EMS Voices: Debbie Coats

As a landscaper in 1990, Debbie Coats had no idea she’d be spending the next 20 years treating patients. Or fighting fires. Or rescuing parakeets.
“I’d been with Metro (Nashville’s fire department) about two years when a call came in for a bird in a tree,” Coats says. “I know—that sounds like a bird doing what birds do best, but it was a pet bird that had gotten out of its cage. As our crew was putting a ladder up against the tree, that bird took off, flew right into the truck and knocked itself out. It started to come around when the owner took it home.”
During seven years as a Nashville firefighter, Debbie has done a lot more than retrieve wayward house pets. With a dual fire/EMS mission, Coats can’t be certain which skill set she’ll need when the tones go off. “About three years ago we were dispatched to a seizure in a car,” Debbie remembers. “When we got there it was a little more complicated than that: The driver had hit a house. Oh, and the car was engulfed.”
The three-person crew—Debbie, the captain and engineer —quickly donned turnout gear, pulled the still-seizing patient from the burning vehicle, then extinguished the fire. The car was the only casualty. “Sometimes you get mentally prepared for a fire and it’s more of an EMS call, or vice-versa,” Coats explains.
The Leipers Fork, TN native began her rescue career in 1991 as a dispatcher for Williamson County. Within a year she was also volunteering as a firefighter and EMT-IV, an intermediate certification that includes a subset of paramedic-level medication administration and airway management. By then she’d been married to Jerrol, a Franklin FD lieutenant, for four years, and had to leave her county job to take care of their children. “My husband was pursuing the career we both wanted,” Coats confides. She continued to volunteer, then joined NFD in 2004.
Debbie acknowledges differences in fire and EMS culture. “Fighting fires requires a mind-set that isn’t the same for EMS,” she says, “There are egos on both sides that sometimes cause friction.” Coats believes fixing that problem is a work in progress. She and Jerrol did their part last September when they climbed the equivalent of 110 stories as part of a regional exercise to honor firefighters who’d lost their lives at Ground Zero nine years earlier. The couple chose to represent EMT Mark Schwartz, in addition to FDNY lieutenant Kevin Pfeifer. “Those who died didn’t let job descriptions get in the way of what they had to do,” Coats states.
Spoken like a woman with more than one mission.
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.