We’re all guilty of it… “This one time, I ran this call”…


War stories are just part of the job, but have you ever noticed that we can’t talk about anything in this career without talking about our previous calls?  My last partner and I were really good friends and actually had quite a bit in common.  We were both into gaming and other nerd topics.  But no matter how hard we tried, we always ended up getting to war stories during some point of the shift.



While this is a normal occurrence, once I became aware of it, it drove me nuts.  Our entire profession is built on a communication structure that revolves around this.  It is physically and mentally exhausting when you think about it.  From a post-traumatic stress disorder perspective, we are reliving some of our worst calls over and over again for what we think is the enjoyment of others.  But in reality, we are doing more harm to ourselves and our coworkers for really no reason.  Like I’ve mentioned in other blogs, we have a bad habit of turning our own mental pain towards others.  You may be struggling with the death of a child, for instance.  What do you do? You bring it up every chance you get.  Not only are you “reopening your own wounds”, but you’re also giving others the same pain that you are experiencing.  Some of the things we see don’t need to be remembered on a daily basis or shared with others.  

Next time you are at the ER, waiting for a room for your patient and talking to the other crews “holding the wall”, pay attention to the topic at hand.  Nine times out of ten it’s a group of EMTs & Paramedics talking about calls they’ve run.  Now if you’re anything like me, this moment will change your outlook on this career field.  Once it’s seen, it can’t be “unseen”.

Even if the conversation has NOTHING to do with EMS, somehow it will inevitably somehow come back to it.  It’s just human nature… or, is it nurture?


We’ve all had a class, whether it was your initial EMT/Paramedic class, AHA BLS/ACLS classes, or even continuing education, where you had an instructor who couldn’t go more than ten minutes without bringing up a “war story”.  Even I am guilty of this from time to time.  We are brought up in this field to “one up” one another and we do that by bragging about the calls we have run.  But tell me this, other than when you were BRAND new, have you ever really been impressed by one of these stories?  If it sounds unbelievable, you probably blow it off as an over exaggeration.  So why do we do it?  Is it because we feel the need to boost ourselves up to prove our worth? Maybe.  Or is it the CONSTANT competition with one another to be the “best”?  Striving to be the best is good, when it improves your patient care, but most of the time it actually hinders our care.


So let’s make a promise to do better as an entire field.  Let’s stop this nonsense of “war stories” and try to become the best we can.  I’m not saying we shouldn’t learn from our experiences, but we should move them from this “pissing contest” into a place of learning.  Tell others about the mistakes you’ve made and what you learned from them.  Until you admit your faults, you can never grow from them.