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Well, today as we were coming home from the theater, we drove by Balboa Park and into Hillcrest, and the Gay Pride Parade. By the way, Happy Pride. So that got me thinking, how many of us have been trailblazers and how hard that has been? It does not matter if you're gay, straight, male, or female, sometimes you will find yourself changing the world.
Well for me it was purely accidental. As a young kid I used to love watching Emergency... Paramedics De-Soto and Gage always saving lives, with the heroic help of Rampart. Well, in my last year of High School we had the chance to take a course given by the Mexican Red Cross, five actions to save a life. Essentially first aid and CPR. After we were all certified, we were invited to join up. One of the instructors was a Paramedic, a newly minted medic.
So I went and signed up. We were a weird cadet corp, as most of us were women. Realize until our class no women were accepted. We were given the same kind of training men were. This meant, runs, drilling, firefighting the same crap of basic training, and of course first aid, advanced first aid. Then came graduation and we had our command cords... very military, very german, put on us. Our instructors, in a tradition I repeated years later when I taught classes in Tijuana, pinned theirs on us. We were now part of the corp, but there was one caveat. Women could not work third shift. Why? We were women and they were afraid for our safety, the highers ups that is. We weren't quite pleased, after all during training there were no exceptions made and we had to run that damn click in a minimum time that boys had to run it in. So it seemed a little unfair.
So that started a small fight. To make a long story short, I ended up moving to San Diego, but continued to work in Tijuana. It is there that I managed to convince my commanders to try letting us work the third shift. It was a pilot program. It worked like a charm. I never saw myself as a trail blazer, but the other day I went to have some yogurt, and struck a talk with a female firefighter. One of the reason the fire department decided to allow them in, women, was believe or not, what they saw in Tijuana. That and LAFD and a few other departments, but we were closer as an example. A few in the department used to volunteer also in Tijuana and they saw me and a few others pulling hose the same as the boys... we were part of the team, not damsels in distress to be looked at but not touched. We fought fires, we rappelled, we did EMS, our primary function... and we did it the same way, with seemingly few complaints. (I personally fired a couple women that would not do that, because I am not kidding one feared breaking a nail.)
So I realized... I became quite the accidental trailblazer...
Oh and remember, when I started, there were no boots made for women in the fire service, so we had to do with what existed, men boots. I recommend very heavy sucks if you are ever in the need to wear them and you are a woman.
So anybody else here who became an accidental trail blazer? I have come to realize that even if I kick the bucket tomorrow, or tonight, I did manage to change the world, I believe for the better... and not intentionally either. It was one of those things that hit me like a sack of rocks... your life already mattered to more than just your patients.
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