Duo reflects on long emergency careers

BUTTE — Jalan Van Nice didn’t really find his career as a medic.

In fact, in some ways the profession found him.

Living in Oregon in the 1980s, Van Nice said Friday, his wife, Suesan, was working as an officer at a bank.

“She had to do a first aid and CPR course,” Van Nice, now chief of Butte Ambulance, recalled.

He went along for the course and met the instructor, who happened to be the fire chief for Dufer, Oregon.

“She sucked me in to coming in and being a driver,” Van Nice said.

So he signed up to be a driver as a way to give back to his community, he said.

“First thing I know I was sucked into an EMT class,” he said. In 1989 he became certified as an EMT I.

Soon the hobby that sucked him had lured his wife, too.

“Suesan got tired of me always listening to the radio,” Van Nice recalled.

Back then, Suesan pointed out, the radio wasn’t a pager like it is now, with settings that can make it go silent until you get paged.

“It was always talking. It didn’t matter if we had company or whatever,” she said.

“Well, it was important,” Jalan interjected, laughing with his wife at the memory.

He said that he used the tack the chief had taken with him — he talked Suesan into being a driver and then an EMT.

“We’ve been a team ever since,” he said.

A lot of times they were first to reach the ambulance bay. Some times they took the ambulance out to a call, just the two of them, at all hours. If you’re a medic who’s been doing it awhile, it just becomes a reflex when that pager goes off.

“There have been times when we were both standing on each side of the bed trying to figure out why were both standing up,” Jalan said.

In 2003 they moved from Oregon to Butte. Jalan said he was looking for work. He’d lost his job in Oregon. He found work in Alaska. He also found a new ambulance service to roll with. Maybe five years ago — Jalan isn’t sure — he became acting chief and, soon after, the position was made permanent.

Jalan said that in that time he has worked to improve the department. He has made sure that the department is well-trained, stable and well equipped.

On the well-equipped side, he’s got vehicle on order, a Unimog — think a Hummer but way, way bigger and built by Mercedes-Benz — outfitted as an ambulance he can take out to Jim Creek when people are injured while playing off road in the area.

Keeping a department stable entails some things you might not consider. For instance, it means making sure your roster — which, for Butte, includes 13 medics and two drivers — isn’t just too reliant on young people.

“For a stable service a young medic is not good because they grow up and go away,” Van Nice. “I really am looking for someone maybe the housewife whose kids have grown up and are in school and she’s looking for something to do.”

For the Van Nices, their emergency services careers also have included a lot of time training together. Working alongside his wife all these years, Jalan said he’s come to understand the value of teamwork.

“That’s something we work on all the time,” he said.

And when your roster is full of people you’ve been working with a long time, bonds form.

“We are a family to be honest with you,” he said.

Contact Andrew Wellner at 352-2270 or andrew.wellner@frontiersman.com.