Choosing Compassion as a First Responder

To the uninitiated, a firefighter's day-to-day may seem filled with five-alarm fires, car crashes, and cardiac arrests. But first responders know that emergencies come in all forms, and that the bulk of the job requires being with suffering, day in and day out, oftentimes in situations that don't technically qualify as emergencies at all. In fact, Faith Applewhite, a colleague and the medical captain for the Santa Fe City Fire Department, noted that in an audit of over seven million records of EMT (emergency medical technician) treatments, only two percent were labeled as emergencies. Most calls require taking non-emergent patients to hospitals, handling substance-abuse cases, delivering blankets and sleeping bags to the homeless, and managing mental illness cases. And then there's the neverending paperwork.