I wouldn't say I enjoyed my EMT days, but they were very interesting...…….most of the time. But, got tired of the blood, spending nights away from home, getting pissed off at drivers that wouldn't pull over to the side of the road for me while I was on an emergency call and having to work weekends. Was extremely glad to leave the job and go into manufacturing where I only worked an 8-hour day, got holidays off and had every weekend off to have fun.
Given that I left a much better paying manufacturing job to go into EMS, my experiences differed. I loved EMS. At first, I preferred the trauma calls for the excitement and being on television or in the newspaper. Later, too many of the trauma calls became commonplace, as I worked in the Rio Grande Valley where there was a lot of violence, and where people drove kind of crazy. Then I came to enjoy trying to figure out what was going on with someone medically and, given that I usually worked in rural areas, we had long transport times, so we could do more than many EMS systems, as far as the medications and equipment we carried. Of course, when I imply that these calls were fun, I don't mean it in the way that someone outside of the medical field might interpret it. These calls were fun in that they were stimulating, not that they were ha-ha funny. Regardless, bringing this back on topic, while I might think that it would have made sense to finish college right out of high school, or that maybe I should have stayed with the paper company, or taken the job with the union, a different decision there would have changed everything that came later, so I'm satisfied with the decisions that I made.
An absolutely marvelous observation Beth! Though many times in my life I have thought that perhaps I had made the wrong choice in the realm of opportunity, the eventuality of it was that I thanked God that I had made the choice that I did. There were many avenues I could have taken but if I had, the chances are extremely great that Yvonne and I would have never met. Shoulda, woulda and coulda are all nice things to speculate but what I now have is far greater than those visions of “past possibilities”.
I don't think many people actually make wrong choices we make the choice that makes sense to us at the time. Things definitely would have been different but I think we are where we're suppose to be.