Joseph F. Clark, Ph.D.

In “My Ambulance Education” there is an interesting quote.

“In college, if you make a mistake in a test there may be a final or makeup so you can do it over. But in life, and on the ambulance, there is no such thing as a do-over. The ambulance life is excessively harsh and contains more reality than most people should have to deal with.” Joseph F. Clark, PhD.

This Quote embodies the paradox that exists on the job and in college life. Happily, I’m still in college as a college professor and it is an insular and cloistered life. I sleep nights and don’t have to wash blood out of my clothes. Most of my days of work, I want to remember as opposed to wanting to un-see what I had seen. Life is good so I am grateful for not having to rush to the scenes of human tragedy.

March 12, 2009. Well, tomorrow “My Ambulance Education” is scheduled to be released by Firefly Books. After years of writing and polishing it will be set forth for others to see and experience. In some ways the anticipated book release feels like the first day of school for a child. All sorts of emotions and expectations concerning the unknown are conjured up. Will people be mean; will the book be liked, what if it is shunned; are all questions that plague me prior to tomorrow’s release. Like a parent, I can say I did the best I could and hope that “My Ambulance Education” enjoys a good life.

My mom could not finish reading “My Ambulance Education.” She was very well aware of my accident with the motor boat while skiing, but she had never read the detailed account of the accident. Reading the detail of her son hitting a motor boat (head first) while skiing was too much for a mother to read. When she got to that chapter, she put the book down and never finished the book. Mom was an EMT on the local volunteer ambulance corps, so she was not shy when it came to reading the gore; it was my gore that stopped her.

Mom has copies of my Ph.D. Thesis, my other science texts, and several articles I’ve authored, but this is the first body of work that she could read cover to cover and understand. But she did not finish it. She did not skip that chapter either. She just stopped there. Oh well. Maybe some day I’ll write something my mother will read cover to cover.

I’ve been privileged to have multiple rewarding jobs in my life and working on the ambulance is the ride of a lifetime. I cannot emphasize enough how that experience has helped me in my career. I have recently been able to advocate for research into pre-hospital technologies. My main research enterprise is now able to try to develop new diagnostic devices that can be used to assess patients and this may help them treat patients better and faster. Every day when I come to work I am talking to people and working on projects with an eye to aiding paramedics in the field. To a certain extent I think of the old gentleman Fritz who died from a stroke. Some day paramedics in the ambulance will be able to diagnose and treat patients like Fritz and with luck; I am hoping to be involved in making that possible.

I was recently at a conference of stroke physicians and emergency room physicians. We were talking about the grim reality of emergency medicine and the calluses covering our personalities after years of being on the job. As is often the case in such circumstances we told war stories. I literally heard a story that I could have told. An ER employee was talking about a patient who was an indigent patient living on the street. As the story goes the patient was septic with no obvious cause of the infection. The physician ordered the patient’s shoes to be removed and feet cleaned and examined for the source of the infection. An overwhelming majority of emergency personnel know that this is a big and unpopular job. If this blog were a story within “My Ambulance Education” I would likely use some emotive characterization of the smell of the feet being a cross between rotten cheese and road kill, but I think that is not necessary here. The story that I heard is that the three people who would normally be tasked with doing this did Rock – Paper – Scissors to decide the loser who would be cleaning the feet of this patient. I laughed hysterically because I had been in the exact same situation and in my case we flipped a coin and loser got the job. These two stories occurred over a thousand miles apart with 20 years having passed between them, but some parts of medicine have not changed.

My Ambulance Education is a culmination of about seven years of on and off writing. While it is not my first book, I’ve been involved with writing science books before, it is the first book that is based on the events that shaped my professional life. It is exciting to have a book like this published and I sincerely hope that it is enjoyable, informative and useful for the reader.

I’m looking forward to having the stories from my days working on the ambulance made public. Hopefully people will see how I grew and changed during the years working in emergency medical services. My current work is concerning the causes, diagnosis and treatment of stroke. Some of this work actually has applications in ambulances and emergency rooms. While technology has changed since the days I worked on the ambulance, it seems that the same problems and people are prevalent. Thus the experience from My Ambulance Education, helps me in my current career.

I want to reiterate my sentiments in the book that the professionals and paraprofessionals I talk about in My Ambulance Education are heroes and mentors for me. You have been my mentor in personal and medical education, hence education is in the title. I learned a lot from my learned colleagues, which has been pivotal to many later stages of my profession and career to become a University Professor. Therefore my heartfelt thanks to all those involved. I hope that I have made you proud.

Finally, I hope the reader enjoys My Ambulance Education. It reflects significant events in my formative years and shaped my career.