It’s the People You Meet Along the Way

I had been an EMT perhaps two weeks when I met her. The big EMS agency in my town wouldn’t have anything to do with me; I showed up at their headquarters and asked the receptionist for an application, and then cooled my heels in the lobby for two hours before my presence was acknowledged. The operations manager gave my application a cursory glance and told me they had no openings, but they’d keep my application on file.  His body language radiated indifference and disdain.

So my friend Cyndi Ott took me to meet the people she worked for, a couple who had just started their own ambulance service. When I first met Liz Hyde, she was sitting on the floor in her living room helping her husband Alan sort through a stack of paperwork.

I didn’t know what the documents were. They could have been invoices, loan applications, bank statements, or the original manuscript of the Magna Carta. There was paperwork and ambulance equipment strewn as far as the eye could see, and sleeping EMT’s covered every horizontal surface that had some semblance of a cushion. Heck, some of them slept on the  paperwork.

That was my introduction to D’Arbonne Ambulance.

I listened in rapt fascination as Liz prattled on for hours, introducing me to all the crews, showing me around the station (which happened to be their house), waking up her kids to introduce them all…  I think she paused for breath twice in about two hours.

They had been the ambulance crew in Farmerville for the big company in Monroe, the one that wouldn’t give me the time of day. They had tired of leaving Union Parish uncovered while their former employer had kept them running transfers in the big city an hour away.

When the city leaders urged them to start their own ambulance service, they leapt at the chance. From employees on Friday morning to business owners on Monday, they were petrified, but passionate about what they were doing.  They resigned their jobs on a Friday, bought two used ambulances on Saturday, had them painted, and drove them back home while the new paint was still tacky. They stocked them with salvaged and repaired equipment on Sunday, and Monday morning D’Arbonne Ambulance Service was up and running.

Frankly, it showed. Organization wasn’t their strong suit and never would be.

We talked into the wee hours of the morning, and when I caught myself yawning I excused myself to head home. Liz didn’t seem tired at all.

A week later, I returned, wearing a coat and tie and bearing my resumé. As I approached the station, I could hear Liz hissing, “Alan, there’s someone on the porch wearing a suit! I think he’s a process server!”

When they realized it was me, she warmly ushered me inside and demanded, “Why the heck are you wearing a suit?”

“Well, that’s what you wear when you apply for a job,” I stammered, thrusting my resume at her.  Her reaction was a peal of laughter and a fierce hug that nearly lifted me off the ground – no small feat considering I outweighed her by 100 pounds and stood a foot taller.

She insisted on taking my coat, which I insisted on keeping on because my Corona Beach Club tee shirt showed through my dress shirt. When she finally peeled it off me, she began giggling at my discomfiture. The more I blushed, the louder she got until it ended with her rolling on the floor, clutching her sides. When she finally paused for breath, she shoved me and my sweaty resumé into a room with Alan and ordered us to talk.

 Two hours later, she cracked the door, beckoned me over and asked in a stage whisper, “Has he offered you the job yet?”

“We haven’t even talked about EMS yet!” I whispered back. “We’ve talked about everything but!”

It was twenty years before I realized how skillful a job interview that was. By the time Alan Hyde tendered a job offer, he knew exactly what made me tick, and he hadn’t asked a single EMS-related question.

When I excused myself to let my dog out of the truck for a moment, Liz was delighted. She insisted that I let Sprite inside. My dog, a highly-bred championship Labrador Retriever who was all-gas, no-brakes, was so overstimulated with everyone making a fuss over her that she was a threat to wreck the house. I barked at her to sit and pointed at a bar stool. Sprite obediently leapt onto it and sat… for two hours.

To this day, I’m suspicious that a big reason I got the job was that my dog was more obedient than her kids.

After a few months at D’Arbonne Ambulance, the division of labor became clear; Alan was the brains, but Liz was the heart. She was the big sister, mother and cheerleader to us all. We all groaned in frustration whenever Alan approached us with his signature phrase, “Hey, I’ve got a project for ya’…” but we all learned to never EVER get Mama Liz angry. Alan did the strategy and planning, but Liz Hyde’s word was law.

After two months, they sent me to EMS instructor school. After five months as an EMT, they sent me to paramedic school. Pretty much everything that needed doing at D’Arbonne Ambulance, we did ourselves because we couldn’t afford to hire someone. We repainted ambulances, changed water pumps and alternators, made spine boards, devised education to help us wring all the potential from our ancient LifePak 5 monitors, and went door-to door to introduce ourselves to the communities we served. All of us learned at a deep level how an ambulance service worked, because if we didn’t we couldn’t get paid.

We did all those things, very few of them to be found in the job description of an EMT, because we believed in what Alan and Liz were doing. We believed in Alan’s philosophy, summed up as – and I’m paraphrasing here – as the Three P’s. It went something like, “There are three things that are important: patients, partners and profits. You take care of the first two, let me and Liz handle the third.”

It’s easy to work for people like that. The freedom to grow as an EMT and Paramedic that I got at D’Arbonne Ambulance, I have struggled to recapture at every job since.

I’ve known plenty of EMS gypsies, people who jumped from agency to agency, always seeking the perfect EMS job. After 30 years in EMS, I’ve come to realize that there is no such thing.

But as I look back over the past 30 years, being a paramedic at D’Arbonne Ambulance was as close as it gets.

This rumination I’ve subjected you to came about when I learned that on November 24, 2024, Liz Hyde died. It hit me harder than I expected. I’m a writer; whenever I feel something deeply, I process the grief through writing about it. I parted from Liz and Alan Hyde on bad terms, but over the years we realized that hanging on to bitterness and resentment lessens us all. It’s better to remember the good memories and how they shaped the people we would become.

Broken-down ambulances, bad supervisors, ungrateful patients and families, low pay and disrespect… I’ve experienced them all, but they pale in comparison to the quality of the friends I’ve made along the way. Those are the memories worth having, the ones that meant something.

If you haven’t made some of those, you’re missing out on the best part of being in EMS. If you’re lucky, you’ll meet someone like Liz Hyde to teach you the most important part of the job we do:

It’s the people you meet along the way.