I used to think I was the last person who could ever become a medical professional. Growing up, I was someone who tended to shy away from situations in which someone was in pain, rather than try to take charge of the moment. For example, when I was a kid, my mom would get really bad migraines that would leave her bed-ridden for an entire day or longer. When this would happen, I usually wouldn’t know what to do. I would want to help her—and I would always get her whatever she asked for—but I just didn’t have a good instinctual sense of how to make her feel better. I would end up spending a lot of the day hiding in the basement, crying, because it was hard for me to see someone hurt without also feeling hurt myself. In that sense, I think growing up I had the empathy and desire to help people who are sick, but not always the confidence or knowledge to act.
Flash-forward several years to freshman year of college, and I decided to apply, somewhat on a whim, to take an EMT certification course offered through University Health Services. One of my friends was really excited about the prospect of working as an EMT and I think a lot of her excitement rubbed off on me. At the time, I was struggling with whether I wanted to be pre-med, a common track for someone studying biology like me. I also still hadn’t really found an organization on campus that I felt invested in. I was worried about whether I had “what it took”—namely, confidence and an instinct for taking care of people—to be a medical provider, but I decided to give EMS a try anyway.
The certification course was a big time commitment. Outside of my regular college classes, it was pretty much the only extracurricular I participated in that semester. The material wasn’t necessarily difficult, but there was a lot to learn. I ended up spending a lot of late nights reading Emergency Care and Transportation of the Sick and Injured. Although the process to get certified was intensive, I didn’t mind. What I was learning felt important and worth my time because it was information that could one day be used to help someone in need.
I got nationally certified as an EMT at the end of my freshman spring semester and I’ve since been working as an EMT on campus for one and a half years. In that time, I’ve realized that a lot of people have misconceptions about what collegiate EMS is really like. For instance, there are people who believe that our shifts are a lot more high acuity than they actually are. These are people who think a normal call generally includes performing CPR, extracting individuals from crashed vehicles, and applying tourniquets to gunshot victims. While these are certainly skills we learn and review often, they’re not ones we use frequently, if ever. Rather, most of our patients tend to be either injured athletes from intramural sports games or students who have had too much too drink at a party. Our shifts can become high acuity and difficult to manage in their own right, but they are certainly not all resuscitation and life-threatening trauma.
On the flip side, there are other people who have trouble understanding the purpose of collegiate EMS organizations, especially at liberal arts universities like Harvard. An advisor sophomore year once asked me why I chose an extracurricular that “seems oddly vocational for a Harvard student,” while a relative once questioned at a family dinner why I was “wasting my time working as an EMT” when I could be taking advantage of more liberal arts-based extracurriculars, such as the Institute of Politics.
To this latter group of people, I explain that being an EMT transcends the “vocational” side of the job that involves being able to perform concrete medical skills. The hardest things I’ve had to do as an EMT have not been splinting a broken ankle that’s bent at an odd angle or taking an accurate blood pressure in the middle of a noisy party. Though these skills are certainly critical to the job, they are not all of the job. Instead, it’s been learning how to balance leading a crew with practicing good followership. It’s been trying to get more busy students and community members to engage with outreach initiatives, such as our CPR classes, so that Harvard’s campus can be a little bit safer. It’s been learning that not every problem will have a clear diagnosable solution and not every patient will necessarily want what’s objectively “best” for their health in a given moment. It’s been gaining the confidence to interface with university police officers and healthcare professionals—all adults with years more experience than me—and prove my competence as a provider. These are all skills that are as critical to EMS as they are to law, government, art, and academia. They are also ones I will carry with me for years after I forget how to crack an oxygen tank or apply a C-collar. In the context of a liberal arts education, what I’ve learned as an EMT has been invaluable to my success as a student and a citizen.
I’ll admit, the title of this blog post is a bit of a misnomer. I don’t really “save lives” on most of my shifts. I hold a lot of vomit bags, tape people’s fingers back into anatomical position on a Popsicle stick, and sometimes assess the general severity of a sports-related head injury. But I—and the roughly 60 other student EMTs at Harvard who generously give up their time to serve the campus community—also make students who are afraid of the university police, or the high costs of an ambulance, or that their parents will find out they were drinking underage, feel a little bit more comfortable and a little bit less scared. When one of us succeeds in doing that, it’s worth so much more than any concrete skill we could possibly learn at Harvard, vocational or otherwise. Collegiate EMTs are students taking care of students; we play a unique and important role in campus safety.
This past week was National Collegiate EMS Week and it’s had me reflecting a lot on my experience as an EMT. Working in EMS has taught me invaluable medical skills. It’s allowed me to give back to a community that has given me so many resources. Most importantly, it’s helped me build confidence and taught me to stay calm in the face of stress—something the younger me, who spent too many occasions crying in his basement when he didn’t know how to help his mom, used to struggle with a lot.
I say it all the time when I’m talking to interested freshmen about joining CrimsonEMS, but I really mean it: becoming an EMT in college is one of the most meaningful and important things I’ve done in my life.
On Ariel's Mind 