EMS Voices: Alan Keith

Nashville paramedic Alan Keith has learned a lot during 25 years in EMS: how to assess patients when language barriers rule out communication except gestures and smiles; how to perform invasive procedures in the rain and the dark; how to remove ferrets from drain pipes...
Huh? Let Alan explain:
“I was working Putnam County (east of Nashville) when we get a call for an elderly male, unknown. My partner and I find him in the kitchen, pale and sweaty, looking like he’s having an MI. When I ask him what’s wrong, he points at the sink: there’s this grey thing with a tail sticking out of the drain. The patient tells me his ferret got loose, crawled in there and got stuck. ‘I put some cooking oil on it,” he said, ‘but it didn’t help.’
“The guy was pretty upset, so I moved him out of the kitchen, just as my partner grabbed the hindquarters of that thing and yanked. Out comes the ferret. We did a refusal, although I’m not sure the ferret consented.”
Now in his third year at Gaylord Opryland, a Middle Tennessee resort and entertainment complex, Keith began his EMS career in 1985 as a volunteer at Putnam’s rescue squad. “I was in radio, working at WHUB—‘The Hub’—in Cookeville. It was fun, but I couldn’t see myself sitting behind a microphone forever.”
The highlight of Alan’s radio career may well have been a prank he pulled just before switching to EMS full time.
“I was writing copy for the evening news,” the former disc jockey recalled. “I thought it might be interesting to find out if Sarah, our announcer, was paying attention.”
Alan inserted a phony obituary—Sarah’s—into her on-air copy. “She got three-quarters of the way through before she realized what I’d done. Lucky for both of us it was on tape.”
While Keith considers humor an essential stress-reliever for caregivers, he concedes there’s nothing comical about the toll EMS takes on providers. “I think most of us reach a point when we’re not sure we want to do this anymore. When I felt that way ten years ago, I backed off. I’m glad I kept my medic card because, after a few years working other jobs, I knew EMS is where I wanted to be.”
Ironically, Keith is headquartered next to a radio station. Would he consider a part-time gig? “Only if they let me write the copy.”

Mike Rubin, BS, NREMT-P, is a paramedic in Nashville, TN, and a member of EMS World Magazine’s editorial advisory board. Contact him at mgr22@prodigy.net.