By Mike Rubin
“You never hear a peep out of him.”
That was a compliment when I was a kid. It meant you did what you were supposed to do without complaining. Another version, “He wouldn’t say spit if he had a mouthful,” conveyed the same sentiment with coarser optics, especially if you replaced spit with the original term.
The idea was to say less and do more. Act that way and you might grow up to be a man of few words who let his deeds do the talking. Not a bad start for a future paramedic.
Matinee idols
The strong, silent types of my youth were the stoic characters played by Gary Cooper, John Wayne, and other larger-than-life actors in mid-20th-Century Westerns. They were the men in white hats who fought mangy outlaws and rescued wagonloads of pioneers before unwinding at the local saloon over a few slugs of rot-gut whiskey. Hey, it was only two bits a bottle back then.
Those straight shooters of yesteryear mostly kept to themselves. They’d drink alone at a corner table or unwind back at the ranch and wouldn’t say much about the widows and orphans they’d saved. Any cowpoke worth his spurs was supposed to get ready for the next bad guy and leave the after-action banter to gossipy townspeople.
Westerns taught wannabe gunslingers like me and my trigger-happy playmates to choose our words carefully and not use too many of them. Adults cut us slack for our youthful swagger, but still preferred to hear “please,” “thank you,” “sir,” “ma’am” and not much else from us. Although such deference is rare these days, I think most of us on the high side of 60 still appreciate a modicum of respect for our survival skills.
Some folks don’t see the value of good manners, though. Just look at social media; there’s way too much childish prattle polluting posts. That may not matter when the only ones paying attention are smartphone friends hundreds of miles away, but in the workplace, poorly timed opinions can compromise teamwork, customer service and even careers.
Take EMS. Most of us realize it’s risky to blab about patients, but there are other ways to talk ourselves into trouble, especially when we’re growing into our jobs.
Evidence of ignorance
If I had endless time and a sympathetic publisher, I’d write a book on how to be the new guy or gal. Some of us didn’t learn enough about that from first-day-of-school or new-kid-on-the-block challenges. Maybe we were too busy dodging bullies to embrace a fairly simple concept: Know your place. That has a negative connotation today – as if you were on the short end of a class struggle – but in this case, it merely acknowledges roles requiring more listening than talking.
Do you remember the first time you rode with an experienced preceptor? I do. I was a student on a New York City ambulance with two medics who had three decades of EMS between them. Although I was older than both (EMS wasn’t my first career), I felt appropriately intimidated by the gap between my naivety and their know-how. As a new guy on my knees in the crawlspace between the cabin and the cab, the only time I remember joining a conversation was to share a self-deprecating laugh about something I messed up.
Hospital rotations weren’t much different. There was no way I was going to entertain an L&D nurse with my book knowledge of maternity, or debate a cardiac case with an ED doc. I knew my place, and it wasn’t to advertise my superficial understanding of anything medical.
Speaking of showing off, an ambulance is a pretty bad place to do that. Something’s wrong if you’re trying to educate patients and partners instead of looking out for them. And don’t get me started on long-winded hospital reports. Transmitting a complete set of unremarkable vitals followed by a history of unrelated conditions means the sender’s priority is verbosity, not relevance.
Cowboy up
There were times I said stupid stuff, then suffered consequences, ranging from alienated colleagues to acute embarrassment. I was into my 30s before I embraced the difference between having the right to speak and exercising that right. I still need to be reminded sometimes that opinions are most welcome when someone asks for them.
Celluloid cowboys got that. They weren’t known for preachy speeches. They favored responsible intervention, not verbal ballet. The “cowboy way” – an essential element of Americana – is about authenticity; about walking the walk instead of talking the talk. What a good fit for EMS, too.
Time to saddle up and ride.
