Taking meaningful steps

As the clock strikes 12 and we collectively say goodbye (or good riddance) to 2021, I find myself singing this beautiful song over in my head while reminiscing on the year since passed—my first as a newly qualified paramedic (NQP), my first year of ‘experience’. I always reassured myself that with experience would come enlightenment, although I never fully understood exactly how to measure it, or what form it would take when it did arrive…a beaming ray of light from the sky possibly?

This time last year, following successful completion of my paramedic degree, I decided to gift myself a shiny new pair of Leatherman Raptor Shears with personalised engraving, and a sea blue finish—a fine addition to my Batman belt that would signify to all that this NQP ‘meant business’.

Forty-eight hours later, I am crewed with a senior paramedic, and a final year student, hurtling in 365 degrees of blue-light fury towards a ‘category 3’ emergency call for a 25-year-old pizza delivery driver who has taken a tumble in the road at around 10 miles per hour on his moped. This was it, my chance to shine, my first ‘trauma’ call as an NQP—or at least I thought. In my head, I knew what I had to do. I was experienced after all; I read the books, and passed the exams, and I couldn't slip up now, not in front of the student. On arrival, the patient was lying on the ground, alert, orientated, and talking to bystanders in no discernible pain.