If you happened to be near an emergency scanner this weekend, you may have heard a call go out for emergency medical services once, then again, and then several more times, a 911 dispatcher trying furiously to find help for two people suffering from breathing issues. 

Finally, a response came in. The crew promised help was on the way, but their estimated time of arrival made my blood run cold. 

It would be another 35 minutes before this couple struggling to breathe would see a paramedic cross their doorstep. 

That’s 5 times longer than the average response time of an ambulance in an American city, 6 times longer if you add in the time from the first request for help from dispatch and the mutual aid response. 

My own asthma is well-controlled and complications are rare, but on the occasions when my lungs do go into spasm, leaving me gasping for breath, I know the sheer terror that takes hold of my body. I both feel like someone has wrapped their hands around my neck and taken a seat on my chest, preventing a single breath of air from moving into my lungs. The fear that no air is coming causes a panic that only seems to worsen the attempts to breathe, making an attack that is mere minutes long feel like hours. 

My heart went directly to these people waiting what sounded to me like an interminable amount of time for help. 

My mind went directly to wondering what would happen if it were me making that call. How long would it take to reach my home out in the middle of nowhere? Is this how we should be living in 2024?

I want to be clear: This is not an indictment of our county’s emergency services — far from it. 

The 911 dispatcher was extremely professional and did exactly what the patients needed most, working diligently to find paramedics to provide the necessary aid. Over the years, my encounters with the staff at the county’s 911 Center have always been similar, calls met with absolute professionalism and a dedication to helping their neighbors in need. In particular, Sullivan County EMS Coordinator Alex Rau has always gone above and beyond in his efforts to do as much as he can with limited resources. 

Nor is this an indictment of our local paramedics. 

Those who responded were facing a lengthy drive. This alone dictated the response time, not any lack of professionalism or dedication on their part. 

Having recently been in a position to need not one but two ambulance rides due to a medical emergency, I can speak personally to the kindness and compassion of local crews. 

Unfortunately, the problems of the system itself are outside of their hands. 

And ours is system that’s chock full of problems. 

We have 17 EMS agencies active in Sullivan County, and three-quarters are staffed solely by volunteers. These volunteers are dedicated professionals whose regard for their neighbors is to be lauded, but all-volunteer agencies simply cannot provide the same level of service as those staffed by paid EMS in part because most of these volunteers have their own jobs to go to. 

Ambulance response times in rural areas throughout the US are significantly longer than those in suburban or urban areas, but our crews do a commendable job. 

Review of ambulance response times completed by researchers from SUNY New Paltz in 2020  showed Sullivan County’s response times are better than the national average for rural areas by about 3 minutes. Response times are — not surprisingly — longer for patients on the outer edges of the county, and calls like the one I happened upon this weekend with a response time 5 to 6 times longer than that experienced in a city are not uncommon. 

This is likely because four fifths of the ambulance calls handled by the county each year are being covered by just three of our emergency service providers. There’s only so much you can do when you have only so much to work with. 

This is why the New Paltz report was done in the first place — requested by the county itself five years ago. The researchers outlined a series of solutions to improve access to emergency care, some of which we’ve seen come to fruition in the past few years. 

But five years post analysis of a broken system, as I listened to the emergency scanner at the start of yet another summer that will bring with it a population explosion that brings us to three times our off-season norm, I scribbled myself a note to call the pharmacy. 

It’s time to refill my asthma inhaler, and I can’t delay.