While she was being tended to in the ER, we paramedics waited helplessly in the ER, now knowing the true condition of our fallen comrade, wondering if she was going to die on us, or how we would tell her family if she did die.

Poor Johnny was crying, and Mike T. was visibly shaking. I tried to be supportive of them, but at the same time, my own feelings were threatening to surface. I was a big, bad-ass paramadic/EMT; paramedics never cried, even when a patient died on them.

I was breaking the cardinal rule of paramedicdom: never get involoved with your patients--EVER.

Yet this incident was proving to be one of our most difficult to deal with. This patient was more than a patient: it was a person we happeend to know, a person we have come to love and respect. Patricia Eileen Moss was new to our squad at that time, but she was already proving to be a woman of steel, a woman of integrity, a woman who commanded respect. She loved her work, and she lived for excitement: being an EMT was the perfect job for her; it was everything she could have ever wanted.

Now she lay on a table in the trauma bay of the ER, possibly dying. It was one of the most terrifying moments of my career as a paramedic/EMT.

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Yet she did not die. Patty Eileen Moss survived her injuries. She had a lengthy recovery, but she made it. Within four months of the accident, she was back at work, and she hasn't missed a day since. She has been faithfully at our side, working alongside us, cheering alongside with us whenever we had a save, crying along with us whenever we lost a patient. She was one of the best EMTs we had ever come to know or work with, and now, three years later, she still continues to dazzle us with her bravery, her skills, her courage, her very being.

We got an award from the state of Tennessee and the city of Nashville for saving Patty (and others down the road), and it is one of our more memorable cases we will never forget.

Nowadays whenever we run across a "familiar face", we try to put our true feelings aside and deal with the task at hand: saving that person's life, praying that they make it, praying that we get them to the hospital in time.

Yet on the inside, I still get that same niggling feeling I first got when I first realized that we had a victim that was--well, one of our own.

****************************THE END*************************