Para-medics, I am personally convinced, are a breed apart. They are very special people as first-response-in-emergency professionals. Somewhat akin to firefighters. Only the fire they are determined to put out through their interpretive and temporarily remediative skills, and to buy time while transporting people in dire medical-health straits to hospital emergency units, is life itself.

Can a price be placed on that utterly priceless service to compensate these skilled humanitarians? Is the gratitude of those they rescue from dread consequences enough to satisfy their inner need to respond and aid? And what toll on their psyches does it take when despite all their skilled efforts nothing can be done to solve an emergency situation, other than to transport a victim so that physicians have the opportunity to apply their heightened skills?

For us, on the several occasions when we have had no option other than to dial 911 and ask for ambulance service resulting from a health emergency, the instant action of these outstanding members of society in a profession for which duly fulsome appreciation simply does not suffice to convey our gratitude, the paramedics' concern, expeditious actions, attention to fine detail, represents the sublime in the human spirit.

In our limited experience, though we are aware that both men and women are trained as paramedics, we have had the services of men only. And in our experience these usually young men whom we trust with our very lives respond as only people with the confidence of professional experience and a determination to answer to a desperate need, impress us beyond mere words.

This early morning's such event was simply yet another convincing performance of humanity reaching into the stratosphere of the most excellent of human emotional relations; strangers setting out to rescue people they have no personal knowledge of, by using their hard-learned and hard-earned skills as medical professionals.