Charissa Profile

Emma Turner
Professor Cryer
ENGL 122
12 September 2018

Bethany Thornburg EMT Community

            I interviewed Bethany Thornburg about her EMT community that she is a part of. Bethany is the only person in her family to pursue a community that is related to the medical field. She is from the city of Bryan, Texas originally and decided at 15 that she wanted to live with her mother who lives in Kansas full time. Bethany chose to move because she was tired of life in Texas and did not see herself going to a college in Texas. A career in the medical field has always been something that she has wanted to do.

Bethany first was thinking about going through the nursing program before she saw a friend from high school that was in EMT classes, “The way that he talked about it made me want to think about pursuing it.” She jumped around a lot with jobs in the medical field and stuck with EMT because she could take it at Johnson County Community College, the amount of time the program entailed was shorter and she found it to be more exciting than nursing. An EMT is a job where you are a specially trained medical technician who is certified to provide basic emergency services. Thanks to her friend that she randomly ran into, she started taking classes that had to do with becoming an EMT.

Bethany’s hardest part of the EMT program and the classes was, “Dealing with the stress of knowing that you could potentially have someone’s life in your hands and if children or families are involved it them becomes emotional if a patient passes or has to see a family member in that sort of pain.” Being in the EMT community is hard because of the emotional struggles that you could potentially go through. You have to have a special sort of mindset to have to undergo the type of things that EMT’s experience.

Bethany finds being an EMT to be extremely rewarding to take care of people. She also finds it to be very exciting because the situations that you could get put into could be a tragic event and being an EMT you must be prepared for anything, so she loves that it keeps her on her toes. While being in the EMT community you a lot of the times could be involved in trauma accidents and emergency situations.

The classes that are involved in the EMT program are, EMR before EMT, EMR is more of the basics of the program, then you get into EMT which is a health care professional who assists in accidents or medical emergencies. In these classes they put the students in real life situations with dummies that are so realistic it’s like you are working with an actual accident. Bethany gets to work hands on with these amazing dummies, “They look like real people and make it seem like you’re working with an actual trauma scene.” They also put you on time limits, for example, if Bethany were to go to a trauma scene for, let’s say a traumatic car accident, she would have to pack in all of her knowledge into 10 minutes to successfully save the people involved. Bethany wants to eventually get her paramedic license so that she can work in Johnson County. Only some county’s accept people with their EMT to work, they are more of the rural counties.

EMT’s work in the back of an ambulance or hospital, they are mostly there to assist in accidents and traumatic, random events. She could potentially save someone from a car accident, emergency birth, heart attack or like a bad fall. The types of situations range from just about anything from a fire to a stroke. What Bethany is doing right now with her EMT is in-home care, what she eventually wants to do is get her paramedic license and work in an ambulance or hospital.

The basic definition of an EMT community is a group of health care professionals who provide treatment to individuals on the scene of an accident or a medical emergency. This community spends endless time together some of the times include, in class and at work, doing what they love. The EMT community is unique because not everyone can be a part of it, you have to take a hard set of classes, have the right mindset and the physical ability to get to the point that they’re at. The ideas that are important to this community are communication, trust and friendship. The communication and trust go together in the fact that you are working with each other to save someone’s life, you have to communicate what you have to do next and you have to trust that your partner knows what they’re doing. Without the trust and communication, you could lose someone’s life in the process. The friendship is important because even though they are there to save lives, you still need to have a life outside of work to destress yourself and have fun. The tools that are important to this community are tools for sure that they would have in the back of the ambulance or hospital, like AED’s, stretchers, all types of things that could help to save a life. When you’re coming up on a scene with the tools in the ambulance or the hospital you have to know which ones to use in which situation, the brain is also going to be a crucial component because you have to know what to do with each unique situation.

     Talking with Bethany and learning about her amazing community, I gained such great knowledge about what people really do in those traumatic situations. The EMT community is a special one that I know is full of passionate, caring, and strong minded people.