He's happy, and he knows it!

You’d think working long hours at one of the nation’s busiest fire departments in San Francisco would take its toll. But not for one paramedic. His blog moniker says it all: Happy Medic.

Yes, despite pointless calls and uncooperative patients, HM (also known as Justin Schorr) doesn’t just grin and bear it. Oh no, he actually enjoys what he does. He loves it so much, he blogs about it. Daily. We asked him a few questions via e-mail, which he was pleased to answer (go figure!), and found out a little bit more about this cheerful man.

OK, why are you so happy? Even in your blog profile picture, you look ecstatic!

I got the name Happy Medic from a triage nurse at San Francisco General Hospital years ago. While waiting in line at the triage desk, three or four back from the front with a regular I was transporting for the third time that day, I went about taking his vital signs and whistling. All the other medics were upset, and in the back, I was whistling “Whistle while you work!” from Snow White.

The triage nurse turned the corner and asked who was whistling. I raised my hand and shot a smile, she replied, “Well, aren’t you just the happy medic.” The name stuck. But in reality, I love what I do and really am a happy medic.

Your department answers about 110,000 calls each year. What’s one that really stood out?

Many calls stand out and for all different reasons. Heck, I started a blog about it.

Do you get a lot of people who come across your blog and think you’re writing about them when you’re really not?

Not yet, and I don’t think I ever will the way I protect a patient’s privacy under the HIPAA laws. Laws initially designed to keep insurance companies and billers from selling information now make it illegal for me to give you enough information to pinpoint a particular person or tell you how to save their life in an effective manner.

So, most times I talk about a man, it was a woman and vice versa. Or since you now think that I can be honest, and no one will know. And since most of my stories revolve around me walking into a room and saying “You called 911 … for this?” I don’t think people will come forward and demand I remove the story about when they called 911 at 3 a.m. for a bitten lip.

You worked on a small Indian reservation at a time. What’s one thing that sticks out in your mind after working in such a remote region? How does it compare to your work in San Francisco?

Working on the Reservation taught me self reliance and a lot about interacting with cultures different from my own. There were no other resources nearby, so when we had a major MVA [motor vehicle accident] or a large grass fire, there were three of us — one firefighter and one ambulance crew — and we did it all. I learned to perform all roles at every kind of scene, which helped me to understand how the fire service and EMS systems function at their most basic levels.

Now, in San Francisco, I can see them operate at their most complex and think back to how hard it was to do things alone. When I’m alone in an SF firehouse responsible for a back-up ambulance, rescue truck and water tender making less than $4/hour, I’ll go back to the res. Until then, things are good.

Tell me about the Chronicles of EMS project (Watch a sneak peak featuring HM and the official trailer below!). How did you become involved in it? Do you think it will be picked up by a network?

The Chronicles of EMS was born in the media savvy mind of Ted Setla, producer and paramedic. It was the filming and resulting show from something UK Paramedic Mark Glencorse and I dreamed up called the Project. Mark, another EMS blogger, and I spent months writing both on our blogs and to each other about how different American and UK EMS systems are.

A heart attack is the same all over the world, but because of politics, it is treated differently here. Why? I set out to learn that answer. Mark and I arranged to ride along with each other for a week and learn how the other does their job. Ted Setla heard what we were planning and within 48 hours of Mark’s arrival, he had raised money through Facebook and Twitter, along with Dr. Keith Westley and Zoll Medical to film our adventures. The result is a program called the Chronicles of EMS.

As far as a network picking it up, I hope so. Our profession has not been accurately portrayed on television since the mid ’70s, and even then, they stretched the reality. There have been plenty of fly-on-the-wall, documentary-style shows, but we aim to inform our populations at just what their systems can, and should, do.

Here’s a question we’ve been pondering for some time: Do firefighters wear tactical pants?

The SFFD does not wear a tactical style pant. We wear a dress-type wool trouser, five-pocket, and rarely carry too much in those pockets since they might find themselves in a fire at any given moment. On the reservation, we wore a BDU [battle dress uniform] type pant. I can’t remember why, since we never carried anything in them except stolen sugar and coffee creamer from the gas station coffee center.

When out on the private ambulance, I wore basic trousers but carried a scissor pouch on my belt, much like I do now when I work the ambulance. I don’t need extra clips, a stethoscope, hidden weapon or anything else like that on most of my runs on the fire engine since I have all my equipment in bags I carry in anyway.