I’ve used this column in the past to highlight important people in my life, especially my immediate family members, including my wife and my two best friends, both now deceased. But I also have another best friend, one who is thankfully still living, named Marty.
Marty and I met when he joined our volunteer fire department after getting his license as a paramedic. He had started his volunteer career with another department, but they weren’t currently running emergency calls and we were.
Marty’s day job was as a health department division director, but his heart obviously called him to dedicate his free time to helping other people and to make a major commitment to emergency services work.
When you joined a fire department or rescue squad in the 1970s or ‘80s, you signed over every aspect of your life, nearly every minute of your free time and a huge portion of your family’s lives, too.
Marty and I soon became best friends, being the only two advanced life support providers in our company. We decided between ourselves that we would split our coverage area into two halves, each taking overnight calls in our districts as much as we possibly could.
If that sounds like an overwhelming commitment to make to a volunteer organization, it was, and which dozens of our fellow first responders made alongside us.
Marty and I, and our fire department brothers and sisters, rolled ourselves out of our warm beds in the middle of the night to respond to car wrecks, house fires, heart attacks, strokes and dozens of other life-threatening emergencies nearly every week. And that was in addition to the emergency calls we ran on weekends, vacations, holidays and nearly every other time on the calendar.
We used to call each other on the phone when we were working to discuss fire company business, bounce ideas off of each other or just to decompress after a middle of the night call.
When we were at the station, while other guys checked the trucks, the hose and the equipment, Marty and I were busy checking over the ambulances. We wanted to ensure that we had enough wound supplies, burn sheets and emesis basins ready to go, that the defibrillator was working, airways were on board, backboards stored and the drug box locked.
We needed to make those checks because when the ambulance pulled up on an emergency scene, we might be called on to start an intravenous line (IV), administer life-saving drugs, run an EKG or even defibrillate a patient whose heart had stopped beating. In those cases, our preparations were life-saving.
After we transported our patients to the hospital, we made our reports to the doctors and nurses, completed our paperwork, restocked the supplies, picked up new drug boxes, returned to our station, did our internal paperwork and locked the station door. Only then could we return to living our not-so-normal lives.
Marty and I were the only medics in our department for many years before we got any help. A paid medic from an urban county bought a house in our coverage area, and one of our members graduated from the new paramedic class to ease our burden of being the Lone Rangers.
We were sometimes players in many dramas within our organization — internal debates and struggles — but we were always on the same side. Marty was always able to provide a more technical, more articulate slant to our discussions with our fellow firemen than me, which was tough to do sometimes.
Marty and his wife, also an EMT, injected some new life into our company by volunteering to begin a program of third-party billing for ambulance runs. It proved to be a huge success by bringing in new income for us and making Marty the most valued member in our organization.
After Marty and I got too old to continue chasing a young person’s spirit, he suffered a personal tragedy when he lost his beloved wife to COPD — chronic obstructive pulmonary disease — which was also a profound loss for all of us.
Marty and I drifted apart after I got remarried and moved to another coverage area, but I continue to call him my friend, and I will forever sing his praises as one of the most committed, most skilled volunteers I have ever had the pleasure of working alongside.
Thank you buddy; you’re one of the good guys!