Don’t Mess With Texas

The last seven months of my life have been surrounded by a whirlwind of activity. Twitter, Chronicles of EMS, and the EMS 2.0 movement have breathed new life and motivation into me, and one week from today, all of that will come together as I’ll get to share four days with some of the greatest people I’ve ever had the pleasure of speaking with.

It wasn’t always like this for me though. If you had asked me one year ago where I thought that I would be today, gearing up to go to Dallas and EMS Expo would not have been my answer.

Truth be told, I was in a rut. The roadblocks I was encountering in my system were immense, and seemed almost impossible to overcome. I would come into work and just go through the motion watching the clock waiting for quittin’ time so I could head home. Day in and day out, I felt like I was running in place, or just spinning my wheels.

I’ve spoken many times in this blog about that fateful trip to the “left coast” and my week in Alameda County. It all comes back to that for me. It was eye opening. I had a chance to work with people I had never met before who were friendly, welcoming, hard working, and had a completely different outlook from anything that I had seen in my east coast home. They possessed the qualities that I wanted to see in my service. I remember writing their boss at the end of my trip, singing praise after praise about each and every person that I had encountered. My trip was great, and it was hard for me to get on a plane and fly back to my East Coast home, but I had to do it.

I brought some souvenirs back with me though. No, I didn’t get any “I Love Oakland” coffee cups or Athletics hats. I brought with me new ideas and a new outlook on EMS. For the next couple of months, I sounded like a broken record: “Well, out in California, they do it THIS way.” Or “Maybe we can try this thing I learned when I was in Oakland.” The list goes on and on. I wanted so badly to bring that West Coast mentality to my East Coast city.

In February, I made the decision to try and get out there a little bit more. I decided it was time to start writing again, and what better way to do it than in a blog about EMS? What you are reading is the end result of that.

As a way to promote my blog, I hopped on Twitter. I had tried the site before, but hadn’t enjoyed it much. I had a more focused goal, and went straight to tracking down people like Ted Setla, Justin Schorr, Mark Glencorse and Natalie Quebuedoux (sorry if I butchered your name!) just to name a few and quickly added them as friends because I had to see what they had to say. I remember being a day or two into my Twitter existence and watching Justin and Ted on UStream as they took that ride from the Airport in their limo to their Baltimore hotel. Just listening to their discussions about EMS, where we are heading and where they wanted to take us made me so excited. Could I have actually found a great community of people who wanted all of the same things that I did?

Now, here I sit, seven months into my social media existence, and I’m a week from a trip that will help me decide the next direction I will take in my life. I’ve got almost 350 Twitter followers, I’m slowly creeping up on 40 Blog posts, and I’ve sold almost 200 EMS 2.0 Pins to motivated individuals who want to show those around them that they are believers. I’ve met some amazing people, and made some great friends.

I picked this post to go up at 10:37am for a reason. That’s the time that my plane will be landing in Dallas on September 28th. At that moment, not only will my anxiety level drop considerably simply from being back on the ground, but another chapter in my life will begin.

Am I excited? You bet I am!