Who is PrepMedic? (My Complete Career Path)

hey guys my name's sam and welcome to prepmedic this week's video is a rundown of my career this video is not meant to be braggy or egotistical i have two main goals number one i want to put this information out there because i get a lot of questions on social media instagram and youtube and number two i hope it can help inform somebody else's career path looking at what i did and being able to set achievable goals for themselves within public safety [Music] [Music] i struggled in high school i was not the kid that had everything figured out you know i was okay at sports i skied i played lacrosse i was okay academically you know was floating between c's and b's um but i didn't have any passion i didn't really have anything that i was you know super interested in and i really found that academically the only time i would excel was when i could apply real world meaning to what i was being taught as you guys know that's not high school's strong suit finding application to the knowledge they're teaching you a lot of it's just hey you're gonna go to college hey you're gonna you know move on in a very traditional path and i knew pretty early on that that probably wasn't going to be for me so it was a stroke of luck when i was out skiing one day and i wrote up with ski patroller and i was just kind of asking him some questions about what he did first and foremost i thought man i should be first aid certified uh i should know something because whether or not i use that skill it's going to be something that helps me throughout my life whether that my career takes me in that direction or just to have it when a friend injures themselves out on the slope or hiking or something like that the second thing that really spoke to me was the fact that he got free lift tickets and his whole family got free lift tickets so it was essentially a season pass and i saw it as a way to ski a lot and get a little bit of knowledge so i entered into their outdoor emergency care program which is roughly equivalent to an emt back then it was emt basic except it had a really big emphasis on orthopedic injuries so spraying strains and breaks was really the name of the game and of course backboarding we were really good at backboarding people back then we were even doing it with webbing so tie them really tight to that backboard if they had any kind of mechanism of injury to suggest a spinal injury or tenderness you know nowadays we're a little bit more relaxed with that so back on point i spent a number of seasons on ski patrol while i was uh in high school and really found a lot of mentors that were able to push me in the direction of public safety i loved public safety when i started going into it i got my emt basic first and what i found with this course of study was that it was all applicable you weren't sitting through stupid classes that were teaching you things you didn't need to know emt class is very much just what you need to know to be an emt and i love that and i love the knowledge that it gave me so through those same mentors they turned me on to what's called a internship back in wisconsin but other places we'll call it live-in programs so this was a program where i applied at one location and then my application got sent to like five or six fire departments they selected the candidates they wanted and when i got picked up by monona i went and i lived full time at the fire station they had dorm rooms for us they gave us 400 a month for food room and board was covered otherwise and most of our other expenses were covered as well and they paid for emt if you didn't already have it your fire one fire two your paramedic and your associate's degree in fire sciences all while working full time for the fire department that was a great deal because experience is king in any kind of public safety and we could come out of that program with three years of experience in fire rescue under our belts and it was a great thing to do it i enjoyed every second of it and it really taught me a lot about discipline you know all the medical stuff aside it taught me you know how to wake up early how to work out regularly how to clean which a lot of people don't think that's a skill but it absolutely is and it taught me how to cook which is another uh big skill to have especially in the fire service so i got my fire one fire2 started going on fire calls we weren't super high call volume but we had enough where i got to do some interior attacks i got to experience kind of what it was like to be a firefighter and then i got my paramedic and going through paramedic school was eye-opening for me because it went so much more in-depth than emt school and it started to show me what my passion actually was in public safety i started doing my associate's degree in fire sciences shortly after finishing paramedic school and whether it was a maturity thing i wasn't quite there ready to put in the work for a degree or i didn't see the application i just wasn't into it and i started looking for jobs on the side so i was working part-time at deergrove ems as a paramedic i started working prn at town of madison fire rescue to do like event medicine with them and eventually i went to visit a friend out in central iowa who is going to school for engineering saw an ambulance on the side of the road saw that they were a hospital-based system and decided to go talk to one of their paramedics so stopped in at the hospital talked to the paramedic and he had me filling up out an application before i left ended up taking that job and i think i took that as almost an excuse to kind of get out of the degree program at that point so i ended my internship early i got the job out in iowa packed up my things and was moving out there in a couple months so started working for mary greeley and i got insanely lucky so as it turned out mary greeley while it did not and i don't believe it pays well still it had very high performing paramedics and they ran three ambulances they did 9-1-1 for the city of ames for the entire and for most of story county they also did all of the transfers in and out of mary greeley medical center so that was from bls return homes all the way up to critical care balloon pump transports down to des moines they also did the event madison for isu so we did football games basketball games i went to see dave chappelle for free working first aid for that event and then the most important part of that and what really gave me perspective into medicine and how much more there was was we could work in the er so we could go help them out we could intubate in the er if the physician was okay with it we could go up on the floor and run in-house codes because we were some of the most experienced in that small hospital we could also go to cath and watch procedures follow anesthesia so there was a lot of experiences we could have within this job and it really introduced me to all the different facets of uh ems and taught me a ton on top of that we were very high performing paramedics so we had you know rsi we had really large protocols a lot of trust from our medical director and we had to problem solve because it was a good mix of urban and rural environments so at one point you'd be taking a drunk college kid into the er the next it would be somebody's arm stuck in an auger so we got a lot of experience in that realm now while i was there about maybe two or three years into my career at mary greeley i noticed that neither swat team in the area so we had story county ert and we had fort collins swat neither one had any medical personnel on their teams they had some ifacts but they weren't standardized they didn't know how to use all their supplies and they didn't have anybody going in that was really designated as the medical provider we would stage outside we had plate carriers on the ambulance but we were not active participants in any of their uh warrants raids or call outs so i saw that as a community opportunity and i started talking to a lot of the deputies in particular and discussing medical items i would give them tourniquets i would show them how to use them i'd put together kits for them if they needed it helped a couple of them uh get things into their cars so that they could help respond to a variety of different situations and through those contacts i made they told me about the reserve deputy program which is a volunteer program within the sheriff's office where they train you over the course of months and put you through a reserve deputy academy you're a certified law enforcement officer in the state of iowa and then you get in basically ride along with them or even go through another step of training and go solo in a patrol car with all the rights and responsibilities of a full law enforcement officer the only thing we weren't allowed to do is implied consent which has to do with uh duis essentially not for you medical people watching it's not the implied consent of an unresponsive patient or anything like that so it started to do that with the main goal of getting on their emergency response team that was the swat team with the county and it took me about a year i went through the application the tryout process for that and ended up getting brought on to ert as an entry team member and filling the role of team medic so that was where i really got my start in tactical medicine i hadn't had much experience in that i had gone through like one tac med course i paid for out of my own pocket before that but really did not know what that job entailed and that was really cool because i got to learn the law enforcement side you know i was fully armed had all the responsibilities of anybody else on the team so would do that but then they also sent me to a couple tech med schools that i could really learn from as well as the basic swat school and started to do that with him now i'm not going to pretend that i was you know a crazy badass operator you know hitting doors every day we were very low call volume it was rural iowa after all however we trained a lot and then we still got a fair share of call outs and got to do some pretty cool things with them and then hone my craft uh in that realm now about the same time i met my wife and she got into medical school we moved south a little bit but i stayed working at mary greeley and the sheriff's office and she made me a deal that if she got into medical school i would also go back and get my bachelor's degree so i enrolled in a bachelor's program in homeland security and emergency management through jacksonville state university and started working through that online while she was in medical school now the goal was always to finish that by the time she finished medical school in four years but uh that timeline did not quite work out how i wanted it to so it ended up taking me about five and a half years to finish with my bachelor's degree so she finished medical school and got a residency out in colorado which is where she is from originally and of course i was going to follow her so i started looking at different jobs out in colorado what would fit for me and what would allow me to progress in my career and stay working as a swat medic and i found a hospital-based agency in northern colorado that i thought had a lot of potential so it wasn't the biggest it wasn't the highest paying even though they did pay a fair wage and got on with them got through training and that really opened my eyes to more ems environments than i had been exposed to so as opposed to the dual medic system i was running in iowa this was single medic so we were medic emt instead of having a stationary street corner post and the call volume was much higher than i was used to so it was a complete 180 from where i came from now i will say that the scope of practice was slightly reduced but the medicine was completely different i wasn't wasn't used to the kind of rural calls we'd go to in the rocky mountains and then the kind of inner city calls we'd run uh in our primary response district so it was really a cool transition for me and i really enjoyed it so after working with this agency for about a year i got on with their special operations response team they call it thames now and this team was really unique because they attached medics to two relatively high call volume swat teams they also sent medics with search and rescue which did high angle and low angle rescue as well as dive team and then you also could deploy two fire lines as a fire line medic if a wildfire popped up either in your jurisdiction or throughout the state and a request came in for you so that opened up my eyes to a lot of the rural medicine you know in iowa we had corn fields but we never really had remote access medicine like we do in the rocky mountains so the response territory for this team is astronomically large and we've i found myself treating patients for hours in the middle of nowhere in very resource limited environments so that i think was the biggest uh change for me the other change was the swap medics we are not armed with them we're not sworn so we're kidded up we go with them uh but our primary responsibility is not as a shooter or entry team member we are purely uh medics for them so a little bit of a different environment i did that for a period of time i'm still on that team um but through a couple years on the streets i decided to pursue an educational opportunity within the service and i took a job as an educational lieutenant we called it a clinical mentor so my job was to go around in a fly car and meet up with crews on the street corner we do cqis with their reports we do case reviews with them on cardiac arrest and some other instances and then we deliver some other educational uh opportunities uh when they popped up periodically so that was a cool position but it was probably the hardest thing i'd ever done you know i had never been able to show up to work in you know khaki pants at you know nine in the morning set my own schedule i've never had to track things like i did then you know use excel spreadsheets and spend time behind a desk and it wasn't long before i realized that that's not where i wanted to stay i wanted to go back into clinical medicine and throughout this i was still picking up shifts on the street i was still you know working on the special operations response team but i wanted something a little bit different and that's when i saw a position open up in our agency's south region for a flight medic position and i applied for it now i failed in that application i was number two in the lineup for it but somebody with more experience than i did that interviewed better than me ended up getting the job and that really kicked my butt into gear so i realized that that was one of my big goals and it was something that i was willing to work for so i went back and i got my flight paramedic certification i finished my bachelor's degree and then just started getting as much critical care classes under my belt as possible i went through the creighton critical care course prior to completing my fpc i did a couple prep courses and i started to interface with the flight medics and nurses within my agency and that really helped me for the second time around where a position opened in the north region where i was familiar with i applied for that position and got hired so that was about two years ago now i got hired as a flight flight paramedic the training for that was about six months long and was probably one of the biggest learning curves i've ever experienced within uh ems you know the diversity of calls that we have on the helicopter is so much more than i ever imagined coming from the ground side so you know we have our scene calls we've got our you know mountain rescues where we're going up for a bad car accident in the canyon or we're flying out east for a guy stuck in an auger you know intercepting with ambulances coming from the north region things like that but then we also have our critical care transport so we're taking patients on impellas on balloon pumps we'll take ecmo by ground critical care if we get those we're taking a lot of intubated patients that have very complex metabolic issues coming into play and it really took me about a year year and a half to start actually feeling comfortable in this role and through that you know i took a couple more prep classes i've attended a lot of different trainings and mainly i have sought out the nurses that i work with that are used to the critical care hospital environment with things like balloon pumps and pellesonecmos and started to pick their brains and what's really cool about our group is that we're very small and we all come from different aspects of medicine so everybody has something to teach and you can learn a lot in that environment now i'm about two years into it i'm still working on the tactical ems team through the ground side i still pick up shifts on ground just to keep low use skills such as iv starts that we just don't do that much in the helicopter you know up to par and to really keep that ground experience but my primary job is that of a flight paramedic i do 24 hours on the helicopter and then i do 24 hours on our ground critical care truck every week so it gives me a lot of diversity uh in call volume in this region since then i have slowed down on the professional goals a little bit and have been focusing more on being a father i've got an eight-month-old son and my wife is super super busy with her residency getting ready for fellowship so a lot of my focus and time has been taken up with that and being a dad has really proven to be one of the most rewarding and most challenging things i have ever done throughout my career but in the future i'm not quite sure what i want to do i'm very happy where i am but i don't have anything like set in stone that this is where i want to go with it i think the next step is going to be growing pragmatic starting maybe doing some consulting uh doing some more video work and interfacing with other professionals within the public safety realm because i think there's a lot of stories that are really cool have really cool paths that can give people a good understanding of the different things you can do in this realm and while i am prevalent on youtube and have a big following my career path is not anywhere close to you know the coolest the most intense the most unique there are a ton of people with experience very similar to my own and very different so i hope to bring that to you guys in a video format you know i love videography if i ever got injured on the job and couldn't fly anymore i think this is where i would go with it that's a pretty good summary of everything i've been doing over the past 12 years so if you have any questions or comments leave them in the comments down below and i will see you next week [Music] you

Channel: PrepMedic

Views: 94,162

Keywords: Paramedic, Prepmedic, Medic, Flight medic, flightmedic, Flight paramedic, emt, Prep medic, prep, prepare, career, Firefighter, flight nurse, tacmed, tactical medic, swat med, swat, swat medic, Ambulance, first aid, day in the life, career path, how did I get here, medicine, nursing

Id: cadgCXBOpB0

Length: 20min 46sec (1246 seconds)

Published: Sun Aug 21 2022