Some Austin EMS medics working winter storm say it was the 'worst shift of their life'

AUSTIN, Texas — From record-breaking call volumes to transporting patients in their final moments of life on icy roads, Austin EMS Association shared the many challenges they faced during last week’s historic winter storm.

“I’ve heard from many medics this was the worst shift of their life, and this is after going through a global pandemic,” said Selena Xie, President of the Austin EMS Association.

Many Texans are still processing the trauma of the winter storm that caused infrastructure to fail across the state and lead to a domino effect of issues that will takes months, if not longer, to fully recover.

Whatever challenges we faced as a community, Xie and her paramedics faced them with the goal of saving as many lives during the crisis as possible.

”My partner and I kept on saying ‘there are no rules anymore.’ The normal rules just don’t apply. Stop signs don’t mean anything, roads don’t mean anything when you’re creating tracks in the road, the normal way you take care of patients doesn’t mean anything in this type of crisis. It felt very lawless, to be just doing what we could barley be able to do to take care of people. It felt lawless,” said Xie.

Austin-Travis County EMS measured they received 1,435 calls for service on February 15 and 1,323 calls for service the next day. Xie said the previous record for calls for service was on January 1, New Year’s Day, in 2017 with around 700.

One week after ATCEMS recorded their highest volume of calls for service – ever, for two consecutive days, Xie wrote down some of the challenges she faced last week and posted it for the community to see.

Her first call that Monday morning foreshadowed how her week would follow.

Their ambulance got stuck in the snow and ice after a different crew was already stuck. A 4x4 vehicle helped them out to reach a patient with a debilitating lung condition.

“By the time we reached the patient, his oxygen levels were half of what is normal,” she wrote.

Icy roads made a typically bumpy ambulance ride even more turbulent, she says.

She tried every form of oxygen until the patient made it to the hospital.

”Even for the first 10 minutes he asked the doctor to knock him out and put him out of his misery. That was really hard, it set the tone for the rest of the shift for me,” said Xie.

In a separate call, Oxygen helping one hospice patient stay comfortable at home was cut off when the power went out.

“He started making awful grunting noises,” wrote Xie. “It is not acceptable to die like that, in agony. We had no other option at the time than to take the person to the hospital to keep him comfortable but not before we let his wife cry against his chest for five minutes, which was all we felt comfortable sparing at the time.”

Xie said typically, medics do their best to share empathy with grieving family members but during a crisis like the winter storm, Xie said there’s so much action that needed to taken to treat patients – time wasn’t on their side.

“I’m trying to be there for his wife emotionally but I’m also trying to get this moving because we need to get him to the hospital and also, it’s freezing in their house,” she said.

The overwhelming amount of calls lead the communications team to prioritize their responses.

“Even our department had to say, ‘I’m sorry you’re not getting an ambulance for 30-40 minutes because you’re not at the point where you’re dying right now. We had to make those really hard decisions.”

As state and city infrastructure started to fail around them, EMS still found a way to do their job.

Medics started to get creative to deliver care in the aftermath of the storm. Xie gave the example of how medics found a way to administer care efficiently during the crisis. She said if a patient needed stitches, EMS can’t give stitches even if the medics know exactly how to treat the patient. COVID protocol changed EMS’s operation to have a physician’s assistant on a call so they can get care at the patient’s bedside.

“This is something we are planning to roll out, more and more. The roll out was supposed to start this week. This is thanks to city council funding to make this possible we were really able to see that aspect of medicine shine,” she said.

Once we thawed out, Xie said EMS helped fill the need with food and water crisis.

”I still felt guilty because there is so much need in our community,” she said.