Eleina Salgia

It was kind of on a whim, my decision to be an EMT. I really wanted to know what I wanted to do before I started college. Hospital rounds are great, where you’re shadowing a doctor, but when you don't know what to do, you have a lot of people in the hospital [to fall back on]. But being an EMT, there's really no safety net. You have to know what you're doing.

The program was at Cleveland Clinic [and] lasted five weeks. Most people were already pre-med or med students for a few years already. I was basically the only one who had no experience in the medical world. It was like seven hours a day, something awful. Every day I was like, “I want to quit,” but at the end of every day, I loved it.

I remember a time I messed up. It was the biggest guy in class: 196.25 pounds. And I was the smallest person in the class. We were supposed to do a stair chair, which is basically bringing someone up and down stairs on a chair. I chose the biggest guy in class because I wanted to prove that I could do it. I got up two steps and I was like, “OK, I need help. Can someone else fill in here?” Instantly, I apologized to the instructor, and he was not mad at me at all. He was just really impressed with me. It was nice to have someone recognize that I was trying.

Eleina Salgia is a Weinberg second-year on the pre-med track. She completed an accelerated EMT certification program in Ohio the summer after her senior year of high school. In January, Salgia began working in Skokie for an interfacility transport company, which moves patients between medical facilities. Salgia works 12-hour shifts about twice a month during the school year.

The instructors were great. One of them overheard me on a phone call with my dad in the hallway. I told him, "I don't think I can be a doctor. This is so fast-paced. It's really stressing me out. I just don't think I'm cut out for this." [My instructor] pulled me aside afterwards and he was like, "We've noticed you in class. You're doing incredible. And don't think you're falling behind anyone."

He told me I would be an incredible doctor, and the world needs more people like that. It was just nice hearing from someone who has seen a lot of students before. It felt like I was being recognized and that there was someone who really wanted me to succeed.

I did work briefly in Ohio. This was when I was doing my ride along, so I wasn't even a trained EMT. We were called to a case of someone who was expressing suicidal ideation. It was two guys and me working. [The patient] was sitting in bed refusing to talk to any of us. She wouldn't respond to our questions, wouldn't say anything. [The patient’s] mother was called, and it was clear her mother wasn't really expressing that much care for her. She was yelling at her daughter like, "Why did you have to bring police into this?" It was a friend who called the police, but [the patient’s mom] was pretty mad.

The police came, and the other EMTs went to talk to the police, and they asked me to just watch her and help her get to the hospital. Once they left, I sat down with her and instead of asking, "How are you feeling?” or telling her, “You really need to get to the hospital right now," I started talking about her cat in her room. I was like, "Oh my God, I have a cat, too, she’s the love of my life! She's my best friend." And she finally started responding to me.

This is the thing that made me realize I needed to be in the medical field. We were able to talk as two women without these other men in the room. I told her going to the hospital was going to be a lot easier if she agreed to go with us, because if not, then unfortunately, the police were going to have to take her in their car. I told her I would ride with her in the ambulance. I would be in the back with her. We don't have to fully strap her in, and I can just talk to her the entire ride. And she started crying and finally started packing and getting ready to go.

Something that I love about the community of EMTs is that I've never been treated differently as a woman [by my coworkers]. It teaches you very early on that if you prove yourself, nothing can stop you, and there aren't people out to get you. That was something I was really scared about [in the beginning]. I'm the smallest one here. I'm 5 foot 1 inch and a woman of color going into this field where stereotypically it's always been big white men. But once I got in there, I realized I wasn't going to be treated any differently. It wasn't that I had to prove myself as a woman, I just had to prove myself as an EMT.

I've worked in the hospital, and it's a little bit harder to understand where [patients are] coming from, because a lot of them are already annoyed. They've had their vitals taken in the ambulance. They don't understand why it's happening again. But seeing the version of them who has to call an ambulance and needs help is a lot more humbling and makes you realize that it's their worst day. For us, it's just another day. You need to treat them with the compassion that you would want to be treated with, which I think sometimes gets lost in a hospital setting.

[Working as an EMT] is the one part of my day where I'm not thinking about school stress or anything else. Even when I'm working out, I'm still thinking, “I should probably be back home right now studying for bio.” Or when I'm out in Chicago or out with my friends, I'm thinking, “I have an assignment that I really should have started.” For some reason when I'm working as an EMT, even if there's downtime, I'm never thinking about schoolwork. I think the change in location is one of the biggest things. As an EMT, I'm so far out from campus. When I take off the uniform, I'm just like another kid again, just going to school.