JOE HAYES
Biography/Memoir
Published by: Code Three Books
Paperback ISBN: 979-8-9970084-0-6
Ebook ISBN: 979-8-9970084-1-3
Paperback Trim: 6" x 9" - 308 pages
Also available as an eBook.
Coming Soon!
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THE STORY
There have been more advancements in medicine in the last fifty years than in the last five thousand years. I was on the front lines for it all, living the successes, the failures and all the growing pains along the way. 50-Year Medic is the story of my time in EMS and a street-level history of the first half-century of EMS and modern-day emergency medicine.
When I started as an EMT, there were no treatments for heart attacks and strokes. They simply diagnosed you as having had one and hoped for the best. Emergency medicine as a specialty did not exist. Any doctor could moonlight in the ER with no emergency medical training at all. Preventative medicine also did not exist. People only went to their doctors when they were sick. Then, as now, most people developed hypertension by their forties but went undiagnosed and untreated until they had a heart attack or stroke. Likewise, many people developed Type II Diabetes by their sixties. But it also went untreated as it ravaged their bodies. There were no airbags, protective cages, or crumple zones in cars. All of this added up to a lot of very sick patients. And if you pulled up on the scene of a car crash with heavy damage to the car, you were almost guaranteed to find seriously injured patients inside of the car.
COMING SOON FROM YOUR FAVORITE RETAILER
EXCERPT
Chapter 11
We arrived to find a woman who looked to be in her sixties lying on the floor in the dairy aisle. From a glance down the aisle, she was conscious but looked anxious. Her skin was pale and diaphoretic.
“How are you doing?” I asked calmly as I knelt down and felt her radial pulse.
“I feel like I’m going to die.”
Any time a patient expresses a feeling of impending doom, take them seriously. They don’t always die, but they’re typically seriously ill and many times their premonition ends up being correct.
Her radial pulse was weak and rapid, her skin felt exactly as she looked, cool and clammy. We hooked her up to the cardiac monitor. She was in a normal sinus rhythm but with frequent PVCs, or premature ventricular contractions, wide abnormal-looking complexes, a sign of an irritable heart. Before I could do anything, her heart rhythm suddenly degenerated into ventricular fibrillation and cardiac arrest. Then she started seizing.
I’d heard of V-Fib seizures triggered by a sudden cardiac arrest; now I saw it for myself. I started to reach for the defibrillator paddles, then remembered a quicker trick of the trade. I gave the patient a precordial thump in the center of her chest with my fist.
“Holy shit! It worked!” I exclaimed as her V-Fib converted back to a sinus rhythm right before my eyes.
ABOUT JOE HAYES
Joe Hayes grew up in Philadelphia in the 1960’s. Joe’s first heroes were two neighbors who were Philadelphia firemen. Those neighbors gave Joe a fire helmet and boots along with fire department magazines, all of which fueled his imagination.
Joe’s family moved to the Northeast suburbs of Philadelphia in 1965, and he became a volunteer firefighter with the Croydon Fire Company #1 in 1975. He also became an Advanced First Aider, which was the only prehospital medical certification there was before the advent of EMS. Joe ran fire calls and assisted the rescue squad with their station wagon ambulances.
Joe served a hitch in the US Navy as quartermaster/navigator aboard the destroyer USS. William C. Lawe DD 763. During his waning days in the Navy Joe learned that the younger brother of a friend of his had drowned in the Delaware River. Instead of wallowing in sorrow about things he could not change, Joe resolved to become an EMT after getting out of the Navy.
Joe was honorably discharged from the Navy in August 1980 and was sitting in EMT school in September 1980. Joe went on to become a paramedic with Central Bucks EMS and served as Deputy Chief of the Bucks County Rescue Squad. Joe also served 14 years as a tactical medic with the Central Bucks Special Weapons And Tactics (SWAT) team and Bucks County’s Police Major Incident Response Team (MIRT). Joe completed 50 years of service in 2025. Those fifty years coincided with the first half-century of EMS and modern-day emergency medicine.
CONTACT JOE HAYES
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