Xavier Murdoch is a University of Idaho pre-med student and emergency medical technician with the Moscow Volunteer Fire Department. He was born in Canada but has lived in Moscow for 12 years now since his parents have been professors at the university.
Q: How did you know you wanted to get into medicine?
A: “I kind of have always been really interested in it (working in the medical field). I was an athlete — I always injured myself. I was also a very injury prone kid. My third word was sphygmomanometer, which is a blood pressure cuff. (My parents) taught me that as a kid, so that I could go in and they could ask me what it was and surprise all the doctors. I always liked learning about it.”
Q: How do you cope with those difficult cases?
A: “Those types of things are — they happen. Sometimes there’s nothing you can do about it, and so there’s no use. You’re going to think ‘well, maybe I could have done something different, maybe this could happen.’ But the fact of the matter is, you did everything you’re supposed to do — there were lots of people there to help them. Sometimes there’s just nothing you can do. To accept that, that’s really a coping method. You just got to make sure that you’re able to, because it can be difficult sometimes.”
Q: How has your family impacted your career in medicine?
A: “My parents are very encouraging, very supportive of anything I wanted to do. They didn’t care what it was as long as it was going to make me happy. But that being said, they’re always pushing me — whatever I wanted to do — to do it to the best of my abilities. One thing my dad said about it is, ‘this is something that you can study, just enough to pass. Or you can study enough to be a great EMT, and really make a difference in somebody’s day, in somebody’s life. Who would you rather have working on you or your family, somebody that just got through it, or somebody that was committed to learning everything they could to best help people?’”
Q: What does a typical shift look like as a student EMT?
A: “Typically we have signed up for a slot of times, so you go to class. Hopefully nothing turns out while you’re in class, but if it does the professors are very understanding and they’re great at working with us. So then we just quietly get up and come to whichever station we decide to come to, which is called over the radios. It’s very random, and very sporadic.”
Q: What is the most difficult part of being an EMT?
A: “If you’ve been around the community for as long as most people have, you’re going to have some (cases) where you know the person, or you know the person’s parents or something like that. One of those for me was where I knew the patient’s parents very well. That was particularly difficult. Those are the types of times where everybody checks on everybody.”
Q: What is something you learned from being an EMT that you’d never thought of before?
A: “Well, the first thing you learn is that life is fragile. That’s a big lesson. You think of all these things and there’s all these great medical techniques and procedures you can do to try and get somebody back, but the fact is that sometimes you don’t. And that’s just the way it goes.”
Story by Brianna Finnegan
Photos by Brianna Finnegan
Design by Taylor Lund