Gomerville has been in existence in one form or another since the mid 90’s.  Back in those early days when we used ‘gopher’ programs such as ARCHIE, I was surfing the limited web and not finding much about EMS.  Web space was super expensive back then and I did not know HTML, so I began typing stories and emailing them to the few friends I knew that had an email address.  One by one, more of my friends would get an email address and I would put them on the list.  I had just quit my job at the psychiatric hospital and started working on an ambulance, and I had some stories to tell.  My friends were always amused at my anecdotes of life on the street, and they reciprocated with their own stories.  I used to use slang terminology in my stories and my friends always thought it was weird that EMTs often referred to nursing home patients as GOMERS.  One day a friend argued that our email group needed a name.  He suggested that we call it Gomerville, and it stuck.

Gomerville has had many incarnations.  It became an egroup in 1999.  After Yahoo purchased egroups and ruined it we had our own website for awhile.  I retooled that when open source content management systems became available.  And then I got busy.  I became a paramedic instructor and became consumed with starting my own business and put writing on the back burner.  Now that I have more time, I have yet again reinvented Gomerville as a blog.  And now I am sharing my stories with more people than ever before.

In 1993 I was pretty directionless.  I had been an English major in college for four years and was nowhere near graduating.  I had written many short stories and had nothing but a stack of rejection slips to show for it.  To be honest though, my early attempts at writing were painful to read.  My stories were unimaginative, self-indulgent, and sophomoric.  But as they say, you can’t write anything before you have lived long enough to have a tale to tell.  I was badly in need of a job to help me get through school, and a good friend who was studying to be a psychologist suggested I work at the psych hospital with him.  With his recommendation I was hired and my career in healthcare began.

In 1994 I went to EMT school on the advice of a friend.  He knew that I was working in a psych hospital, and according to him, “If you can put up with that crap, you’re going to love working on an ambulance.”  I went that summer between semesters in college.  I caught the bug.  I caught it bad.  I was signed up for paramedic school before I had even finished EMT school.  By the summer of 1996 I was cleared and riding as a medic.  I never did finish that English degree.  But I always kept writing.

I have had various jobs in both Texas and Kentucky.  I have worked for private services, fire-based services, county based services, critical care, and everything in between.  For the last several years my concentration has been education.  I was the lead instructor of a fire-based EMS program for about three years.  After that I started my own EMS academy.  Over the years I have either been the lead instructor and/or coordinator of seven paramedic programs and I have put over 80 medics on the road.

But the failing economy and new national accreditation requirements proved too difficult to overcome and my academy has failed.  I am leaving education.  I still work on an ambulance, but I make my living mostly by working at an organ procurement organization.  I have plans to go back to school soon and after fifteen long years, my EMS career is in its twilight.   I still enjoy working the streets, but it is time to do something new.  I look forward to the future, but I also keep looking back, trying to make sense of it all.

People keep telling me that I need to write my stories down, or turn them into a novel.  I have tried a few times to write the great American novel, but the short, choppy nature of EMS does not lend itself well to that format.  It does however make a perfect blog post, and that is how I chose to write my memoirs.  So, a couple of times each week I like to sit down and tell a story.  Sometimes sad, sometimes funny.  Always human.  Always true.

A short while ago I was surprised to find out that Gomerville has over 1500 readers each month.  From what I can tell, most of my readers work in EMS or healthcare.  This is a wonderful thing.  However, it has always been my mission to tell my stories to people outside of healthcare.  That is how Gomerville started, and that is where I think it will have the most impact.  If you have read my ‘about’ page this far, then it is safe to assume that this blog has touched you in some way, and you find some value in what I am doing.  If I could ask one favor from you it would be this: please show this blog to one person outside of healthcare who you think might enjoy it.  That’s it.  Just pass it on.  Let someone else know about it so I can share these stories to a wider audience.

Thanks for reading.