For Michael Guymon, being an Emergency Medical Technician (EMT) is a career filled with tragedy, bitter realizations, and beautiful moments of brotherhood.
Guymon has been an EMT for about three years and six months full time on the streets of Reno.
As an EMT, Guymon, a UNR graduate, says he has seen sides of Reno he wished did not exist. “It's (Reno) dirtier than I thought it was going to be. Drugs are a lot more rampant here than I first anticipated, and the amount of meth in Reno is pretty absurd.” Meth, he says, remains a serious issue in certain communities.
“So opiates are kind of a more expensive drug, same with like all your like hallucinogenics and cocaine,” Guymon said. “Meth is massive. Super cheap meth is easily obtainable, and you're high lasts for way longer. Fortunately, I don't see too much overdose in terms of heroin and the homeless population. I have encountered meth with people who have hotel rooms or live in some very low-priority housing kind of thing. That's where you start to see meth use.”
Mental health is also an issue he believe has not received enough sustained attention. “A big issue is with drugs and with just the inability for us to actually take care of mental health patients on the street, and they don't get help there. So they just continue to try dosing themselves with random drugs or use like meth or something like that. They're very easily taken advantage of by other people on the street. It's really sad because there's very little that we can do for mental health. And there's very little the ER can do for mental health. We only have, like, I would say probably like four or five major mental health facilities and Reno. And if you don't have insurance, it's kinda difficult to get into those.”
Dealing with downtown ambassadors he says is also a work in progress.
“We know they try to do their best, but there's like a false sense of urgency with a lot of the calls, and realistically, driving lights and sirens is super dangerous for us. It's where the majority of healthcare fatalities in the field have happened. It's just, it's dangerous, and it's dangerous to other people. I wish the ambassadors would be able to get like a little bit of medical knowledge because they can sort of figure these little things out and be like, ‘Hey, there's urgent care down the street. You should go walk over to that urgent care,’ instead of requesting an ambulance with lights and sirens or something, cause realistically, almost all the Ambassador calls I've been on required a lights and sirens response. It could have been something we could have driven to fairly slowly because the patient's not critical. Right. The matter of a five to ten-minute difference wouldn't have made any difference at all in the patients overall care.”
The pandemic, he says, has also brought a new form of stress to many EMTs, especially when trying to help lower income communities. “So we do decently well with like obviously the upper and middle classes because you know, that tends to be where more of the education is focused around. A lot of the people tend to be a little bit more agreeable about it. When we start getting into like the lower classes, it's not necessarily that they don't want to be compliant with COVID restrictions. It's that they have a hard time with it. I mean, masks there's no, as far as I know, readily distributed masks system where people can get masks.”
Shelters he feels haven’t respected guidelines. “I mean, we talked about social distancing. You go into like the shelters, and they try their best, but it's just a whole bunch of burlap sacks on like the floor. And you have like three feet between you and the next person sleeping next to you. And then you have a hundred different people in one different room.”
EMTs invariably will have a brutal call or lose a life, although they did everything they could. The environment created by the connection between Guymon and colleagues reminds him to keep fighting. “It's kind of like a brotherhood between the people and like really the best relief for some of the stuff that you see is talking to your fellow coworkers and stuff, because they've also seen it and they've been there, and you know, they offer you like little things that can help you out,” he said at the conclusion of our interview.