Greg Young

Greg Young is a 43-year-old firefighter/ paramedic who has worked with the Evanston Fire Department (EFD) for nine years. He began his EMS career as a volunteer firefighter in his hometown southwest of Chicago, where he still lives today. I spoke to him at Evanston Fire Station 1, 10 hours into his 24-hour shift.

Ileave home at 4:15 in the morning to get [to the fire station] at quarterto-6. I get here an hour early because that's a big part of our culture, trying to relieve the crew before us so they don't get a last-minute call, and then their 24 hours turns into 25.

When I was 27, I decided that I wanted to do something else that was comparative pay to what I was currently doing. I had kids real early, and I owned my own drywall business. I decided that I probably don't want to do that the rest of my life, abuse my body. So now I just abuse my mind [laughs].

I tried volunteer [firefighting] because I didn’t know if I could handle it. By the time I was 33, I started getting job offers. [EFD] is the first full-time department that offered me a job. I've had other offers since, but I really like what Evanston has to offer. It's just a little bit of everything.

Children are the cases that stick with you — or me, anyway. I don’t wanna say it’s easier, but it’s different with older adults as opposed to what you view as a defenseless, innocent person.

This one was probably three or four years into my career. I ended up assuming care in a paramedic role for a kid that was the same age as and went to school with my daughter.

It was in the morning before school. The kid was a passenger sitting in the back of a minivan in a captain’s chair. His mom was driving. A [driver] in his 20s blew a stop sign going 60 miles an hour and the timing was just … wrong. They were T-boned. When I got there, [the kid] was pinned in between the sliding door and the captain’s chair from impact. That was a particularly tough case because he was in a real bad way. His legs were pinned up behind him, rotated backwards, and he was sitting there screaming, “My legs! My legs! My legs! I’m gonna die!” We had to cut him out, and as soon as we got him out, I had to take him to the ambulance and take care of him until the helicopter showed up.

He ended up OK — different, but OK.

He played soccer with my daughter, and I saw him at a game probably two years later. I could tell he was running a little different. His mom recognized me and came and found me and said, “Thank you.”

It took me a while to get over that case. I dwelled on it a little bit, thinking, “How is he? What happened to him? Did I do everything right?” You know they’re terrified, and your instinct –– or my instinct anyway –– is to say, “You’re going to be OK. We’re going to take care of you.” In the moment, that’s the right thing to say, but then you question it later.

[Seeing him two years later] brought a lot of those feelings back. It was emotional — I didn’t cry, but I teared up.

It was a big weight that I didn’t feel at the time, but it kind of felt like it went away when I saw him.

Situations [like that] proved to me that [being a paramedic] was something I could do and [that] I was built to do. I'm not denying that it doesn’t affect me in a negative way, but there’s always the next call. You have to realize you didn't create the situation. You're doing what you can to help.

When I worked in [my hometown], we ran four calls a day, and five was a busy day. We would go on 1,200 calls in an entire year. You felt like you were doing really good all the time. In Evanston, we did 11,300 calls last year. Once you get into a higher frequency all the time, what I started to notice, and I'm not afraid to say it, is that I had to go talk to somebody, a psychologist.

To think about the job is harder than to do it. The graphic doesn't bother me, but it's just the stress of the job that eats away at you slowly over time. So it's important for medics to be cognizant of that. For a while, it's easy to deal with. But as you start to develop a family and outside responsibilities, it takes time for you to realize it's weighing on you. And it's just important to do something about it.

It's very hard to separate work life from home life. [The department] is almost like a second family, but it's a totally different dynamic. When you're that entrenched here and then have to go home, it's hard to separate the two. And [work] is the one that sticks, more than home, because it's so much more dramatic. You get caught in this weird thing where there's two separate existences.

[My psychologist] has taught me techniques. Like on the drive home, you don't make any phone calls about work. Tell yourself, “You're going home. You're going to a different environment. Whatever is going on there is OK.” And also more self-reflection, like, “I'm justified in the way I feel,” but now thinking about why I feel that way.

[Mental health] is becoming talked about more and more. For the longest time, it definitely was not. It was, "We're tough guys. We're firemen. We don't show weakness." And it's still that way. We'll have trainings where people make light of it, you know, but that's how we cope with it. We all joke

Medill third-year Anna Bock is a pre-physician assistant (PA). When Bock was 18, she completed her EMS certification in her hometown of Denver, Colorado. Every summer since, she has worked as an emergency medical technician (EMT) for a Denver-based inter-facility transport company.

Ioriginally got [certified] because I wanted to see if I was squeamish, if I could handle blood and if I should pursue pre-med. My instructor brought pictures from his calls over the years so you saw all the stuff you were likely going to see in the field. There was a slide once of people that had been impaled, there was a guy who had gone into a boat dock and had the wooden things sticking out of his stomach, and another guy had a steel pole that had gone into his leg. I remember being like, “This is so crazy — not good, but kind of cool!”

It’s definitely a job where you have to get down and dirty. You get thrown up on, peed on — various bodily fluids that you might not necessarily enjoy bringing into your daily routine [laughs].

I had a dementia patient once who took off all his seat belts while we were driving in a snowstorm. I remember trying to gently go around the guy and buckle him back up and flip the belts so he couldn't reach them. Especially with psychiatric patients, they're not functioning normally, and you can't expect them to do about it. But if somebody was really having an issue, you will not see an outpouring [of support] more than from this group of people. Everybody in this department is willing to help and do whatever you need if you're really, really struggling. I want every firefighter to be OK seeing somebody. I could choose not to be as busy as I am, but I choose to be at the station because I like the people here. It’s like another family. We're all good friends and get along really well. We have a routine. I like being busy, too. As much as it is a stressor, I do enjoy it. A lot of stories come from there. A lot of your positive experiences come from there. I'm very thankful I got the job and chose this career path.