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At a young age, this Baldwin City Fire volunteer knew what she wanted to do and is now able to give back to the community through her passion for medical care.
Baldwin City Fire Department: Becky Catron
Though she was born in Baldwin City and has lived there with her children and mother the last 11 years, Becky Catron says her volunteer work with the Baldwin City Fire Department has its roots in a Southwest desert town nearly 900 miles away.
What is the essence of life? To serve others and to do good. 
–Aristotle – 2300 years ago
It was there, in the city of Las Cruces, New Mexico, where Catron lived 25 formative years and fell in love with emergency medical services and fire service.
“Around the age of 12, I took a CPR (cardiopulmonary resuscitation) course,” Catron says. “I was fascinated by that.”
She also points to a car accident she was in with her older brother when she was 14 and the interactions they had at the scene with the ambulance crew there to help them. Those interactions got her brother interested in obtaining a paramedic’s license. As a young sister who always looked up to her brother, it only seemed natural that young Becky wanted to follow suit.
Catron earned her license as a basic emergency medical technician (EMT) in 1995 and an intermediate EMT designation in 1996, and worked 15 years with the Las Cruces Fire Department before deciding to return to her hometown back in 2013. She began working full time as an emergency room technician at Lawrence Memorial Hospital but was still itching to get back into EMT work.
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The Baldwin City Fire Department, with its volunteer staff of Fire Chief Terry Baker, Assistant Fire Chief Tim Silvers and a crew of firefighters and EMTs, was just the avenue Catron was looking for.
“It basically comes down to recognizing a real need in the community,” she says. “First response is such an important role. The better the response time, it makes a huge difference in the outcome of an event.”
Obviously, Catron performs her volunteer work when she’s not working her full-time hospital job. She says she reserves Sundays as “family day” and makes herself available for calls from Sunday night through Thursday morning.
“There’s no typical day,” she says. “Some days we get no calls, some we’ll get nine or 10 calls. The other day, we took three calls, one on top of the other.”
Catron’s shifts at LMH Health run from 11 a.m. to 11 p.m. So life can get hectic.
“If you sleep, you sleep. If you don’t, you don’t,” she says.
One of the things that makes her volunteer job so interesting is the wide range of calls she takes, Catron adds, which forces her to utilize different emergency response skill sets.
“Sometimes, you have true emergencies and make a big difference,” she says. “But whether it’s life-saving care or emotional support … simply providing comfort and stability in someone’s life … it’s very fulfilling just being there when someone needs you most.”
Working for a volunteer fire department in a small town can provide more personal experiences than those an EMT in a big city might encounter, Catron explains. “Sometimes, you run into people you know, and your presence can give (an accident victim) a lot of comfort and emotional stability. It just gives me an overall sense of fulfillment.”
Understandably, she says, “The (calls) that stand out in my mind are ones I really don’t like to talk about.” However, there was one call she remembers when the victim of a fall went into full cardiac arrest—an event she says rarely has a positive outcome. But through her job at LMH, she was able to see that patient several days later sitting up and moving about in the hospital.
“That just made my day,” Catron continues. “That doesn’t happen often, but when it does, it’s such a boost.”
Her true passion is riding in an ambulance and answering EMS calls. In fact, she says she remains best friends with her old riding partner back in Las Cruces. For now, though, that kind of schedule just doesn’t fit into her schedule as a mother and a daughter. She’ll simply have to feed that passion with her volunteer duties in Baldwin City.
“It’s definitely a good place to be now,” Catron says.
