Memorial medical copter crew combines courage, caution

Beep, beep, beep.

Flight paramedic Amy Middleton’s pager breaks the quiet in Memorial Star Transport’s headquarters. The flight crew is needed in Calhan. The rush is on.

Middleton grabs her backpack, and flight nurse Ami Brownlee her coat as they run outside and across the street to Memorial Hospital. The helicopter pad is on the rooftop of the seventh floor. Middleton punches the combination of a small wall safe and grabs narcotics before heading through swinging doors to the waiting chopper.

Pilot Rex Prickett is close behind, after checking weather conditions. A second page gives the coordinates and the nature of the emergency call.

Six minutes later, with safety checks done, the crew of three lifts off in the Bell 407 and heads toward an elderly heart patient.

In the air, Middleton and Brownlee discuss their plan for treatment while scanning the skies for other aircraft.

They are Prickett’s extra eyes and ears.

Brownlee spots a plane descending toward Colorado Springs Airport and calls out to Prickett: “Plane, one o’clock.”

Twelve minutes later they land in the front yard of a home 30 miles from Memorial. Middleton and Brownlee hurry inside while Prickett waits with the engine running. Fifteen minutes later the patient and crew fly back toward the Springs.

It’s another day in the life of the medical helicopter crew.

“It’s kind of exciting and kind of a rush when you know you are working against the clock when you have a very critically ill or injured patient,” said Middleton, who joined the crew in 2006 after four years as a paramedic with American Medical Response. She still works for the ground ambulance service part time.

Brownlee joined the team in 2009 with 20 years of nursing experience in pediatrics, trauma, critical care, surgery, and labor and delivery. She also works part time at Parker Adventist Hospital and teaches.

The job is not for the weak of heart. Working on the flight crew is physically and emotionally demanding. The helicopter offers as much room as a 1968 Volkswagen Beetle. Crew members must be confident and self-directed in the field, but humble and team players. No room for egos.

“We recognize our strengths and our weaknesses,” Brownlee said. “It’s not about being a flight nurse, but a flight team.”

“There is no script for any given day,” Middleton said. “You have to be a pretty spontaneous person who doesn’t need a lot of routine.”

“You have to be a little bit crazy,” Brownlee added. “Takes some courage to crawl into this (helicopter) every day.”

But at the end of the shift, it’s worth it, they say.

“It’s the 11-year-old who throws his arms around you and says, ‘That was a really cool helicopter ride,’ and shouldn’t be alive but is talking to you,” Brownlee said. “Or the mother of three who you thought was going to die and her kids will say thanks. That’s the reason.”

Memorial Star Transport, owned by Med-Trans Corp., started serving Memorial Hospital in 2005 after military deployments left the hospital without a helicopter service to transport patients in southern Colorado to its critical care units.

The helicopter flies neonatal, pediatric and high-risk obstetrical patients with the hospital’s speciality teams, and provides primary care with its own staff of registered nurses and paramedics. The service is one of two in Colorado Springs; Penrose-St. Francis Health Service’s Flight for Life is the other.

Memorial Star has four pilots, six nurses (three full time, three part time), seven paramedics (three full time, four part time), one full-time mechanic and a program director who also flies as a nurse.

The pilots work 12-hour shifts, while the full-time nurses and paramedics work 24- and 12-hour shifts.

When they aren’t flying, the nurses and paramedics respond to trauma cases in the hospital’s emergency room or help out in other areas of the hospital. Working in the hospital keeps Brownlee and Middleton current on their skills, and strengthens the bond between the flight crew and hospital personnel.

Good communication is critical during a medical trauma. “People in the ER are our colleagues, too,” Middleton said.

Flight-crew members treat one another as family.

“The nature of what we do day-in and day-out, we put a lot of trust in each other,” Brownlee said. “The pilot trusts the nurse and medic to take care of the patient, and we trust the pilot to get us home safe to our families.”

Crew members review every call, and talk about what went right and what they could have done better. And they are there for one another to help through the hard times.

“We all have our stories that we didn’t get there in time or the patient was too far injured to survive, and they stick with you for a long time,” Brownlee said. “I still have faces I can remember and people I know by name, and I don’t think those ever leave you. Our team members play a huge role in that support.”

Safety is first with the crew.

“Three to go, one to say no” is the flight crew’s motto. If one member is too tired from previous calls or feels uneasy about weather conditions, the crew doesn’t fly. Period.

“You aren’t doing anybody any good if you crash,” Middleton said.

Crashes such as the one near Brownsville, Tenn., March 25 that killed three crew members reinforce the importance of safety. That crew was returning from a transport to another hospital when it flew into a thunderstorm. Another medical helicopter crew had declined the flight.

“Every time a helicopter goes down we immediately want to know what happened so we can prevent that from happening to us,” Brownlee said.

Medical helicopters on the Front Range operate under a weather-turndown system. If Memorial Star turns down a call because of weather, Flight for Life and other teams are informed. Most likely they will do the same, and no one will fly; it prevents “helicopter shopping,” the crew says.

Crews fly with night-vision goggles, and radar altimeters sound when the helicopter is within 300 feet from the ground during the day and 500 feet at night.

Dispatchers never tell the crew the nature of a call or the exact location until they accept it, which removes any emotion from their decision to fly. That could prevent a crew from ignoring dangerous weather conditions — and putting themselves at risk — because the patient is a child.

“Safety, safety, safety — and it’s pounded into us day after day,” Brownlee said.

Two flights and three ER traumas later as darkness descends on Colorado Springs, Brownlee and Middleton begin to wind down and prepare for bed.

Emergency medical service “is hard on your body,” Middleton said. “Hard on your psyche. So much illness and injury over time takes some kind of toll, but for the time being, I have one of the best jobs in the world and I’m really happy about it.”

As the sun was rising the next day, the flight crew was off and running again. Heart condition.