Naperville students explore careers aboard 'flying emergency room'

When Kerry Hess decided to pursue a medical career, she immediately wanted to become a flight nurse.

She might have planted that seed in the minds of a Naperville North High School student or two Wednesday morning as she shared the joys and challenges of her job with about 30 teens in a health occupations class at Edward Hospital.

"It's cool to see that this is something I can do with what I want to major in," said senior Stefania Romano, who plans to become a nurse.

Hess also was a nurse, and then a paramedic, before joining a Lifestar medical helicopter crew with paramedic Nolan Ryan and pilot Brady Clauss.

Clauss landed the team's chopper atop the helipad at the Naperville hospital, where Hess and Ryan told students how they provide medical care for patients in transit.

"We are a flying emergency room/intensive care unit," Hess said. "All the things you see in the hospital, we can do in the back - except we do it in a much smaller space."

The helicopter has a heart monitor, a ventilator and an IV stand from which to drip medication. In the pockets of their flight suits, paramedics stash clamps, syringes, scissors, saline solution and medicine to keep the often-needed items handy and their cramped space clutter-free.

The crew's days start at their hangar and part-time home in Joliet, where they work 24-hour shifts. Some days are crammed full of flights from hospital to specialty hospital or from crash scene to trauma center.

But on others, the alarm never sounds.

During those slow times, Ryan said, "we fill our days with training."

To join a medical flight crew, students need training as a nurse and/or paramedic and five years of on-the-job experience, the pros said.

"This is not the job that you do right when you graduate," Hess said. "It's a very special industry."

Medical flight staffers also need steady hands to deal with turbulence and turns and quick thinking to stabilize patients while in the air.

"We get really sick patients," Hess said, "and we need to make really good decisions for them going from point A to point B."

Dealing with the additional stress and hazard of flight is a challenge, Ryan said. And the job can "drag on you" because patients who need speedy transit in a medical helicopter often have dire injuries or deteriorating conditions, so their prognosis isn't great.

The flight crew copes by increasing its focus on safety.

Pilots such as Clauss aren't told what kind of patient they could be transporting when dispatchers request their response. The details are left out so there is no pressure to respond when weather conditions or visibility won't allow.

"We're not any help if we can't make it to a call," Ryan said.

Students said the presentation clued them in to a hidden-in-plain-sight career they'd never considered.

"It's a new aspect of medicine that I haven't seen before," junior Bella Karduck said.

"I realize that a lot with this class," senior Libby Ramm said.

Health occupations students have been visiting Edward twice a week since January, shadowing employees such as child life specialists, charge nurses and central sterile processing workers. As the year wraps up, the hospital schedules visits from Naperville Fire Department paramedics and Lifestar to introduce students to careers outside its walls.

"The helicopter is usually the highlight of the year," said Pam Briggs, supervisor of volunteer services for Edward Hospital. "Hearing the stories of the paramedics is really interesting for the students."