The selfless emergency responders of the future?
This is Katie Pastorius and I am back on blog duty while Rhona is busy changing the world!
In conducting interviews for an emergency response article on the Mississippi bridge collapse, I discovered some amazing people (as I am sure you find after tragic disasters of any scale). Their story is important because it highlights medical student’s response as community members, not MD’s on call or at the hospital. I think they are a great example of the type of people we need in medicine and allow us to reflect on our own actions as medical students in the community.
There are many of heroes that arise in any tragedy. Their stories are heart-warming and it is immediately apparent in talking to them that they are concerned and sympathetic individuals. Medical students, Nicole Kopari and Missie Wayne, responded to this tragic event with a sense of calm that they received from their training. Nicole Kopari said, “You go into this mode of helping people. I didn’t even look at the bridge.”
During my interview with Nicole, she explained that her training could not have provided additional help in preparing for this situation: “It is who we are as people that made us want to go to the front of the scene and help out. What we need are more people like that in medicine,” she said. Her modest, mature, and compassionate response is exactly what we need in medicine. She admitted that she “felt silly” receiving attention for doing something she hoped many people in her shoes would have done.
Her comment made me reflect: what would I have done if I were in her shoes? Nicole and Missie were at home eating dinner, exhausted, and still wearing their scrubs after a long day rotating on the hospital wards. Upon hearing the news of the collapse, would I have taken off running to the scene like they did? I admire all the heroes: bystanders, who were there by chance, as well as firefighters, police, and EMTs, who were there on a routine call. Overall, they saved dozens of lives because they cared. I hope I would have done the same. Would you?