A typical weekend for junior Luke Vayder includes a 24-hour shift working to potentially save lives.
“If you don’t do well on minimal sleep, don’t do it,” Vayder said.
Vayder warned anyone considering any role in medicine — as he plans to pursue throughout his life — that sleep can’t be a priority. Sometimes he works up to 48 hours in a single shift. While he said he can technically sleep between emergency calls, there’s no guarantee of free time.
Joined by junior Lucas Feddersen, Vayder works as an Emergency Medical Transport for the Reading Emergency Unit, serving the city of Hillsdale.
An EMT responds to any kind of medical transport emergency working through a private ambulance company. Assessing whether the situation is life or death is step one. From there, the EMT determines if the patient will die without immediate hospital care, or if he can stay and receive help at the scene. Feddersen said he and others in the field refer to it as “stay-and-play” or “load-and-go.”
“If it isn’t that important, I can play stick around and do a little more of assessment, but if it’s load-and-go, if I don’t get them to the hospital as soon as possible, they might die.”
Most people don’t realize how much time an EMT spends waiting or driving around. Feddersen began his work as an EMT this summer back home in California, where he said much of his work was non-urgent medical transport. EMTs work in pairs: one drives the vehicle and one remains with the patient in back.
Feddersen once drove a woman from a hospital to a rehabilitation facility two hours away just to drop her off and drive two hours back. He said he ensures people have the medical supplies and transportation they need.
“Some people make jokes that we’re just a glorified Uber ride,” he said.
Inspired by the career fields, both chose to become EMTs because of their long-term goals. Feddersen’s initial motivation to work as an EMT was to fulfill the basic requirement to become a firefighter. Now, it is a step in the process toward becoming a physician’s assistant, for which most programs require 1000 to 2000 hours of medical work.
According to Feddersen, people are attracted to serve as EMTs for a mix of reasons. While many use it to go further in the medical field, often to become a paramedic, Feddersen saw some who felt called specifically to take on that position.
“I think it’s mostly a stepping stone into something else,” he said. “But there was a guy who was 40 years old who was a bartender his whole life, and COVID-19 affected him so much that he decided, ‘I’m going to be an EMT.’ So people use it for all sorts of different things.”
Vayder, however, said he has known he wants to go to medical school for as long as he can remember. In awe of his father’s work as an emergency physician, he began volunteering at his local hospital in Wisconsin at the age of 14.
“I’ve always wanted to do something in this kind of emergency medicine field, and it was my dad who gave me the idea to do it while I was in high school. He just said to me one day, ‘You should go to EMT school.’ I said, ‘Oh, okay. Sounds good.’ So I did. I’m very much following in his footsteps.”
Much of Vayder’s work here, he said, deals with accidents in the nursing home.
“I know on TV you see a lot of car accidents and heart attacks — and those kinds of things happen — but the majority of your day is nursing home calls. So it’s just old people that get sick in nursing homes. It’s in a lot of their protocols to just call 911 and have the ambulance respond and take them into the hospital.”
Vayder got trained before coming to college, while Feddersen only recently got involved. After receiving his California and national certifications, Feddersen spent last semester completing Michigan’s certification process.
By learning biology and exercise science throughout the week and employing that knowledge in medical emergencies on the weekends, their studies complement their work. Both said their work is driven by a need to help.
“This is a quote that my dad tells me frequently about emergency medicine: ‘We are here to help those who either are unable or unwilling to help themselves,”’ Vayder said. “So, it is gratifying. In that way, it is you’re helping someone who is either unwilling or incapable of helping themselves. But the real gratifying parts are when you actually make a tremendous difference in someone’s life.”