AMT

Well, its been a long time but I'm finally going to explain my other summer training:

Those of us who had Advanced Medical Training (AMT) during the third block of the summer had to report on the same day as the Buckner run-back. No break. Joy. On the bright side, Meg and Gute from my squad were going to be there with me.

I roomed with a guy from my company and turns out we were right next door to Meg and a few doors down from Gute, always nice to be close to the people you know. The days were 11 hours with one hour off for lunch. If we were lucky the day was split into two parts, half in-class learning (death by power-point) and half practical exercises, if not we had 10 hours of power point slides. At the end of these insane days it was expected that you would go back to your room and study for a good 2-3 hours on top of all that. Yeah right. We went back to the barracks and had fun (head out to the mall, watch movies, etc.). This lead to many nights next door "studying" with friends until 1 or 2 am.

This was also my first real introduction to the political climate of the military when an individual desperately wants to expand his/her power. The barracks we were staying in were controlled by SGR (the Summer Garrison Regiment), but we were not a part of SGR because we were on a MIAD (Military Individual Advanced Development). Unfortunately, the SGR TAC decided that he wanted us to be under his jurisdiction.

The first problem we had with them was when we had to be awake at 0400 to do a 12-hr EMT shift and they decided that it would be important to wake all of our girls up at 0300-0330 to make sure they were in their rooms. As the SGR TAC was a Major and the officer in charge of our training was a LT Col. we soon had the power to check off our own people.

Next came room-standards. The standard for AMT was simply that the room needed to look nice. SGR came around and yelled and screamed that our beds weren't made to standard, our closets weren't set up per SOP, etc. This fight continued through the entire course until one day LT COL Chamberlain checked our rooms and said they looked fine and a certain captain came by later and threw our stuff around because our rooms weren't up to standard. This battle ended with us submitting to SGR standards and waking up earlier for breakfast formation. We never got stuck with their guard shifts or anything but the extra sleep lost and trying to find the time to get our rooms to military standard was not fun at all. C'est la vie.

In the end we all (mostly) passed the exams and got on the national registry. New York State tests came later and I still haven't heard back though it should be coming soon. There are some cool opportunities opening up for the EMS club here such as a high-volume EMT station trying to get their Friday night and Saturday shifts completely covered by cadets, they're trying to give us access to higher levels of training (EMT CC, CPR Instructor, etc.). Should be good!