others might show up on the scene to help.

When we were dispatched to a call at about 1:00 a.m., the dispatcher, who was also an EMT and a friend of mine, sounded like she was half asleep when she dispatched us. After the call, which I responded to at the scene but didn't go along for the transport since we had a good crew to handle that, I went into the dispatch office to tease her about her dispatch.

I explained that if she insisted on getting us up at one o'clock in the morning, we didn't want to think that she was going to go back to sleep after getting us up. "You need to have some pep in your voice," I told her.

I went back to bed on a cot at the station. At about 3:00 a.m., we were dispatched to another call. and, in a sing-songy voice, our dispatcher told us to respond to an address at Indian Lake, which was a senior citizen community about ten minutes from our station. Then she added, still in a sing-songy voice, "IT'S A FULL ARREST," which, for the uninitiated, means that there was no pulse or respirations.

I couldn't have asked for a better crew for a full arrest. We had two EMT-Paramedics and two EMT-Intermediates, and everyone was pretty good at what they did in EMS. Since they were volunteers, they didn't do EMS for a living. The other paramedic was also a justice of the peace, and the intermediates included the assistant pastor of the Baptist church and a firefighter who worked in Brownsville, Texas.

I turned the radio on since it was at least a ten-minute drive - not the dispatch radio, which would come through anyhow if there was anything to add, but a radio station, and, on our way to Indian Lake for a full arrest, the station was playing "Indian Lake" by the Cowsills. I cranked it up.

I'm sure that was coincidental, but I didn't anticipate that we all knew the words.