I volunteer for my township’s all-volunteer first aid squad. We have a designated crew manning the building during the day to answer any calls, but overnight, the designated crew responds from home via pager. My town and surrounding towns are not very big, so we or other towns sometimes have difficulty putting a crew together. For this reason, we have a “mutual aid” agreement with nearby towns. If we do not have a crew available, another town offers their crew, and vice versa.

Many people misuse the 911 system. They think that arriving at an emergency room by ambulance will mean faster service. It does not. I have literally been to a house in the middle of the night for a stubbed toe. There were four cars in the driveway and five people in the house, any one of whom could have driven the “patient” to the hospital… for the stubbed toe.

On one night shift, my pager goes off to respond to the next town over, which also happens to have the hospital that we take most of our patients to. Bleary-eyed, I drive to my building, meet up with my crew, grab an ambulance, set the GPS, and go off on our way.

Dispatch: “The patient is experiencing urinary retention.”

This can be very painful and dangerous to the kidneys.

And where was the house we ended up at? Across the street from the hospital emergency room entrance. And where was the patient? Sitting on his front porch with a packed bag and quietly reading a book. And how long had it been since he had passed urine? About three hours. Grrrrr!

I used to volunteer for my township’s all-volunteer first aid squad. Some years prior, we had removed a volunteer for a variety of reasons, including being unfit for duty. Prior to that, when he was still on the squad, he told me an hour-long story about how he was working as an EMT in Manhattan on 9/11. He had my complete attention and sympathy while he told me how he was injured and could not walk inside one of the towers when a policeman came by and carried him out to safety.

Following his removal from the squad, it started coming out that the whole story he told me was a lie and he was scamming foundations and other groups out of money and services. At the time, though, nobody could prove that he was a scam artist. I felt personally affronted, as he had originally had me hook, line, and sinker when he told me his fake story. Because of this, I was very vocal about how I felt about him, and he knew it.

Fast forward several years. It is a Friday night and I am on duty to take calls for an ambulance in my township. The township high school is playing a football game, and since the school requires an ambulance to be stationed at the game, we have a second rig there. Partway through the game, my pager goes off, announcing a call for a stabbing at the game. My crew heads that way. When we arrive, we see that the other ambulance is already on the scene rendering care. Since it would be the responsibility of my ambulance to transport to the hospital, we decide to leave the patient on that ambulance and just switch crews.

I enter the side of the other rig to see the victim receiving care for his wound by the other crew. But who else is there? The scammer! I look him in the eye.

Me: *Calmly* “You can leave my ambulance now.”

Scammer: “I will not. I’ve started rendering care here and I am going to see it through to the end.”

Me: “We have it under control. Exit my ambulance.”

Scammer: “No.”

Me: “You must leave immediately; you are not wanted here.”

He looks down to the floor, picks something up, and throws it at my face. I do not have time to react; we are only five feet apart. The object hits me square in my face and then falls toward my hands, where I catch it. It is only then that I realize it is the bloody shirt from the stabbing victim! And this is in front of three witnesses directly inside the ambulance.

I immediately drop it to the floor and then proceed to lose my cool. I move around the victim on the stretcher toward the scammer/assaulter. I get loud. I am not even sure what I say exactly, but something to the effect of, “How dare he expose my eyes and hands to a bodily fluid?!”

The scammer/assaulter quickly jumps out the back of the ambulance. I follow, still shouting. He runs away. Within five seconds, I realize that a police officer was standing right there taking a witness statement but is now staring at me in surprise, as he has never seen me act this way. I look at him and apologize, telling him that I will talk to him later.

We transported the victim to the hospital and he turned out to be okay. After finishing up with the transport, I called my squad captain to report what had happened. He told me to go directly to the police station and file charges.

Some months later, it was time to go to court for the trial of the scammer/assaulter. He had a lawyer and pleaded guilty. I talked to the prosecutor, who recommended punishment to the judge. I knew there would be no jail time, but I requested the maximum fine, to be earmarked as a donation to the first aid squad. He agreed. So did the judge.

It was some years later that an investigative reporter contacted me. He was looking into the scammer. I happily provided all the information that was known to me. His two-night piece aired a few weeks later, and it 100% exposed the scammer for what he was: a guy taking advantage of a national tragedy for money and sympathy. Now, THAT was sweet justice!

I used to volunteer with my town’s first aid squad. Most of the calls would be relatively minor in nature, but every once in a while, a true life-or-death emergency would occur.

This story occurs on the day of a blizzard with over twelve inches of snow already on the ground. We get a call for chest pain and begin to head toward the house as quickly as is safely possible. As we get onto side streets, a township snow plow meets up with us to plow the road in front of the ambulance.

We arrive at the house to see a driveway on a steep incline that is, of course, covered with snow. We all make our way up without falling and go into the house. We find a patient having a true heart emergency and in need of the hospital immediately. Our team leader takes over.

Team Leader: “[Colleague #1] and [Colleague #2], go get the snow shovels out of the rig and start making a pathway to get [Patient] out. [My Name], get [this equipment], [that equipment], and [other equipment] and bring it inside.

The three of us went outside. The other two started shoveling a pathway while I started grabbing the necessary equipment. As I started carrying it up to the house, a neighbor with a snowblower made his way over and started clearing the snow from the driveway. Suddenly, two more neighbors with snowblowers arrived and joined in the effort. On my second trip outside, I watched as two teenagers with shovels ran over and started clearing off the steps. A moment later, yet another neighbor appeared with a bag of sand and she began to coat the steps & driveway to improve traction.

We were able to get the patient down the driveway, into the ambulance, and safely to the hospital, where he made a full recovery. And my faith in humanity? Restored!

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Please note that at the time of this story I was running on hope and caffeine, and had been awake for thirty hours, so some details might have changed due to my recollection.

It is the winter of 2018. I work at a call center for a power and natural gas company. The worst polar vortex storm the state has seen in ages hits us, with temperatures frequently hitting -25 or below for over a week.

Even the waffle houses closed; waffle houses are so reliable FEMA uses something called “the waffle house index” to rate disasters!

I was living close enough to work that they called me in a few times and all hours of the day over the weeks because the number of people who could arrive safely is small.

At the beginning, our queue could be over 500 people. By day three it is mostly just shouting that we need to reconnect their power before anyone else because of any number of reasons, none of which changed the reality that we couldn’t do that. The power grid is like a vascular system. If the end of the line isn’t getting blood it isn’t because the immediate juncture is stopped up. This is compounded by weather and reconnection surges frying an entire second batch of equipment and causing a second wave of outages.

Me: *Taking a call* “Thank you for calling [Power Company], my name is [My Name]; how may I help you today?”

Caller: “I’m not sure you can help, please let me know if you need to get a supervisor. My name is [Caller’s Name] and I am with [Major cellular company]. We donate facilities to be used as 911 relays and switchboards, and the 911 branch in Minnesota town has a problem. See, we have generators and fuel, but only enough for 86 hours. We are currently at about 76 hours without power. We have a fuel delivery being made on an emergency basis tomorrow after they will have been out of power for about 90 hours. With this weather, we need to remain active so our last-ditch hope was to contact you guys and see what can be done.”

I am staring blankly at the address search screen trying to process this.

Me: “Well… let me put you on hold for just a second, I want to see if we have a protocol for… this. Can I get the address of your building?”

Caller: “Oh yeah, absolutely, ask around! Anything that may help. Our address is [Very Minnesota road in very mid-west town].”

At this point, I just mute and ask the girl next to me what the h*** I do. The supervisors are beyond busy, sometimes even taking calls themselves, but she had worked there for six years and just gave me a blank stare for a moment.

Supervisor: “Huh, that’s new, call dispatch I guess. It is an emergency. Several actually.”

I hop on the line, check to make sure an order to investigate the outage is already there, check-in with the caller and get his callback line, all that, then call dispatch.

Dispatch: “Dispatch, what’s the issue?”

Me: “So I know we don’t prioritize who gets reconnected b—”

Dispatch: “Ya d*** right we don’t!”

Me: “Yes I understand that, but I have a fellow from 911 on my line. He says they’ve exhausted their options for keeping the lights on themselves. They won’t get fuel for the generator until they’ve been offline for several hours. That town was hit some of the worst, the last thing they need is to not be able to contact emergency services.”

There is a long pause.

Dispatch: “Okay, I need to put you on hold.”

I hear a bunch of shouting into different rooms because he didn’t put me on hold or even mute me. The dispatcher’s boss gets on the line.

Dispatch Boss: “This is [Dispatch Boss], I hear you’ve got 911 on your line?”

We go back and forth, I bring the cell rep into the call and hop around in the system getting our protocol stuff done, and letting my team lead know what’s going on. I never heard about the issue again, so I have to assume it worked out.

Honestly, I think that dispatch actually giving a hoot was more surreal than being called by 911. Those guys always sound like every request you make is like squeezing lemon juice in their eyes.

This happened eight or nine years ago. I was at my parents’ house, since I had a planned get-together with my friends, when I got a frantic call from my husband that our house was on fire. Sadly, since we only had one car at the time, I couldn’t drive home myself. My dad offered to take me but my husband told me to wait and he’d come and get me. 

The fire had started in my mother-in-law’s room when a piece of clothing fell on top of a power strip. There were a few miracles that day. 

1. Her door to her bedroom was shut so the fire didn’t spread. 
2. No one was hurt, including our pets, though the one cat still has PTSD, we think. 
3. Nana didn’t go shopping that day even though Fridays were normally her shopping day with her friend.
4. Last but not least, even though the fire reached 1500 degrees according to the firemen, my mother-in-law’s Bible only had smoke damage even though everything else in the room was destroyed. 

She still has the Bible to this day.

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