By Kipp Hanley, potomac news & manassas journal messenger
Published: April 19, 2008

For the Greater Manassas Volunteer Rescue Squad, some days can be extraordinary; others are worse than anything people experience in a lifetime.

There are slow days and lazy nights filled with grilling out, socializing and Will Ferrell's absurdly funny movie "Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby." Others finish with delivering babies on a car-peted bedroom floor when the 24-hour shift is nearly over.

And still others end with a helpless feeling after a father accidentally suffocates his infant by rolling over on him, and nothing can be done to save the baby's life.

The trick is to treat each day the

same.

"You don't become hardened to it, but you got to get used to it," said 63-year-old career medic Ralph Aiger, who served in a U.S. Army infantry unit in the Vietnam War. "[With] children, it still is hard."

BEDSIDE MANNERS

Empathy for humanity has a lot to do with why people work in the emergency field. After a 9-year-old boy wit-nessed a domestic disturbance between his parents on March 21 at a Manassas town house community, Manassas Rescue Squad career medic Andrew Carver ended up on the stairs with him, trying to keep boy's mind off what he just saw.

Carver called it having a bedside manner, and often you need to employ that tactic when dealing with not only sick or injured people but their relatives as well.

After their chat on the stairs, the child remained visibly upset so Carver took him outside and showed him the ambu-lance while the police officers on hand questioned the parents about the incident.

"When you see someone having a problem, you want to help," said EMT and Assistant Volunteer Chief Rob Driggers, who was also on the scene.

That call was it until midnight. The crew on duty had just finished a healthy-sized dinner of stuffed chicken, salad and rolls at the station when they received the domestic call around 8 p.m.

From station to town house back to the station, the medic unit was there for no more than an hour, with the wife refusing medical treatment.  An hour or so later, the unit on duty settled into the upstairs rec room for the Will Smith hit movie "I Am Legend."

The only interruptions during the rest of the 24-hour shift came from the loud voices of co-workers in the break room and a late-night run to a Manassas restaurant and pub for an unconscious man who had one too many drinks and three too many fists to the face.

no two days alike

Of course nights like March 21 aren't necessarily the norm. Evenings can start innocently enough with a dinner at a local restaurant.

But just as the meal comes, so does a call. When they get back to the doors of the restaurant, another call comes in.

The number of calls in a 24-hour period ranges from five to 15, with Saturday being one of the busiest days of the week.

That's why many restaurants like Glory Days are good about re-heating or even making new meals for mem-bers on duty.

Sleep can also be tricky when working a 24-hour shift. If a call comes in the mid-morning, one has to decide whether to try and go back to sleep or just stay up to 7 a.m. when it's time to go home.

Often on the weekends, rescue workers will either hit the sack at 10 p.m. before the bar scene lets out or stay up later in anticipation of a call.

According to Carver, there are some at the station that wake up when they hear the tone that precedes the dis-patcher's voice. Carver is one of those folks.

Others have to be shaken awake even after the bell rings. The rescue station has a policy that no one is allowed to go to bed before 10 p.m.

This unpredictable atmosphere is what Aiger likes. An active runner who most recently competed in the Miami Marathon, Aiger was looking to keep busy after retirement.

"Every day is different," said Aiger, who worked 56 hours straight on 9/11.

For volunteer Dave Hurley, it's about serving the Manassas community where he lives.  The 39-year-old works as a narcotics officer with the U.S. Park Police in Washington, D.C., and volunteers every Friday night at the rescue station.

The James Madison University graduate started volunteering last fall, passed his emergency medical training test this winter and is in the early stages of what is called "pre-cepting," which is an initiation period that can vary from several months to nearly a year depending on the competency of the individual and how often he or she comes to volunteer, said Driggers.

After verifying that everything is in working order on the ambulance in service and checking medical inventory, Hurley accompanies a set medic unit, basically doing whatever is necessary to assist those in charge that night.

Teamwork is crucial in what Driggers called "one big family." After being stationed in the Army at Fort McNair in Washington, D.C., from 1981 to 1985, Driggers sought out the Rescue Squad in 2000, in part, for the camaraderie that he missed from serving in the military.

A FEW GOOD MEN

[AND WOMEN]

There aren't too many people like Hurley or Driggers these days. Volunteerism is down nationwide.

It doesn't matter whether it's the soup kitchen or the fire or rescue stations, numbers are dwindling. Careers, commutes and apathy are partially responsible for this downward trend.

For those volunteers interested in attaining Basic Life Support certification, there are ever-increasing demands placed by state and federal agencies, which stop people almost before they start. And many of the ones that staying for awhile end up leaving for a paid position in another jurisdiction.

After 9/11, there was a huge upsurge in volunteer interest. However out of 103 applications, only two made it to full membership, said rescue squad President Mike Enright.

Once certified and cut loose to run as the lead on an ambulance, which can take up to a year and a half, volunteers and paid personnel alike then have to go through a variety of re-certifications at given time periods. Cards from national, state and local organizations line the wallets of all Manassas rescue workers.

To become a paramedic or a medic intermediate, which Carver is, there is a host of classes to take and clinical hours to perform. Classes run two nights a week, and every other Saturday for five months. In addition, you have to ac-quire 230 hours of clinical time, which include—among other things—80 hours riding on a medic unit and 80 hours in an emergency room.

Driggers, who volunteers every Monday night, said he thought about becoming an intermediate medic but realized quickly he didn't have time for the training.

"I started trying to work [the clinical hours] into my schedule and I was going to have to take vacation time from my work to get my clinical hours," Driggers said.

Currently there is only one volunteer medic. And the overall numbers of active volunteers have dwindled from around 50 or 60 to 34.

"The way the city has grown and with the city raising taxes, it's forced people to move out [of Manas-sas]," Rescue Chief Curt Huntington said. "I can count on two hands the number of people that have moved out to Fauquier [County]."

GREEN LIGHT, RED LIGHT

It's Wednesday, April 9, around 7:30 p.m. The crew is watching the Nicholas Cage movie "Gone in Sixty Seconds" in the rec room.

Dinner is on the backburner as Huntington and some of fellow volunteers wait for one of the EMS units to get back from a minor "pedestrian struck" call.

Within minutes of that crew arriving back at the station, a mutual aid call comes from Prince William County in-volving a traffic accident at the corner of Nokesville and Linton Hall roads.

The crew fires up the heavy rescue unit, a large multipurpose truck used for passenger extrication. But as the unit passes the Alpha-Bet School on Nokesville Road, the dispatcher informs the crew they aren't needed.

The sirens and lights are extinguished and the unit turns around. Starting and stopping can happen quite often on mutual aid calls, said Huntington.

"You put everyone on a call just to be safe rather than sorry," Huntington said. "If you don't need them you send them back."

Just minutes after parking the unit back at the station, though, a chest pain call comes in from the Bowl America on Mathis Avenue in the city. An ambulance is soon on the way, winding down Centreville Road toward the popular strip mall on the north side of town.

A medic unit from Manassas Park arrives on the scene just a minute of two after the Manassas crew, which is taking the man's blood pressure and asking him questions as he sits outside the alley on the sidewalk.

Minutes later, the patient is loaded onto a gurney and hauled into the Manassas Park ambulance.  The Manassas crew didn't have a paramedic on board so it decided to defer to the Park unit.

According to Huntington, many chest pain calls end up with a diagnosis of a pulled chest muscle. But chest pain calls often end with a trip to the hospital regardless of the severity, said Huntington.

"It may be a cautionary, it doesn't have to be severe," Huntington said.

PUTTING ON

A HAPPY FACE

Only one more call comes in before the clock strikes midnight, and its another mutual aid from Prince William County. Dinner is served around 9 p.m., a large bowl of pasta and chicken prepared by 60-year-old Mike Murphy, the oldest active volunteer and the company captain. 

"I found over the years that they will eat anything," joked Murphy.

Table talk Wednesday included an incident last fall involving a rescue of a passenger in a car that tumbled into a pond. It also centered around the fire levy, proposed by City Manager Lawrence Hughes, that would add 11 new career cross-trained fire and rescue employees to the current paid staff of 18.

As the crew finished dinner, the city council was "marking up a proposed budget" a few blocks away in Old Town. Unfortunately, the meeting ended with the council omitting the 10-cent levy that would have financed these new positions.

While the budget proposed by council is not set in stone, April 9, 2008, certainly will not go down as one of the rescue department's better days. According to Enright and Carver, they needed immediate help but could very well walk away empty-handed for now.

But there's always the good days on the horizon, the ones they remember, the ones that make what they do worthwhile.

"When you get an opportunity to help someone who is having the worst day of his life, that's a bless-ing for me, not for them," Aiger said.