Stories worth saving
EMS is still a young profession. The people who built it are retiring, and their stories go with them unless someone writes them down. This is a place to do that.
In EMS, a lot of what we know we didn’t learn from a textbook. We learned it from a story: told in the day room, in the front of the rig on the way back from the hospital, or over coffee at the end of a long shift. A story about a call gone wrong teaches you what to watch for. A funny one gets you through a bad night. The hard ones remind you why the work matters.
Why this exists
Our industry is young. Many of the people who were there in the early days, who built the systems and wrote the protocols and ran calls with far less than we have now, are retiring or passing on. Their stories are some of the best teaching we have, and right now most of them are never written down. When they’re gone, the stories are gone too.
The Stories We Tell Each Other is a place to collect those stories and keep them: from the first generation of EMS and from the people working the street today.
What we hope it does
- Educates. Real calls carry lessons that stick in a way a lecture doesn’t.
- Entertains. Anyone who has worked in EMS knows some of the best stories are the funny ones.
- Shows people what the job is really like. Not the TV version: the long nights, the small moments, the calls you never forget.
- Brings new people in. EMS is not an easy career, but it can be an extremely rewarding one. Honest stories make that case better than any recruiting poster.
Handled the right way
Every story here is about a real call, and every patient in it deserves privacy. Contributors remove anything that could identify a patient, and every story is reviewed and edited before it’s published. Names, dates, places and other identifying details are changed or left out. If you ever see something that shouldn’t be here, let us know and we’ll fix it.
Who’s behind it
This project was started by someone who has spent a career in EMS and believes our stories are worth saving. I go by VAEMTC here, because this site isn’t about me. It’s about the stories, and the people who lived them.
If you’ve got one, I’d love to read it.
— VAEMTC