Student EMTs save lives a call at a time
The petite Kristen Bert is enthusiastic when she talks about her work as an EMT, casually tossing out funny stories of drunken patients and odd 911 calls.
Bert and three of her friends - Molly Ronan, Rob Sickeler and Todd Spock - are all sophomores here at Hopkins, as well as volunteer EMTs at nearby fire stations.
A firehouse crew is like a second family to each of these Hopkins students. They eat and do chores with the firehouse crew as well as depend on each other to finish the job safely. It is a reprieve from Hopkins life for these four; no one at the firehouse is worried about their grades or classes. Instead people of all different ages, education and experiences work together to save lives.
Bert was the first to get involve in the Emergency Medicine scene, and soon got her friends involved as well. "It's really contagious and basically like an addiction. So I got them addicted," Bert said.
Being an EMT requires dealing with high stress situations, as well as a strong stomach. These four students thrive in this unique environment.
"I personally like calls that have a lot of blood and gore. Calls that are traumatic but no one is going to die. Like a car accident where someone has broken their arm or leg; its not like they are going to die from it, but you have to do something fun like a traction splint," Molly Ronan said.
"Cardiac arrests are fun though," Bert said. "You can't mess them up because they are already dead."
Of the four of them, only Todd Spock has seen someone come back from a cardiac arrest. "I had one guy where we got pulse back, but we worked him for 30 minutes before we got it. He was actually walking around in the ICU about two weeks later with a bunch of broken ribs," he said.
The four of them laugh as they trade stories about weird calls, completely at ease with the thought of blood and death. Bert says that her first experience with a death on the job was not traumatizing, since it was a woman in an elderly home who suffered from progressed dementia.
Bert and three of her friends - Molly Ronan, Rob Sickeler and Todd Spock - are all sophomores here at Hopkins, as well as volunteer EMTs at nearby fire stations.
A firehouse crew is like a second family to each of these Hopkins students. They eat and do chores with the firehouse crew as well as depend on each other to finish the job safely. It is a reprieve from Hopkins life for these four; no one at the firehouse is worried about their grades or classes. Instead people of all different ages, education and experiences work together to save lives.
Bert was the first to get involve in the Emergency Medicine scene, and soon got her friends involved as well. "It's really contagious and basically like an addiction. So I got them addicted," Bert said.
Being an EMT requires dealing with high stress situations, as well as a strong stomach. These four students thrive in this unique environment.
"I personally like calls that have a lot of blood and gore. Calls that are traumatic but no one is going to die. Like a car accident where someone has broken their arm or leg; its not like they are going to die from it, but you have to do something fun like a traction splint," Molly Ronan said.
"Cardiac arrests are fun though," Bert said. "You can't mess them up because they are already dead."
Of the four of them, only Todd Spock has seen someone come back from a cardiac arrest. "I had one guy where we got pulse back, but we worked him for 30 minutes before we got it. He was actually walking around in the ICU about two weeks later with a bunch of broken ribs," he said.
The four of them laugh as they trade stories about weird calls, completely at ease with the thought of blood and death. Bert says that her first experience with a death on the job was not traumatizing, since it was a woman in an elderly home who suffered from progressed dementia.
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