News Photo by Julie Riddle Ed Hoskinson, firefighter and medical first responder for the Maple Ridge Township Fire Department, displays medical equipment at the fire department building on Thursday.

ALPENA — During National EMS Week, celebrated each third week of May since 1974, the nation gives a nod to emergency medical services responders who arrive first at the scene of a medical crisis.

For many of the women and men who dedicate full-time or volunteer hours to showing up when people need medical help, the work is almost instinct, said Ed Hoskinson, firefighter and medical first responder for the Maple Ridge Township Fire Department.

“We don’t know why we do it,” Hoskinson said. “We just do it.”

Like medical responders elsewhere, the 11 emergency medical technicians and six medical first responders at the Maple Ridge Township Fire Department put helping other people first, Hoskinson said.

“When the tones drop,” Hoskinson said, “we drop everything and go.”

Most responders carry medical trauma bags so they can head straight to the scene when needed, he said.

When 911 dispatchers take a medical call, pager and text alerts go to every volunteer responder in the appropriate township.

Those who can go, do.

Hoskinson remembers shopping in Walmart when an alert on his phone alerted him to a two-person crash with an ejection.

“I just set my stuff down and walked out,” he said.

In a rural area, reaching the person in need might mean navigating a two-track in an ambulance built for paved roads.

Vertical house number signs, available free to every resident and already on most mailbox poles in the area, help responders find homes in a rural area, Hoskinson said.

Those small signs get help to homes more quickly, and, “Seconds, minutes, could be the difference between life and death,” he said.

To learn to handle emergencies, from broken toes to heart attacks, medical responders train for months or sometimes years, their only financial reward a small payment when they respond to a call.

“It’s a pittance, for what we do,” Hoskinson said. “But we don’t do it for the money.”

At many rural fire departments, couples, siblings, and family generations volunteer together, following the “there’s nothing we can’t do together” philosophy, said Hoskinson, whose wife also volunteers as a Maple Ridge Township medical responder.

EMS work requires team effort, with many hands needed to provide care, gather materials, and handle paperwork and communication while preparing a patient for medical transport by paramedics.

He remembers a motorcycle crash that left a 12-inch gash in the driver’s leg and injuries to the man’s head. The rider had “barbaric strength” and kept trying to grab his head, requiring five people to hold him down during the ambulance ride to the hospital, Hoskinson said.

The rider recovered and returned to thank his caregivers.

More often, people get whisked away in an ambulance, and volunteer responders never get to find out what happens to them — probably the most frustrating part of the job, Hoskinson said.

At Maple Ridge Township, volunteer medical responders include a millwright, a heavy vehicle operator, a township clerk, and a transcriptionist, all ready to break away from their day jobs or spend their free hours responding to their neighbors’ medical needs.

Some come with military experience — Air Force, Army, Marines, Navy.

Such military background befits the job, which resembles combat triage in which the essential goal is “to keep everybody alive,” Hoskinson said.

For Hoskinson, that has meant rushing to the aid of a woman convulsing from a diabetic fit, her eyes rolling back into her head.

It’s meant leaping out of bed at 2 a.m. to perform CPR on someone having a heart attack.

For emergency medical responders, such first-on-scene heroics are just another day on the job, Hoskinson said.

“We do it for our community, not for ourselves,” he said. “On people’s worst day, we’re there to try to make their day better.”

Julie Riddle can be reached at 989-358-5693 or jriddle@thealpenanews.com. Follow her on Twitter @jriddleX.