Paramedic Eddie Barnes saved a life with skills he wasn’t authorized to use — prompting an investigation that reveals the moral gray zone of modern EMS. Anyone who has ever done EMS at any level knows the reality: in school, the rules are black and white — the policies, protocols and procedures are black and white. We study them, we take the test, we get out and we get the privilege of practicing. What they almost never tell us is that absolutely nothing in the real world of EMS is black and white; everything happens in the murkiness of a very gray area that providers must navigate in real time. They also never tell us that within that gray area, there comes a series of ever-changing and unimaginable X-factor variables providers must also respond and react to in real time ... and be correct, if not at least reasonably wrong.

Therein lies the dilemma that any provider can face on any call: what would you do if ... ? Sometimes the decisions are obvious, but other times, the decisions EMS providers have to make in the heat of a fraction of a moment make Sophie’s choice look easy. Such is the life we have chosen.

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Photo by Aidan Tottori on Unsplash