Part III of the Bull Sh*t Trilogy

I was getting an education in record time, and I was not impressed with what I was seeing. But soon I was to be granted another lesson, and in this one, something that I did in the interest of promoting the squad, would be perverted into use by my superiors in their ongoing conflict with Randolph County Medical Rescue, the Paramedic service in the county.

In order to understand the relationship of these two organizations, it is necessary to review some history concerning them.

Randolph Counties Rescue Squad was founded in 1963, The same year that I was born. The squad began with perhaps a dozen volunteers and a donated truck. Like most areas of the Nation at this time in history, emergency transportation was provided by funeral homes. The rescue squad was formed not to assume this transportation role, but to provide personnel to participate in land searches and water rescues. They would cut trapped victims Out of wrecked vehicles with the rudimentary hand tools of the time: hacksaws, axes and hammers and chisels. They had a few hours basic training in first aid. No certification was required or at that time, in fact none other than basic first aid was even available.

The combination of volunteer rescue and funeral home transportation, was the standard in much of the country until the passage of new legislation in the late sixties and early seventies which started the birth and growth of the Emergency Medical Technician, and the demise of the funeral home ambulance.

During the years that funeral home ambulances were receding, the Rescue Squad had purchased much more equipment including an ambulance and had began to provide transport in addition to its rescue duties.

The new legislation had set forth standards for ambulances and their personnel which had made it less profitable for the funeral homes to continue to provide ambulance services. Profit alone had been the reason for funeral homes to operate ambulances and before the new laws, all a funeral director needed was a hearse and a warm body who wasn't afraid of cold ones. Once the government required a certain amount of training for ambulance personnel and minimum equipment for the ambulances, the profit diminished, and one by one the funeral homes parked their ambulances.

Randolph County, faced with the need for assuring that its citizens had transportation to the hospital following an illness or injury, and conscious of the fact that a vacuum of need would form faster than any volunteer organization could fill, created Randolph County Ambulance Service in the late sixties. A small fleet of ambulances and a few underpaid, iron stomached people, leftovers from the funeral home services comprised this new organization.

From what I can gather from the few people I have had the good fortune to talk to over the years who were there in those days, the rivalry between Ashe-Rand and Randolph County Ambulance Service was immediate and would continue, with the intensity varying from quiet resentment to verbal firefights and back again, at least up to the time that I left the Squad. I have very little knowledge of the relationship between the two organizations after I resigned.

This was another type of "turf" war. The squad was established first and I suppose by virtue of this fact, they considered themselves the "primary" service in the county. It seems safe to say that they resented the new county funded service.

To be fair, I suppose that in the early years of the county ambulance service, the squad could argue parity with them in many areas of performance and could perform rescue functions as well, the new County ambulance service was for transportation purposes only

Soon however, funded by taxpayer money, the county service could boast a system that first rivaled, and then surpassed the rescue squad in the area of medical response. The county ambulance service personnel were paid and on duty twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. The squad could not guarantee this same continuity of service. The squad however had no inclination to concede what they considered to be their rightful place in Randolph County and this, I believe, was a discredit to them.

The failure of the Rescue Squad to recognize that its day as the primary emergency care provider was over would caused years of needless conflict between the two organizations.

After all, the squad was still the sole provider of heavy rescue services in the county as well as handling calls when all county ambulances were busy and that alone was a great responsibility. I would have thought that this volunteer organization would have welcomed the opportunity to relieve itself the duty of transporting patients since there was now a more efficient and reliable service available. That they did not is a classic example of what usually motivates and sustains the "turf war". Call it what you will:

power hunger, misplaced pride, refusal to change with the times or the basic refusal to acknowledge that someone else can perform a service better or more efficiently than yourself, the net result is the same: the people who are to be served, namely the public, gets lost on the battlefield. Why is it so hard for us as professionals to stay focused on why we exist? When will we learn that we are all on the same side? When this day finally comes, Emergency Services as a whole will take a giant leap forward.

When I joined the Rescue Squad, I learned quickly that the battle with the county service, which had became by this time Randolph County Medical Rescue, was still in full swing although the two organizations attempted a fragile, uneasy truce that was broken only in the offices of the county officials. This had been the reason for the look of disdain in the chiefs eye when I spoke of becoming a Paramedic. I see now that he viewed Paramedics as the enemy arid was not thrilled at one of "his" people becoming one of them.

The verbal battles between the Director of Operations of Randolph County Medical Rescue (RCMR) and the Chief of the Rescue Squad, were so common as to be rarely noteworthy to any but a few. The rest of us on both sides heard the accounts of these skirmishes after they occurred. They made little difference to us in the rank and file and seemed to me to me that the only purpose of these battles was to provide a backdrop for the next one.

I learned early on that in the Rescue Squad, a steady list of complaints concerning RCMR was a necessity, even a sacred tradition by this time. If a valid reason for discord did not readily present itself, then one would be produced regardless of how trivial.

At the time of my entry into the membership of the squad, the current complaint that the Squads Chief and principal officers were touting was that Randolph County Medical Rescue had the word "Rescue" in their name. The Chiefs position was that RCMR did not perform rescue and since they didn't, the word should be removed from the name. Technically the Chief was correct, RCMR was a medical service only, but I was still unable to see how RCMR having the word "Rescue" in their name took anything away from, or did anything to harm the squad.

It was in the midst of this battle that I arrived on the scene and was unwittingly injected into a situation without my consent that fanned the flames of discord.

It started at the Randolph County Library of all of the innocent places. As I have said the squad was established the same year I was born in 1963. In just over a year from the time of my arrival, the squad would have been in service for 25 years. Some type of acknowledgment of this event was planned and I was on the committee charged with proposing ideas as to what would be done to celebrate the squad's quarter century of service.

I went to the library to look through the archives of Asheboros local newspaper to see if I could find any information about the squads formation. I thought I might find some photographs and maybe a few of the names of the early membership. If the founders could be found, I was thinking, it would be great if they could be invited to the event.

I found an article from 1962 announcing the formation of the squad, complete with a photograph of the membership in front of the first truck the squad ever owned. At the time of the article, it was reported that the first members were taking first aid classes and toward the end of the piece the article mention what the squad would be named. The name of the new squad contained the word "Rescue". This last sentence of the article, the one mentioning the word "rescue", would be important, as I would learn.

Feeling very pleased with my efforts (The story had taken several hours to find on microfilm); I attained a copy of the article and went home. Within a couple of days, I showed the article to the chief. I thought he would get a kick out of it, especially since the squad had done little to maintain records of the early days. As the Chief finished the article, a wry smile on his face, he asked if he could have a copy and I readily agreed. I assumed that he just wanted the piece because he was the chief and had a sense of history, as I did. I did not know about the on-going "Rescue in RCMR's name" business, but I had just contributed to the battle without any intention to do so.

Within a week of finding the article and giving a copy to the Chief, there was a meeting of the leaders of all Fire, Rescue and EMS leaders in the county. Every fire department was represented as well as the director of RCMR and, of course, the Chief of the Rescue Squad. This was called the "Chiefs meeting" or "Chiefs Council" I forget which, but it had at that time a reputation for being explosive. This was because many of the chiefs of the different organizations couldn't stand the sight of each other as a result of some past, real or imagined, transgression. Personally I think it was just more "Turf war" nonsense, but in any event these meetings seemed to accomplish little except great stories of the fights that occurred.

The Chief of the squad picked this forum and used a blitzkrieg attack to spring the ammunition that I had unwittingly provided.

I didn't know it at the time but the gist of the argument over the "Rescue" in RCMR's name, came down to a question of who had the word in their name first. No one on either side knew for sure if the Rescue Squad had always been known by its current name or had changed it before Randolph County Ambulance became Randolph County Medical Rescue. The Chief used the article to try to force the county to change the name of its EMS service using the article I had found. He also told the county manager (who also attended these meetings) how he came to have it.

I was not happy that he did this. He knew that I wanted to become a Paramedic and he had to know that I probably wanted to work for RCMR someday. Providing ammunition for the chief of the squad to use against the county and assisting the chief in being pain in the ass of the County EMS administration was not an action that would win me the gratitude of the administration of Randolph County Emergency Services. My career was off and running, I thought. I haven't been an EMT for 2 months and I am already being made to appear as an enemy to the county EMS.

I decided then and there that I would not let this childish " war" again hurt my chances of future employment. This would not happen again. This final development coupled with the other events I had witnessed steeled my resolve to leave the squad as soon as I started classes at GTCC if I decided to continue to pursue my goal of becoming a Paramedic.

I would be lying if I did not say that my experience in my short stay left a" bad taste in my mouth", so much so that I would never join a volunteer organization again. I would teach classes for a few of them, but I knew even then that if I was going to put up with this kind of foolishness, I was damned well going to get paid for it. My career as a volunteer was to be soon over.

Ironically, Randolph County Medical Rescue would change its name a few years later, I don't know why they did this, but they are now called Randolph County Emergency Medical Service.

Up to this point in my fledgling career, I had seen very little that would entice me to continue to strive to make my living in the Emergency Medical Services. The things I had seen and heard thus far had led me to believe that pettiness, stupidity and hypocrisy seemed to be deeply rooted in the very fabric of my proposed profession, with little thought for the reasons that these organizations exist. The ultimate mission of Rescue/EMS systems, which is to serve the public, was far too often not the highest priority. It was becoming increasingly more difficult to maintain my enthusiasm for pressing on in this profession when these facts became clearer each day.

If this weren't enough, events were in my immediate future that would strike me on a personal level and cause great wounds but would also give me a violent push toward becoming certain that I wanted to be a Paramedic.