Outstanding in Oakville: Robin Goede

When Robin Goede was a child, her mom had a photo of her wearing a fire hat. It turned out to be an omen, because even though Goede started her career in medical school, she ended up choosing a firemedic career path.

Goede always was interested in the EMS and fire service fields and became an EMT for experience while in medical school. She received her EMT license in 1996, her bachelor’s degree in 1997 and graduated from the fire academy in 2005. She said that it was a fluke that she became a firemedic and she couldn’t be happier. 

“At this point I couldn’t see myself doing anything else…maybe I would have finished medical school or engineering,” she said. “This is definitely my niche and where I’m happy.”

A firemedic is both a paramedic and a firefighter. He or she is expected to be proficient at both jobs. On the scene, the firemedic assists the paramedics on the ambulance, or if the paramedics haven’t arrived yet, the firemedic does everything a paramedic does to stabilize a patient until the paramedics are on the scene. Then the ambulance would take care of the transport of the patient. There are only a few departments that don’t have their own ambulance, but each department wants a firemedic on each truck just in case.

Goede currently works for all seven different Mehlville houses, which entails rotating 24-hour shifts. She also is an instructor at the St. Louis County Fire Academy. Since the firefighters are on 24-hour shifts, they become like family. In fact, the firehouse is their home away from home, equipped with recliners, beds, showers and a full kitchen. During the shift, the crew is able to go to the store, cook meals in the kitchen, etc. They eat together and watch TV just like a regular family. The firefighters are not required to be up for the entire 24 hours, but if they have a call they obviously have to be awake and respond to the call at the appropriate time.

“We’ve got some downtime in the afternoons; we can take a nap and we can go to bed at night and sleep,” Goede said. “Depending on the piece of apparatus we are on (during the day) we may get a full night’s sleep or you may not get a full night’s sleep. We rely a lot on coffee and Monster (energy drinks).”

A typical day begins at 7:30 a.m. The crew clocks in, sits around the table and talks with the outgoing crew in a debriefing about the previous shift’s events. Discussion involves anything unusual that happened the day before and any training they may have had. During 7:45 a.m. roll call, activities of the day are discussed; the chief will go over emails and policy changes.

Each day of the week there are assigned duties, for instance, that day happened to be checking ladders on the truck and cleaning the stove. Trucks are waxed on the first of the month. 

By 9-930 a.m. if there aren’t calls, training begins. The crew is refreshed on new techniques and always is kept current.

A good day for Goede is if she is helping to deliver a baby, or if the department gets to a person who may be having a heart attack on time. Seventy percent of calls are EMS calls, or medical in nature.

“We spend so much time with each other, about 56 hours a week, that it ends up being more time here than a lot of time that people spend with their families at home,” Goede said. “Last week for example I worked 120 hours (overtime) and it was a week and a half since I last saw my husband since he’s on a rotating schedule too. You get very close to the people here.”

There are currently 140 firefighters in the district, with six female firemedics/firefighters. Goede does consider herself a role model, especially when different groups such as the Girl Scouts come to tour the firehouse.

“There are so few of us. There are more now than 10-15 years ago because females are becoming empowered and thinking, ‘There is no reason I can’t do it too,’” Goede said. “We have school troops come through and they say, ‘Hey look, she’s driving the truck, girls can do it too.’ There is no reason if you want something bad enough if you try hard you can achieve your goals.”

For young women aspiring to go into this type of field, or any field, for that matter, Goede said her No. 1 piece of advice is to take advantage of all of the training that is available.

Goede said that the worst part of her job is tending to sick children, or seeing kids in accidents that were entirely preventable but were hurt because of a parent’s  negligence.

“Obviously if a coworker is injured or hurt, that is bad too,” she said. “We had a fire last May and the roof came down on a group of us. We huddled together and we looked up and we were like, ‘Hey look, we’re on fire we need to get out of here.’”

Goede thinks that her being a smaller person in the middle actually helped prevent any injuries.

“I’ve been doing this 1996 and I’ve never come up to an obstacle or having someone say, ‘Well, you are a girl you can’t do that,’” she said. “The equality is there. We are kept to the same standards, the same test. Granted if there is a big door to be busted down, we’d pick a guy, but if there is a small crawlspace we are there!”