From Survival to Self-Leadership

The Index Cards That Changed My Life

The first tool I ever created wasn't for leadership.
It wasn't for wellness.
It wasn't for mental health.
It was a note card.

In 2014, I was a 21-year-old rookie wildland firefighter and newly certified EMT. I had graduated with my EMT certification and was spending my first season learning how to navigate a world that felt much bigger than I was prepared for.

At the time, I was trying to learn two professions simultaneously. I was learning how to be a firefighter. I was learning how to be an EMT.

And truthfully, I wasn't sure I was good at either one yet.

Our district had conducted mock fire scenarios for our state and national testing, where we were tested on everything from communications to medical emergencies. During one exercise, I was responsible for assessing and treating a patient while crews managed the larger incident. During another, I found myself hiking into a simulated medical emergency, trying to gather information while managing the chaos around me.

After each scenario, I left with the same thought.
What if this had been real? How would I have done? Would I have remembered all my questions to ask the patient?

In the those scenarios I remember how quickly things shifted, learning tactics of firefighting, to then being called to an IWI (incident within an incident) and switching over to being an EMT. I had hiked into a scene, heart rate elevated, people were looking to me for answers, decisions need to be made, and suddenly simple things become harder to recall. I didn’t have a mentor to look at any longer, this was real life. I was an EMT.

I wasn't afraid of hard work.
I was afraid of missing something important.

So I created a note card.

On one side was basic patient information. Name. Age. Sex. Weight. SAMPLE (signs/symptoms, allergies, medications, past medical history, last oral intake and events leading up). On the other side listed my OPQRST (onset, provocation, quality, radiation/region, severity and time). The basics to being an EMT and patient assessment.

I printed several copies and placed them in my pocket.
At the time, it felt like a simple solution to a simple problem.

Looking back, I realize it represented something much larger.
I wanted to be prepared.
I needed to be prepared.
I went from being in survival mode of having to remember the questions, to self-leading in understanding my weakness of inexperience in remote situations with the weight of the title, EMT.

Two days later, those cards would end up on the most significant call of my career.

A helicopter crash.