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Wendy Hilboldt cannot imagine life without being aboard an ambulance. For the 31-year member of the New Canaan Volunteer Ambulance Corps, it's right where she should be.
"It's something I've always loved. I love taking care of people," she said. "Always. And I'm here all my life, so I know 60 percent of my patients, so it's a wonderful thing to do in a small town." Hilboldt once considered a career in medicine, but a passion for education led her to become a teacher at South Elementary School. But her move to the classroom did not take away her desire to help folks facing medical emergencies.
On average, Hilboldt boards an ambulance about 150 times a year to respond to an emergency call . The corps of 40 volunteer EMTs go out to roughly 1,500 calls annually. Fall and spring are usually the busiest times of year for the NCVAC, with local children out playing sports and inevitably getting injured.
While Hilboldt has dealt with life-threatening injuries, the majority of her calls are not life-or-death situations. That doesn't mean the calls are not scary for the injured or their relatives. "A young mother whose child falls for the first time and sustains a laceration to the head can be very traumatic for the mother," she said.
That trauma may make an EMT's ability to maintain calm and reassure patients that things are going to be all right the most important asset of all. "You provide them with a sense of calm ... and you try to bring them to the hospital in better shape than you found them," she said.
Hilboldt has no plans to stop yet, either. Helping people, and the chance to learn more life-saving techniques, never gets boring. "There's always an opportunity to learn new things,she said. "I love it,"
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