Who is PrepMedic? (My Complete Career Path)

Hi guys, my name is Sam and welcome to

prepmedic

. This week's video is a summary of my

career

. This video is not intended to be boastful or selfish. I have two main goals, number one. I want to post this information because I get a lot of questions. on social media instagram and youtube and number two, I hope that I can help inform someone else's

career

path

by seeing what I did and being able to set achievable goals for themselves within public safety. I had problems in high school. He wasn't the kid who had everything figured out.

You know I was good at sports, I skied, I played lacrosse, I was good academically, you know, I was floating between C and B, um, but I didn't have any passion, I didn't really have anything that I was very interested in and I really found that academically the only time Where I could excel was when I could apply real world meaning to what I was being taught, since you know that's not the strong suit of high school, finding application to the knowledge they're teaching you is just Hey, you're going to going to college, hey, you're going to follow a very traditional

path

and I knew from the beginning that that probably wasn't going to be for me, so it was a stroke of luck when I got out.

I was skiing one day and I wrote to Ski Patroller and was asking him some questions about what he did in the first place, I thought, man, he should be certified in first aid. 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 my career takes me in that direction or just having it when a friend gets hurt on the slope or hiking or something like that. The second thing that really caught my attention 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 gain a little knowledge, so I got into their care program.

Outdoor emergency, which is roughly equivalent to a paramedic back then, was a basic emergency service, except it had a big emphasis on orthopedic injuries, so spraying out strains and tears was really the name of the game and of course , we were very good at supporting people back then, we were even doing it. with straps, so tie them very tightly to the board if they had any type of injury mechanism that would suggest spinal injury or tenderness. You know, nowadays we're a little more relaxed about it, so I got back to the point, spent several seasons. In ski patrol while I was 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 getting into it. First I got my basic EMT and what I found. this course of study was that it was all applicable, you weren't sitting in stupid classes that taught you things you didn't need to know, the emt class is just what you need to know to be a paramedic and I love that. I love the knowledge that it gave me, so through those same mentors they took me to what's called an internship in Wisconsin, but in other places we'll call it intern programs, so this was a program that I applied to at a place and then My application was sent to five or six fire departments, they selected the candidates they wanted and when Monona picked me up I went and lived full time at the fire station, they had dormitories for us, they gave us 400 a month to meal. room and board were covered otherwise and most of our other expenses were covered too and they paid for the emt if you didn't already have it your fire one, your fire two, your paramedic and your associate's degree in fire science, all while working full time for the fire department, that was great because experience is king in any type of public safety and we were able to come out of that program with three years of fire rescue experience under our belt and it was a great thing do it.

I enjoyed every second of it and it really taught me a lot about discipline, you know the whole medical thing aside, it taught me, you know how to get up early, how to exercise regularly, how to clean, which a lot of people don't think is a skill, but it absolutely is. and he taught me how to cook, which is another great skill to have, especially in the fire service, so I got my fire, a fire2 started making fire calls, we didn't have a very high call volume, but we had enough with what I had to do.

In some inside attacks I was able to experience 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 a lot deeper than EMT school and started to show me what my passion in safety really was. public. I started doing my associate's degree in fire science shortly after finishing paramedic school and whether it was a matter of maturity, I wasn't ready to work toward a degree or not. I didn't see the application, I just didn't like it and started looking for extra jobs so I was working part time at Deergrove Ems as a paramedic.

I started working as a prn for the city of Madison fire rescue to do event medicine with them. and finally went to visit a friend in central Iowa who is going to engineering school. I saw an ambulance on the side of the road. I saw they were a hospital system and decided to go talk to one of their paramedics, so I stopped. at the hospital I talked to the paramedic and he made me fill out an application before I left and I ended up taking that job and I think I took it almost as an excuse to get out of the curriculum at that time, so I finished my internship early, I got the job in Iowa, I packed up my things and moved there in a couple of months, so I started working for Mary Greley and I was very lucky, so it turned out that Mary Greley wasn't like that and I don't believe it.

It paid well yet I had very high-performing paramedics and they ran three ambulances. They made 9-1-1 for the city of Ames throughout the county and for most of Story. They also did all the transfers in and out of Mary Greley Medical. downtown so that was from bls homecoming to intensive care balloon pump transport to des moines they also did the madison event for isu so we did soccer games basketball games I went to see free dave chappelle working in first aid for that. event and then the most important part of that and what really gave me perspective on medicine and how much more there was was that we could work in the ER so we could go help them, we could intubate in the ER if the doctor was agree with that. we could go up on the floor and run internal codes because we were some of the most experienced in that small hospital, we could also go to cath and observe the procedures after anesthesia, so there were a lot of experiences we could have in this job and it really introduced me all the different facets of uh ems and it taught me a ton, on top of that we were very high performing paramedics so we knew we had really great protocols, a lot of trust from our medical director and we had to solve the problem because it was a good combination of urban and rural environments, so one moment you were taking a drunk college student to the emergency room and the next someone had their arm caught in an auger, so we have a lot of experience in that area.

Now, while I was there, maybe two or three years into my career at Mary Greeley, I noticed that neither of the two SWAT teams in the area, so we had Story County ERT and Fort Collins SWAT, neither of them were staffed doctor in their teams. ifacts but they weren't standardized they didn't know how to use all of their supplies and they didn't have anyone that was actually designated as the medical provider that we would place outside we had badge holders on the ambulance but we were not active participants in any of their raids or warrant calls , so I saw it as a community opportunity and started talking to a lot of the agents in particular and discussing medical articles.

I would give them tourniquets and show them how to use them. He had prepared kits for them if they needed it. He helped a couple of them put things in their cars so 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 for months and place you in a reserve deputy academy. You're a certified law enforcement officer in the state of Iowa and then you go in, basically, you ride with them or even go. through another training step and going alone in a patrol car with all the rights and responsibilities of a law enforcement officer, the only thing we were not allowed to do is implied consent, which has to do with uh duis, essentially not for you doctors. note that it's not implied consent for an unresponsive patient or anything like that, so I started doing it with the main goal of getting on their emergency response team, which was the county SWAT team, and it took me about a year, I went through the I applied for the testing process for that and ended up being hired as a member of the entry team and playing the role of team doctor, so that's where I really got started in tactical medicine.

I hadn't had much experience with that. Through a tactical medicine course that I paid for out of my own pocket before that, but I didn't really know what that job entailed and that was really cool because I learned that the police side, you know, was fully armed and had all the responsibilities of Anybody else on the team would do that, but then they also sent me to a couple of med tech schools that I could really learn from, as well as basic SWAT school, and I started doing that with him. Now I'm not going to fake that.

I was, you know, a crazy, tough operator, you know, knocking on doors every day, we had a very low call volume, after all, it was rural Iowa, however, we trained a lot and still received a good amount of calls and we were able to do some cool things. with them and then hone my craft uh in that area now around the same time I met my wife and she went to medical school we moved a little bit south but I stayed working at mary greeley and the sheriff's office and she She made a deal that if she went to 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 at 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 that schedule didn't work out the way I wanted it to, so it took me about five and a half years to finish my bachelor's degree, so she finished medical school . and I got a residency in Colorado, which is where she's originally from and of course I was going to pursue it, so I started looking for different jobs in Colorado that would fit me and that would allow me to advance my career and stay. Working as a SWAT medic and found a hospital agency in northern Colorado that I thought had a lot of potential so it wasn't the largest or the highest paying even though they paid a fair wage and got along well. they finished the training and that really opened my eyes to more ems environments than I had been exposed to, so unlike the dual medical system I was running in Iowa, this was a single doctor, so we were emt doctors in instead of having a stationary stall on the street corner. and the call volume was much higher than what I was used to, so it was a

complete

180 degree turn from where I'm coming from now.

I will say that the scope of practice was narrowed slightly, but the medicine was

complete

ly different. I was not used to it. the type of rural calls that we went on in the rockies and then the type of downtown calls that we did in our primary response district, so it was really a cool transition for me and I really enjoyed it, so after From working with This agency for about a year I got along well with their Special Operations Response Team, they now call it Thames and this team was really unique because they attached medics to two SWAT teams with a relatively high call volume.

They also sent doctors with search and rescue who made a high angle. and low angle rescue, as well as scuba gear, and then I could also deploy two firelines as a fireline medic if a wildfire appeared in your jurisdiction or across the state and I received a request for you, which would give me opened his eyes. A lot of rural medicine, you know, in Iowa we had cornfields, but we never had remote access medicine like we have in the Rocky Mountains, so the response territory for this team is astronomically large and I found myself trying patients for hours. in itmiddle of nowhere in very limited resource settings, so I think that was the biggest change for me, the other change was the exchange of doctors, we are not armed with them, we are not sworn, so we are joked, we go with them ,uh. but our main responsibility is not as a shooter or entry team member, we are purely medics for them, so a little different environment.

I did it for a period of time. I'm still on that team, but for a couple of years. on the streets I decided to look for an educational opportunity within the service and accepted a job as an educational lieutenant, we call it a clinical mentor, so my job was to go around in a flying car and meet with teams on the street corner where we do cqis. with their reports we do case reviews with them on cardiac arrest and some other cases and then we provided other educational opportunities, uh, when they came up periodically, so it was a great position, but it was probably the hardest thing I've ever done in my life.

I know I've never been able to show up to work in khakis at nine in the morning. I set my own schedule. I've never had to keep track of things like I did. So, you know, using Excel spreadsheets and spending time behind a desk. and it wasn't long before I realized that that wasn't where I wanted to stay, I wanted to go back to clinical medicine and during all of this I was still doing shifts on the street, I was still, you know, working on the operations response team specials, but I wanted something a little different and that's when I saw a position opening up in the southern region of our agency for a flight medic position and I applied now, I failed that application, I was number two in the lineup for But someone with more experience than me and who interviewed better than me ended up getting the job and that really got me going, so I realized that was one of my big goals and it was something I was up for. to work, so I came back and got my flight paramedic certification.

I finished my bachelor's degree and then started taking as many critical care classes as possible. To the extent possible, I took Creighton's critical care course before completing my FPC. I did a couple of prep courses and started interacting with the flight doctors and nurses within my agency and that really helped me a second time when a position opened up in the northern region that I was familiar with, I applied for that position and they hired me, so that was about two years ago. Now they hired me as a flight paramedic. The training for that lasted about six months and was probably one of the biggest learning curves.

I've never experienced within uh ems, you know, the diversity of calls that we have in the helicopter is much more than I ever imagined coming from the ground, so you know, we have our scene calls, we have our mountain rescues. where we go for a serious car accident in the canyon or fly east for a guy caught in a spin, you know, intercepting ambulances coming from the northern region, things like that, but we also have our critical care transport. so we're taking patients on boosters and balloon pumps, we'll get ecmo in ground intensive care if we get them, we're taking a lot of intubated patients who have very complex metabolic issues and it really took me about a year.

Year and a half to start feeling comfortable in this role and through that, I took a couple more prep classes, attended a lot of different trainings and mainly looked for nurses that I work with that are used to the critical care hospital environment with things like balloon pumps and pellesonenecmos and they started picking their brains and the really nice thing about our group is that we are very small and we all come from different aspects of medicine, so everyone has something to teach and you can learn. a lot in that environment now, I've been at it for about two years, I'm still working on the ems tactical team on the ground side.

I still do floor shifts just to maintain low usage skills like IV snatches that we just don't do. I don't do much in the helicopter, you know enough and I really maintain that experience on the ground, but my main job is as a flight paramedic. I work 24 hours a day in the helicopter and then 24 hours a day in our intensive care truck on the ground each week. so it gives me a lot of diversity in the call volume in this region since then I have slowed down a little bit on my professional goals and focused more on being a father.

I have an eight month old son and my wife is super busy with her residency preparing for the fellowship so a lot of my attention and time has been devoted to that and being a parent has really proven to be one of the most rewarding and challenging things. that I have done throughout my life. career, but in the future I'm not really sure what I want to do. I am very happy where I am, but I have nothing written that this is where I want to go. I think the next step. will become more pragmatic, starting with maybe doing some consulting, doing more video work and interacting with other professionals within the public safety space because I think there are a lot of stories that are really interesting, they have really interesting avenues that they can give people a good understanding. of the different things you can do in this area and while I prevail on YouTube and have a lot of followers, my career path is not close to the coolest, the most intense, the most unique, there are a lot of people with very similar experiences . myself and very different, so I hope to offer it to you in video format.

You know I love videography. If I were ever injured at work and couldn't fly anymore I think this is where I would go, it's a very good summary of everything I've been doing for the last 12 years so if you have any questions or comments please leave them in comments below and I'll see you next week.