Personal Narrative: Becoming An Emergency Medical Technician

An Emergency Medical Technician’s job is to offer a second chance for someone, and they hope they can fix all one’s issues before moving on to the next patient. But, what if there are too many patients to fix each one of their issues, and you are by yourself. Welcome to the world of a mass casualty incident and triage, where life or death decisions are made. I was still training to become a basic EMT. My friends and I were quite confident in our skills, especially since we were three days from graduation, but then we had to undergo the most grueling simulation, Triage. Triage broke everyone’s confidence and made us all rethink the way we act and treat patients.
An explosion at a Home Depot had left an unidentified amount of people incapacitated and wounded. I was part of EMS squad C, a ragtag group of EMT students who I had barely talked to and myself were placed on standby. After Squad A had established the need for more EMS squads, my group was the second crew on site. It was pandemonium, patients laid all over the room, EMS students scrambling everywhere to find out who could be saved or not, equipment soon became unrecognizable in the sea of bodies. Tagging patients, triage, treatment, and transport, which should have been
Swiftly, I made sure everyone did their job and helped move one person to triage station. After getting over the initial shock, I thought everything was well as I made sure everyone calmed down and treat and move critical patients to the triage area to be processed. The commander finally appointed me a position as the transportation officer and resumed command, which I have to admit, sadly gave up. I was still glad to do something vital as we got the last patients out of incident scene and left the scene of incident after thirty minutes of crazy, uncontrolled