Winter 2020
THROUGH THE EYES OF A DINOSAUR WAYNE FLINT FORMER APA (NSW) SECRETARY AND LIFE MEMBER I was once referred to as a Paramedic but long before that, I was called a number of things. The most important being called an Ambo. On the other side of the scale I also got called a Zambuck, Stretcher Bearer and even a Meat Wagon Driver. So, you can see from that introduction that I became a serving member of the NSW Ambulance Service before many of today’s Ambulance stock were even born, hence the reference to dinosaurs. To be precise it was November 1981! Education was different then. I estimated that in my first 10 years in the job I had actually spent a cumulative one year at Rozelle and other Training Centres. Level 1, Level 2, Rescue, Advanced Roping, Intermediate Life Support,
Advanced Life Support and so on. I guess I didn’t do too bad for a guy who failed his First Aid Course at school back in the '60s in Campbelltown. At my first Level 2 me and my other probie mates, we were called Blue Boys (and if you know the reasoning for that you have been in the job a long time). We were interspersed with an equal number of Ambos who I then classified as dinosaurs. My buddies and I of course were the newbies on the block with heaps of intelligence and street cred. I was lucky I was around 26 years of age which made me mature. In age only, I was later to find out! So in amongst this group of Ambos we asked the question, “how come some of these guys are in the job? They don’t seem
that smart." After all, from what we had learned at our Level 1 seven months prior we seemed to know more about anatomy and physiology than they did, and we obviously had our heads so far up our arses we could just about see out of our mouths. So where am I going with this? I sat down one day with an old guy from Ulladulla called John. I didn’t know it, but he was a legend back
"They equipped me with a box of band aids, splints, bandages and Entonox. Yep that was it." in Ulladulla, despite the tag I had labelled them all with. It was only after sitting down over a few beers with John and listening to some of his experiences that I realised how much he and many of these other guys knew. It wasn’t their knowledge of physiology; their anatomy was pretty good. But physiology was as new to them as it had been to me when I started my Level 1. What I realised very quickly was that these guys had a survival instinct, and in most cases that meant good outcomes for their
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