119: helping hands

Sometimes people think when you live in a small town you don’t have the benefit of high quality services available in cities. Really often I’m reminded how the complete opposite is true in our tiny town.  In Mission when you’re in an accident and need an ambulance you don’t get a pair of EMTs, you get at least a half dozen.  Really often it’s double that many and just as many firemen, too. All that help is there fast, usually in just a few minutes. Others who find themselves at accident scenes, though not necessarily trained for emergency response, are willing to do what they can and often have skills and equipment to help.

Today, before we even arrived with the ambulance, people had tractors and chains and jacks out and had already stabilized the vehicle. When we needed to get the patient out quickly, we had enough strong hands to lift, rather than cut and dismantle, the truck.

When you live in a small town you often have more real neighbors than people living among thousands of others in cities.