There are two kinds of people in EMS: the white clouds and the black clouds. White clouds are crews that have low call volume and always seem to be in the right place at the right time. Black clouds, on the other hand… let’s just say those providers have some gnarly stories to tell.

Somehow Harley and I were a bit of a gray cloud – it could be a hurricane or sunny skies on the horizon. We would never know until the tones dropped.

Since Harley became a field training officer, we had a few characters come through our truck. Thankfully, Sam was a cool chick, and she wasn’t afraid to push her anxiety aside to jump right in and provide patient care. She took direction and criticism well, she was professional but loosened up to us as the day went on.

Not going to lie, though, part of my good mood that day was the white cloud hanging over Sam’s head. Harley and I had agreed to work another 72-hour shift for some reason (money. Money is the only reason). It was either day two or three (we stopped counting after the first 24 hours), and we were thankful to sleep from 5:30-7am, get breakfast and coffee, and chill at the coffee stand for an hour or so. Sam’s white cloud was pushing our heavy dark clouds out of the way.

We ran a few ground level falls – grandma tried to get out of bed without her walker, another nine-thousand year old man slipped in the shower that didn’t have sticky adhesive on the tub and his eight-thousand year old wife tried to help him up and threw her back out.

Sam did great. She elbowed her way through the crowd of providers and started assisting wherever she was needed. Harley was proud of her, and I was proud of him for teaching her.

But a white cloud can still mean rain is coming.

Around the halfway point of our day, we’d slipped into a false sense of security. Harley and I had 12 hours to go, and we’d only run 3 calls that day. I kicked my boots off – a sure-fire sign for the EMS gods that it was time to drop a bomb on us.

“Medic 1, code 3 for fall.”

Sam grabbed the microphone and give the go-ahead for dispatch to continue.

“Medic 1, I show you responding code 3 for a fall. 65 year old female fell from the roof.”

“Wait. What?” I poked my head through the partition of the ambulance.

Harley shrugged in the passenger seat and plugged the address into the GPS. “Well, here we go, Sam. Time to show us what you got.”