By Sandy Wells
Charleston Gazette
Copyright 2006 Charleston Newspapers
CHARLESTON, W.Va. — As long as he can remember, ever since he was a boy playing with toy ambulances and firetrucks and watching “Emergency” on TV, Jimmy Stephens knew what he wanted to be. He is happily living his lifelong dream.
A volunteer ambulance dispatcher at age 16, he graduated to EMT, then to paramedic and worked 12 years as a firefighter and paramedic for the city. He got an associate degree in nursing and worked in three CAMC emergency rooms. When the county introduced its critical-care transport program in 1998, he raced to the front of the application line. Today, he’s a critical-care transport nurse based in Nitro.
At 43, he’s working on a bachelor’s degree in nursing, a step that takes him closer to his ultimate goal: nursing anesthesia.
He’s calm, comfortable and quietly confident in the roles that evolved from boyhood aspiration.
“I grew up when the TV show ‘Emergency’ was real popular. A lot of the older people in EMS grew up in that time, and that’s how they got involved in it.
“On TV, they ran more emergencies in 60 minutes than we do in 24 hours. It’s not all lights and sirens and life-threatening emergencies. You might not do anything for 24 hours, and there are days when we’ve put 1,000 miles on the ambulance in 24 hours. You can’t predict it.
“Watching TV now, I know what’s fake. On a lot of shows, they save everybody. That’s not the way it is. You lose a lot. The dramas like ‘ER’ paint an unrealistic picture. You can spot it right off the bat. People who don’t have a lot of knowledge, it gives them false hope.
“We deal with everything. I could be running a heart attack in a million-dollar home, and the next minute, I could be in a housing project running a shooting or stabbing. We deal with millionaires to street people and everything in between. I try to treat everybody with the same respect.
“Weekends are busier than weekdays, but Monday day shifts are always busy for some reason. Attempted suicides increase on holidays. I ran a suicide one Halloween. A gentleman decided to put a shotgun under his chin. It looked like something right out of a horror movie, walking in there. That was memorable because it was Halloween. Psychiatric emergencies are common.
“We run a lot of chest pains. West Virginians are prone to cardiac events. We get a lot of violent crimes. I was shot at three times when I worked for the city. We were responding to a shooting on the West Side one time, and the individuals who did the shooting shot at us as they passed us. I guess they figured if they shot us, it would prevent us from helping the people they shot.
“We had one car wreck that I still think about every day. It was over on MacCorkle Avenue. An elderly lady was dead on the scene. Three children were dead. The mother died in the hospital. And there were three or four other patients to take care of.
“Things can get chaotic, but we are trained to make sense out of it. It’s a team effort. No one person on the ambulance is more important than the other person. You have to be a team for everything to work right.
“We like to say that once we get there, the emergency is over. We’re expected to handle it. You have to desensitize yourself from the emotions. If you get upset, you aren’t going to be able to help the people you are there to help. I’ve never really felt stressed. I’m a laid-back person.
“You really get to help people, even if it’s just talking to someone on the way to the hospital. A lot of times you get to see that you’ve made a difference. I’ve had a few stop by the station to thank us.
“One night when I was working for the city, my partner and I resuscitated a Doberman pinscher. The firefighters had pulled this Doberman out of a house fire on the West Side. He was lying on the ground unconscious, barely breathing. His tongue was blue from lack of oxygen. We carried him to the ambulance and put him on the cot and administered oxygen and got permission from our supervisors to transport him to the emergency vet clinic in Spring Hill. By the time we got there, he was awake and looking around. I felt good about that one.
“Most people do this because they enjoy it. I guess it’s something that gets into your blood. I could go work in a hospital now, but I enjoy this. I like the challenges.
“I’ve got a picture of me when I was 6 wearing a fireman’s hat. My dad and my brothers-in-law used to take me to the fire station to look at the trucks, and I got toy firetrucks and ambulances for Christmas.
“I quit school when I was 18. I was bored. I got my GED and immediately went to work as a dispatcher for the Kanawha County Dispatch Center in Charleston, the precursor to Metro 911. When I was 16, I was a volunteer dispatcher for Valley Ambulance at Alloy, so I’d already been trained.
“I got my EMT card and started volunteering for the Cedar Grove Volunteer Fire Department and Ambulance Service. In 1984, I went to paramedic class. My first job as a paid paramedic was at the Marmet Fire Department. I went to work for Kanawha County Ambulance in 1985.
“I worked for the city of Charleston for 12 years, starting in 1990 as a paramedic. When the fire departments took over the ambulances in 1996, they cross-trained me as a firefighter.
“Now I’m going to WVU Tech, trying to get my bachelor’s in nursing. I’m already an associate degree nurse. I’m paid better than the average paramedic. That’s why I went to nursing. EMTs and paramedics are some of the lowest paid health-care professionals out there, and that’s a shame because they do a very important job.
“I’m a critical-care transport nurse. In ’98, Kanawha County started a critical-care transport program. I think I’m the last of the original nurses they hired. They hired nurses for the ambulances to give a continuity of nursing care from hospital to hospital. We will go to rural hospitals and get critical patients and transport them to major hospitals like CAMC. Or we will take patients from CAMC to the Cleveland Clinic or to Pittsburgh to a higher level of care.
“We do skills most emergency services don’t do. We’re allowed to do surgical airways and give different types of medications, things like that. Our ambulance has things other ambulances don’t have. We have more capabilities. We have an onboard ventilator just like in the hospital. And our monitors are a little different.
“I also work part time at the new Health Net base they put in at Portsmouth, Ohio. They call in the helicopters when someone’s really critical. On critical-care ambulance transports, we transport the same type of people the flight people get, but we have them for a much longer time. Say Welch to Charleston is two hours, but it’s only a 30-minute flight. If they can’t fly because of the weather or something, we go get them.
“I won’t get a raise here with a bachelor’s degree, but it will give me other options if I want to go into nurse practitioner or nurse anesthesia school. Down the line, I’d like to go to nurse anesthesia school. I’d be working in a hospital. I’d miss this. I’d probably have to volunteer somewhere.
“There’s not much I haven’t done. I’ve worked all three ERs at CAMC, trauma at General, cardiac at Memorial and pediatrics at Women and Children’s. I worked a year or more in surgical ICU, so I have a wide variety of experience.
“Here, we work 24 hours on and 48 hours off. We work an average of 10 days a month unless there’s overtime. When there’s nothing going on, we read, nap, watch TV and play on the computer. When I’m off, I like to fish and play guitar and read. I actually look forward to coming to work. A lot of people can’t say that.”