Thirty years ago, Vince Duren was working as a mail carrier in the tiny Wisconsin village of Cazenovia when he happened upon the wreckage of a head-on collision a half mile south of town. The driver of one car had been killed, and the other car carried a mother and her young daughter, who had a compound fracture.
At 76, Duren has retired from the program as well as his job as village postmaster, but Cazenovia, a hamlet of 300 people, now has an 11-member EMT team living within a three-mile radius. “In the city most people may not know their neighbor who lives at the end of the street,” says Irene Barreau, a 24-year veteran of the team. “But here in Cazenovia we do, we know everyone. Generally, if you live around Caz, it’s going to be someone you know who shows up to get you through a medical emergency.”
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Another head-on collision that occurred shortly thereafter was even more gruesome. Two women had severe facial cuts, and one of them had an eyeball protruding from its socket. “We put a Styrofoam cup over the eye and taped the cup down,” says Duren. “You don’t try and put the eyeball back; you leave that for the doctor to do.” A third victim had been impaled when the handle of a tire jack had been driven through the back of his seat. Duren and the firemen placed him prone on a stretcher, leaving the jack handle in place for the emergency room to deal with, and immobilized him as well as they could so the jack handle wouldn’t move. Through his training he’d learned how to extricate someone from an accident, how to treat wounds, how to evaluate bleeding, respiration, and broken bones. But EMTs aren’t doctors: “Just don’t hurt anybody, don’t make them any worse than they were when you extracted them from the accident.”
Senior squad members recall the neighbor who’d lit himself on fire with gasoline. The crew members who responded hadn’t been told anything about the call before they arrived and had no real experience with severe burns. They tried to make the victim comfortable while transporting him to an emergency room as quickly as possible; he talked to them all the way to the hospital and later died.
For more on Cazenovia see the Visitor’s Guide on page 36.
