Some Run to Emergencies

On a blustery, gray day in July 2013, Eric Ponce, who was volunteering with the Bay County Fire Department, was aboard a truck returning to a Panama City Beach fire station from a service call when he saw a parasail carrying two girls drop out of the sky, strike power lines and collapse.

“The girls landed on top of a Nissan Armada and crushed the roof,” Ponce recalled.

Everybody on the firetruck was either an EMT or a paramedic, and Ponce, a firefighter lacking such a certification at the time, felt helpless. An ambulance carrying a senior woman with a broken hip arrived at the scene. Paramedics loaded one of the girls into the ambulance for transport to a hospital along with the woman. A second ambulance would arrive shortly thereafter. 

Reduced to merely watching while others tended to the traumatically injured girls, Ponce knew at that moment that he wanted to be more than a basic first responder. He resolved to go to EMT school. Today, he is an engineer with the Panama City Fire Department who, on his “off days,” takes shifts with Bay County Emergency Services working as a paramedic.

His decision to complete paramedic training at Gulf Coast State College also involves a story.

A day after Hurricane Michael beat up much of Northwest Florida in October 2018, Ponce and two other firefighters were assigned to a pickup truck and directed to knock on doors to make welfare checks. They encountered a woman who said her grandfather was experiencing chest pains. When Ponce saw him, it was obvious that the gentleman’s symptoms were life-threatening.

“We were close to Bay Medical (Ascension Sacred Heart Bay), but they weren’t accepting patients,” he said.

Bay had been heavily damaged by the hurricane and was consumed with trying to stabilize patients who were hospitalized when the storm struck. Ponce et al would have to go to HCA Florida Gulf Coast Hospital instead. Before they could, however, they had to drag the heart attack victim a “block and a half” through downed trees to the truck.

At one point, he became unresponsive.

A paramedic began CPR and detecting a shockable rhythm, began using a defibrillator on the man. Ponce joined in “breathing for him” by applying a bag-valve mask.

“On the last defib before we got to the hospital, we got a heartbeat back,” Ponce said. “That was a rush, and I said to myself, ‘I really want to go to paramedic school.’”

Ponce, 36, has no aims to go to medical school, but had he started on that path earlier in life, he might have gotten there.

Panama City’s fire department is a basic life support department. Bay County EMS, where Ponce also works, is an advanced life support department, meaning that it has the requisite number of paramedics and related equipment.

“The city doesn’t have the heart monitors and drugs that the Bay County ambulances have,” Ponce explained. “We try to save lives in any way we can before the ambulance gets there. We may arrive on scene five to 15 minutes ahead of the ambulance, depending on how backed up they are.”

EMTs stabilize patients and provide basic life support. They may administer oxygen. As importantly, they assess what is going on with a patient and relay that information to paramedics as soon as they arrive.

“We are engaged in information gathering,” Ponce said. “We try to determine what happened, what the patient was doing when shortness of breath or chest pain came on. Does he have a history of it?”

Because he also works as a paramedic, Ponce can school EMTs on how best to be helpful to ambulance crews.

“I know the questions they are going to ask,” he said.

Ponce estimates that about 80% of the calls for service received by the fire department are medical in nature.

Ponce works with firefighters Zachary Maschal (left) and Brandon Connors (center) as part of advanced airway training at the Panama City firehouse. Photo by Mike Fender

“We deal with a lot of respiratory cases, especially being near the water,” he said. EMTs also deal with cardiac arrest, drug overdoses, injuries resulting from violent crime and strokes.

“We can check blood sugars,” Ponce said, speaking for EMTs. “Symptoms that result from low blood sugar levels mimic those of strokes. If it’s a case of low blood sugar, we may give the patient juice to get their sugar up a little. If that doesn’t work and there is a need to administer glucose with an IV, that’s something the ambulance handles.”

Both EMTs and paramedics work to educate patients and to serve them as advocates. They may enable patients to avoid unnecessary hospitalizations, and they may strongly recommend that people go to the hospital when they are disinclined to do so.

“A lot of times, people will have TIAs (transient ischemic attacks), which are mini-strokes that can resolve themselves quickly,” Ponce said. “Still, we strongly encourage people to go to the hospital.”

A small stroke is often a precursor to a bigger one. Strokes are like earthquakes that way.

Twice, Ponce has delivered babies while working for the city. A few days after Hurricane Michael, he helped a mother give birth during a driving rain in the parking lot of a Days Inn. Six months later, he was involved in an emergency delivery in circumstances that were not so inclement.

“Babies are low-call volume, but a lot can go wrong,” Ponce said. “Women have been giving birth for millennia, and usually you can let nature take its course. But we look for signs of trouble. If we have a limb presentation, we do everything we can to stop the birth from proceeding. We’ll have the mother lay on her abdomen and raise her knees to her chest. She needs surgery at that point.”

Drug overdose cases have subsided in recent years, Ponce said, but he readily recalls a case from a few years ago that involved a triple overdose.

“Three people were passed out in a hallway,” he said. “We had just two doses of Narcan and one bag-valve mask. The ambulance crew had to do a sort of triage. They started with the bluest patient first.”

Ponce said the thanks he receives from people he has helped is the biggest satisfaction of his job.

“People remember you,” he said. “They remember your mustache. I was in Publix, and I was approached by a woman who had been in a wreck on Lisenby Avenue that I had forgotten about. She said, ‘You and your crew were amazing. You really saved my life.’”

Ponce did not grow up wanting to become a firefighter. On the day he graduated from Bay High School in Panama City, he filled out a job application with the Lewis Bear Co. and soon went to work as a beer truck driver.

He started driving 30-foot side loaders, the kind of truck often seen making deliveries to convenience stores, and graduated to semis with 48- and 53-foot trailers. A friend introduced him to Justin Barron, who was working as a firefighter and asked Ponce if he had ever thought about doing likewise.

At Barron’s suggestion, Ponce applied to become a volunteer firefighter. His application was approved, and after a day’s experience, he had fallen in love with the job. He graduated from the Fire Academy in 2009 and was hired by Panama City a year later.

Ponce is of Taylor-Swift-boyfriend proportions. He looks like he could anchor an offensive line but never played football after middle school.

“I was a band nerd,” he said. “I played the tuba. I don’t mean to toot my own horn — oops, sorry — but I was just naturally good at it. I didn’t have to practice much. I was able to see a piece of music, play it once or twice and then knock it out.”

At a tri-state competition held in Troy, Alabama, Ponce emerged with top-chair, top-band honors.

For a man who pilots 47-foot ladder trucks, traffic makes a difficult job even more challenging. Ponce readily rattled off some of the most accident-prone stretches of road in Bay County and the most perilous times of day.

He noted that improvements to Harrison Avenue in downtown Panama City have so narrowed the road that it is impossible for a large fire truck and a garbage truck or big delivery vehicle to meet and pass one another. Navigating a new roundabout in a ladder truck is so tricky that it is perhaps best attempted by someone who used to make beer deliveries in a semi to stores and restaurants at Panama City Beach’s Pier Park. Distracted drivers exacerbate the traffic problem.

“And today’s cars are so well insulated, it is hard for people to hear sirens,” Ponce said.

Maybe a blast from a tuba would help.