The Bobby Bones Show - Episode 5: Answering the Call

Episode Date: June 9, 2020

For Emergency Medical Technicians (EMTs), the coronavirus is only the latest chapter in a vocation that requires constant vigilance. Meet Kyle Robillard, an EMT/Fireman/Sports Doctor, who tells us how multi-tasking tends to be a way of life for emergency responders, even as the stakes become more personal. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Among all professionals that keep working throughout the COVID-19 crisis, none may be as widely commended as those who work in the medical field. In places hit hard like Manhattan, the city erupts every night in applause at 7 p.m., showing gratitude for the work of health professionals. Well, that applause echoes throughout the rural areas of the country as well, where medical workers like EMTs stay busy serving their communities and adapting to changing times. If you call 911 after you take a fall,

or maybe you see someone having trouble breathing, the people who show up in the ambulance are emergency medical technicians or EMTs. And if you're an EMT in the city of Rutland, Vermont, you can expect those calls to start rolling in the moment your 8 a.m. shift starts. When the emergency line rings, it's a distinctive bell, and a loud buzzer, it'll wake the dead. And that's what it's intended to do. It's very loud, very obnoxious.

This is Kyle Robillard. He's 32, and he's an advanced EMT at regional ambulance in Rutland, Vermont. One of the busiest ambulance services in the state of Vermont, it's not uncommon for the department in a 24-hour period to run over 30 calls for service. The calls can be for anything. Car accidents, helping an elderly person who's fallen down, cardiac arrest.

Kyle says he has people call even if they have a bloody nose. So you don't know what's coming when you're working at the ambulance, but you know something is coming. Regional ambulance is a building right next to the local hospital. It's got a long garage with seven ambulances at the ready. And when the alarm goes off, a dispatcher in the office picks up and that call blares over an intercom system throughout the building. Telling us the who, what, where, when, and why the need of service. So you can start to get a sense of what the call is. The EMTs go out in pairs.

So Kyle and his partner will hear what the call is and judge what they need to go on scene. And if they know that it isn't as serious, they'll know that they don't have to blow through traffic to get there. But if it's something like a heart attack, they move quick. So we'll get out to the ambulance. We'll get in. We'll sign on with the hospital. Let them know what we're going to because it's important to let the hospital know

like what to expect, especially if it's a significant incident. They want to start to prepare rooms and space and have resources available. Each EMT is trained to drive the ambulance, so they'll decide who's driving and who's in the back with the patient. Sometimes the call is severe enough. We're both in the back, and we call in another crew to drive for us. If it's an easy call, like a nosebleed, if my partner's a basic EMT, I'll let them take the call in. And if it's something that requires a little more care, I step in, so it's situational. They also do a lot of transfers, so if a patient can't get what they need at the Rutland Hospital,

Kyle's team might bring them to nearby Dartmouth or Boston. He's even gone as far as Buffalo, New York, an eight-hour drive. Regardless of what the call is, as soon as you clock in, being an EMT keeps you on your toes. Three years into the job, that's why Kyle likes it. Somebody who's been doing this for over 20 years, who's been to hundreds of thousands of calls, probably wouldn't mind a slower day. And you can't blame them either, you know. A career of service, you're going to see a lot of stuff.

But right now, I love going to work. I love putting on the uniform and tackling whatever comes down the pipeline. And at the end of the day, you're probably physically exhausted, but you can look back your day and say, I did something today. Oh, yeah. Yep, there's never a day where I left. I'm like, oh, man, I didn't get much accomplished here. Being an EMT is actually Kyle's part-time job.

Full-time, he's also a firefighter here in Rutland, where he was born and raised. In his senior year of high school, a friend of his started volunteering at a fire department nearby, and it was the first time Kyle had heard that was an option at 18. My father was a fireman at the time, and my uncle was also a fireman. One time at dinner, I approached my dad about the thought of joining the volunteer department. His dad totally supported it. So Kyle went into the family business, which is really not in common for firefighters. A lot of people in Rutland, it's a generational family thing, but in every fire department

across the country, you'll see sons stepping in after their fathers or their mothers and daughters doing the same thing. So he started going in once a week in training. Soon he was answering a pager he carried everywhere and going into calls with the department. One time jumping up from dinner at a restaurant when he was 19 to respond to a raging fire. His dad said was a fire you might see every 30 years.

Yeah, my heart was in my throat. I didn't really know what to expect. I remember seeing the huge glow in the sky and just being like, holy shit, holy shit, holy shit. Just before you know it, 12 hours has gone past, you're tired, you're soaking wet, you're hungry, but in a blink of an eye, the 12 hours is gone, and you've been at that fire the whole time. After high school, he went to college and got his degree in sports medicine, while he was still working as a firefighter part-time.

In college, he was learning a lot about injury mitigation and physical rehab, and he saw how much that could apply to his work as an emergency responder. And then there was a EMT class being offered in Rutland in the evenings, and it worked with my schedule really well. He thought, This will be great training to have. It ties into firefighting. It ties into his work as an athletic trainer. This seems like too much work, but are you doing any of that as well on the side? Yeah.

The last three winters, I was traveling with the United States Junior Luge team. Wow. Yeah, that was an unbelievable experience. I was able to travel Europe with the Luce team and practice sports medicine. It was unbelievable. That's all. You're working a lot. Are you a workaholic?

Yeah, to a fault. it's partially by nature. I think the fire department job, because our schedule is we work 24 hours, then we have 48 hours off. We tend to fill that void productively. There was a time where I was mismanaging my time very poorly. I've had to make some changes and adjust my work schedule, so I'm not working all the time. Kyle's dad was the same way. Always had another job.

So three years ago, it wasn't all out of the question that Kyle would pick up a second line of work. Especially how complimentary the skill. sets are. We very much run a lot of calls with the EMS department and vice versa. So it was a very natural transition to slide into doing that job as well. Over the last 15 years wearing all these hats, Kyle's got a pretty impressive skill set. He's got plenty of room for upward mobility, and more importantly, he really cares about his job. He's a guy you want showing up when you call 911. But in 2020, the calls that Kyle gets as an EMT shed light on some of the harsh realities of rural America. And when you work in the place you grow up, a lot of those calls hit home.

Talking to some of my bosses who were paramedics back in the 80s, you know, they were doing a lot of the normal stuff you would think, cardiac arrest and motor vehicle accidents. The job description has definitely shifted. More on Kyle's story after the break. A strong work ethic takes pride in a job well done. sweats over the details this is you but to get an honest day's work you need a response

you need a callback you need a job express employment professionals can help because we understand what it takes to get a job it takes more than just online searches to land a job it takes someone who will identify your talents a person invested in your success at express we can even complete your application

with you over the phone. We'll prepare you for interviews and will connect you to the right company. Plus, we'll never charge a fee to find you a job. At Express, we can put you to work with companies of all sizes and industries from the production floor to the front office. Express knows jobs. Get to No Express. Express. Find your location at ExpressPros.com or on the Express Jobs app. In 2014, an article ran in the New York Times. It was titled A Call to Arms on a Vermont Heroin epidemic. The article focused on Rutland, where Kyle's from and where he's now in EMT. In the last few decades, heroin found its way to rural areas all over the country, and Rutland got hit hard. When I was a kid, I always thought heroin and drugs of the similar nature were big city

drugs. Like, that's not up here. I felt insulated to it. It's everywhere. I've never seen anything like it. There's a lot of prescription pill abuse too, something that really wasn't as prominent even 30 years ago. And the thing with people who tend to abuse drugs like that, they do it over and over again. So you have a lot of repeat calls.

Yeah, a lot of people we know on a first name basis. In places like this, where people live a little farther apart than they do in cities, it's less densely populated, the problem can be hard to see. When that New York Times article came out, A lot of people here were shocked.

They didn't know that an epidemic was happening right where they lived. It's far more widespread than you think. I'm sure you know somebody. One of my close friends, he and I shared the same birthday. He was born two minutes ahead of me. He passed away this winter. From an overdose? Yep.

You know, it's awful. Kyle's right. I do know someone. One of my best friends growing up. The great thing about living in a small town is everyone knows everyone. There's a real sense of community. But when something happens to someone in that community, they can make it that much harder. Because Kyle's lived in Rutland all his life, he knows that when a call comes in,

there's a good chance that he'll know who he's going to help. Remember when I talked about I was bad at time management and I wear a lot of hats? Well, I was doing carpentry also. Sure. One of our coworkers was a heroin addict. I would have to bring him to the methadone clinic before going to the job site in the morning. Then, one day while he was working at the firehouse, he got a call to respond to an overdose. The address sounded really familiar, and I was like, please don't be this person's house.

Please don't be this person's house. We drove by his apartment. I was like, thank God. But then we pull up to this other apartment. I see this individual's dogs outside the door, and I'm like, oh, fuck. He was inside, unconscious. They did chest compressions on him, and they gave him Narcan, which is a nasal spray that can help reverse an opioid overdose. After that, he woke up.

He was alive, incoherent, but it was my coworker. But two days later, he was back at the job site. Like, nothing happened. We didn't speak of it, you know? Really? Yep. That's one of the things I fear is going to an overdose of somebody, I know. I ask Kyle if calls like that way on him.

If the things he sees on the job as an EMT overshadowed the reasons he got into it. I try not to think that way. I don't want to become jaded. I just, my goals when I go to work are to make my partner's life easier. Try and help as many people as I'm called upon to help and then try and make the station a little bit cleaner, a little bit nicer than when I found it.

If I can do those three things, I've had a good shift. Do you like your job as an EMT? Yeah, I like it a lot. The shifts fly by. I look at the quack and I'm like, oh man, I've only got like an hour left. It's very rewarding work. Never leave feeling deflated like I didn't do anything. What would you say to someone who's interested in becoming an EMT?

I'd say if you like a challenge, if you like continuing learning, and if you like being busy, it's a great career opportunity. starting from this career you can become a physician assistant you can become a flight medic you can take this education wherever you want to which is awesome when I ask Kyle what his favorite part of the job is

he says he loves working with the elderly population he says that they show a lot of gratitude he especially likes those longer transfers they'll do sometimes from hospital to hospital for going to Burlington which is an hour and 45 to two hours away Dartmouth which is over an hour

You can either spend a time with your nose in the computer right in your report or you can get to know the person, you know, in the backseat with you. And sometimes they have pretty incredible stories. In a lot of cases, he helps out those same elderly people multiple times. They get to know each other by name. And that's the other side of this work and doing it in a small town. You get to be the person that someone trusts they'll see when they ask for help. You're doing your job, but you're not just a uniform.

I think sometimes in this profession and others similar to it, you forget you're dealing with people not too dissimilar from yourself. So anytime I'm in the back seat, I like to talk to them, get a little bit of their backstory and get to know them by name. You know, talk to them like I'd be talking to my brother or like I'm talking to you right now. You can have a great conversation with somebody. And I think that goes, I think that goes a long way with people. For on the job, I'm Otis Gray. Thanks for listening to On The Job, brought to you by Express Employment Professionals. This season of On The Job is produced by Audiation and Red Seat Ventures.

The episodes are written and produced by me, Otis Gray. Our executive producer is Sandy Smallins. The show is mixed by Matt Noble for Audiation Studios at the loft in Bronxville, New York. Music by Blue Dut Sessions. Find us on IHeart Radio and Apple Podcasts. If you liked what you heard, please consider rating and reviewing the show on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen. We'll see you next time for more inspiring stories about making yourself essential as you discover your life's work. Service opens doors, and at American Military University, it can open doors for the whole family.

If you have a loved one who served in the military, you may qualify for reduced tuition. AMU offers flexible online programs designed to fit your schedule so you can keep moving forward wherever life takes you. Learn more at AMU. APUS. Dot APUS.edu slash military. Open doors to the future for you and your family with the help of American Military University. That's AMU. APUS.

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Call 562-314-4603 for complete details. This is an I-Heart podcast. Guaranteed Human.