Dedicated To All EMT's
by: Julianna © 1995

                    They speak softly to the teenager with the crushed skull while documenting
                    the inevitable fraying of his hold on life. They tend to his broken young
                    body, whispering questions that they know will go unanswered forever.
                    "Can you hear us?" "Do you feel any pain?" "What is the last thing you
                    remember?"

                    It is only a matter of hours before death renders the Technician powerless
                    as the life flows through their hands and into their hearts. Later, with
                    the teenagers soul still fresh in their keeping, despair comes to fill
                    their sleepless night, tormenting them with sounds of the teenager's mother's
                    pleadings..."Oh God why my son?" "Please not my son." Then comes the
                    vision of a weeping sister too young to understand why her favorite
                    brother no longer laughs or calls her his little bratty one.

                    Whether or not these Technicians have yet found their delicate balance
                    of compassion and hopelessness, detachment and intimacy, they will choose
                    of their own free will, to return again tomorrow. Their need to nurture
                    is not something they can turn away from, no matter how much it hurts.
                    As a person who wants to heal, they see only that they may be given the
                    chance to steal a child away from death, or perhaps it will be their touch
                    alone that will soothe the fears and aches of some ancient soul.

                    When they wipe the sweat of suffering from your face, they are not
                    concerned with whether you are a Jew or a Catholic, a Protestant or an
                    atheist, but only that you are free from your pain. When they hold you
                    in their arms delivering you to the peace of death, their thoughts are
                    not of whether you lived in a cardboard box or a castle, but that you
                    have comfort and dignity. When they minister to your broken body, they
                    do not care about the color of your skin, but only that you are made
                    whole. When you are afraid they speak with gentle understanding, unmindful
                    of whether you are a prostitute or a priest, for they know well the
                    singular loneliness of fear.

                    The intimate stranger at your side is not only your helper at this time,
                    they may be like your sister or brother, your mother or father, your confessor
                    and your healer. Their caring helps so much in your healing.

                    Emergency Medical Technicians see things, the after images of which will
                    haunt them for the rest of their lives. But they are not hardened monsters.
                    On the contrary, they each carry a courageous and sympathetic heart inside
                    them always, so that when you look into their faces you are looking into
                    the face of human compassion; a human being who still sends a silent prayer
                    each time the siren sounds.

                    And you, the layperson, who lives in the "normal" side of life, in the
                    end will always ask "How can Emergency Medical Technicians bear to do
                    what they do?" "Why do they keep choosing to face the sorrow and the
                     horror day after day?" "How can they continue to care when it hurts so
                    much?"

                    In answer, there is one universal truth about the true giver; Emergency
                    Medical Technicians are able to do what they do because they are rich in
                    the gifts of caring, compassion and love.

                    An EMT prayer..."God, touch me so that when I touch others it will be you
                    touching them".

Wind Beneath My Wings