The Saint Lazare Medical Response Unit held our annual car stop in May, and once again St Lazare residents and visitors showed their support for the service in a way that is truly humbling. We thank you all for your continuing support of this volunteer first responder service.
One driver in particular, clearly concerned with the amount of personal time and effort that we each put into the service, remarked, “You people are wasting your time.”
It’s a wonderful comment, because it’s a comment that comes from a belief that we live in a sleepy community where nothing much happens. And broadly speaking, that’s true. Generally, for a town this size, we’re really quite safe, and we have much to be thankful for.
But it’s worth noting that this doesn’t mean that medical emergencies don’t happen — quite the opposite is true. In point of fact, there’s an average of more than one medical emergency per day that requires the intervention of the first responder team. Most people don’t hear about most of these calls, because they’re private events in the lives of private citizens. They don’t get published in the local papers. And, though the community is small, it’s not so small that one family’s news is every family’s news.
Nonetheless, medical emergencies, fires, and other mishaps happen, and with surprising frequency. It’s surprising how many calls we receive to respond to people in cardiac distress. It’s difficult to imagine, but we receive quite a number of calls from people who have chronic or terminal medical conditions, and who need pre-hospital intervention. The town is by no means immune to drug abuse and and tragic deaths.
In our everyday lives, we’re often reminded to be careful, and not to take unnecessary chances. We often think to ourselves, “Yeah, but how often does anything bad really happen?” The first responders, ambulances, and the fire service respond very frequently to preventable accidents, situations where it’s clear that someone was taking fewer precautions than they knew they probably should, like so many of us do. But those shortcuts often have devastating, if not tragic, outcomes. These situations don’t get reported in the newspapers — they’re private events in the lives of private citizens, but the emergency services personnel are called to help.
The first responders are exactly that — we’re usually the first on the scene, and beyond the initial call, we often have no contact with the family. However, we have from time to time heard back from the families involved, and these contacts are precious to us. To learn that someone with no heartbeat has come home to his family again is a wonderful bit of news. To hear from a patient that we helped to keep a very dangerous medical situation from escalating out of control is tremendously rewarding. To hear from a bereaved family that our compassion in a difficult time helped in some small way is gratifying.
Being a first responder is a big commitment of volunteer time and effort, to be sure. But knowing the town as we do, and knowing the medical needs of the town as we do, we’d have to say — thank you for your concern, but we’re not wasting our time.
