This is a blog post that I intended to put up months ago, but I never got around to finishing. Paraphrasing a sit down interview is something that I really struggled with, but I really feel that not sharing this information would major injustice to our time that we were able to spend with Skip Kirkwood, chief of Wake County EMS in Wake County, North Carolina. I hope you enjoy this two part post, and take as much from it as I did. A little over a month before EMS Expo in Dallas, I was speaking with April Saling (better known to the online community as Epi Junky, the author of Pink, Warm, and Dry) about our mutual admiration for Wake County EMS Chief Skip Kirkwood. We decided that since we were both going to be at EMS Expo in Dallas, and since Chief Kirkwood was also going to be at Expo, that we would contact him and attempt to arrange an interview with him for our blogs. Our hope was that Chief Kirkwood would be able to spare five or ten minutes out of a very busy schedule to sit and answer some questions for us about EMS over a cup of coffee. Well, much to our delight, Chief Kirkwood did one better by inviting us to join him for Breakfast on Thursday, the second morning of Expo. Skip got his start in EMS in 1973 when he was certified as a Hospital Corpsman. He then started his career in EMS and shortly after, he obtained his Paramedic Certification, By the Mid-80’s, he decided that there might not be much of a future in Emergency Medical Services, so he decided to look elsewhere for a career. He decided that the next step in his life should take him to law school, where he obtained his law degree and worked for a large Law Firm in Philadelphia for a few years. One day, while sitting in his office reading JEMS Magazine, Chief Kirkwood came across a Job Listing for the position of the Head of EMS for the State of Oregon. The recommended requirements were a Paramedic Certification and a knowledge of Law. He...

I’ve been doing some thinking over the last couple of days about how I wanted to share my experiences at EMS Expo 2010 with everyone. Do I take it hour by hour and class by class? Do I just give a brief overview? All of the bloggers that I spent time with in Dallas had different solutions. Well, I think I’ve found something that is going to work best for me. I’ve decided to break my experiences at EMS Expo 2010 in Dallas into three categories: The Events, The Education, and The People. The Events Needless to say, there were plenty of these, both of the official and the unofficial nature. If you read the Blog last week, you’ve already seen what we did on Tuesday night for what is now known as “Expo Eve.” Wednesday was just as much fun. After doing a Podcast with the Generation Medicine team, and finishing up the day with a couple of classes, it was off to the JEMS Blogger Meetup at the Rooftop bar of the Gator Croc and Roc. The food was good, and the conversation was even better. I was able to meet many influential people like AJ Heightman, Editor-in-Chief of JEMS, and Rick Kendrick, the inventor of the Kendrick Extrication Device or KED for short. Anyone who has been through EMT or Paramedic school has used this great piece of equipment, and most likely has had to test out on it as part of their certification. Rick had a lot to say about his product, and at one point was holding court with seven or eight of us surrounding him and listening intently, as he described concepts like Pounds per Square Inch and padding. From there, it was off to the One Eyed Penguin for a Darts Tournament. I’ll spare you the messy details of the match, and just tell you that Kyle David Bates and I, better known as Team First Few Moments, beat Team EMS Garage, Chris Montera and Annie Robinson. Lots of beer was had, and lots of great conversations and laughs were shared. Thursday morning marked what might have been the highlight of my trip to Dallas. Details of...

Expo Eve has come and gone, and boy was it a great experience. The trip out was a long one, I was up by 3am (I don’t even know how I slept) and in the air to Detroit by about 6am. The Captain told us it was going to be an hour and twenty minute fly time, but I swear it took closer to two hours. With ETAs like that, they should just go into the ambulance business. I kid, of course. I was off the plane and into the terminal by 8:10, and made an OJ Simpson-Like run to my next connecting flight at 8:25 (thanks, Joel Nied for that Hertz Commercial Reference) and I was able to get there just in time, ready to make the trip to Dallas. I was greeted on the plane by my good friend April from Pink, Warm and Dry, and her preceptor Dave who had missed their earlier flight and would be joining me on this flight, which after delays for a broken GPS and the apparent necessity to jump start out plane, we were off. The flight was smooth, and we were on the ground in just over two hours. I spent the day wandering around Dallas with April, Dave, and RJ Stine who is better known as Hybridmedic on Twitter, and in the Blog world. We made it down to Dealy Plaza, which was quite the site to see. We all commented on how much smaller it looked than what we had perceived it to be from all the pictures and TV shows we’d seen. After checking in at Expo, it was time to head over to the House of Blues for some dinner and drinks. RJ and I had planned on getting a small group of people together for some food and drinks. That quickly grew to 15-20 people who took over the outdoor porch. Our server, Luis, was kept on his toes, but he did a great job. If anyone is ever in Dallas, I highly recommend the House of Blues for food, drinks, or music. When Charlotte from Zoll arrived, we found out that they had booked a room that night,...

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...