Flight paramedic honored

MARIANNA — In June 2007, Marie Patterson retired from Bay Medical Center Sacred Heart Health System as a paramedic. A month or two later the phone rang, and the voice on the other end said: “Marie, do you want to fly helos?”

“I said, ‘I sure do,’ ” Patterson said.

Patterson, of Panama City Beach, now spends her working hours racing through the sky at speeds up to nearly 170 miles per hour, sometimes in night-vision goggles, keeping people alive. Now in her sixth year as a flight paramedic for Air Heart Sacred Heart Medical Center, Patterson has been awarded Paramedic of the Year by the Florida Department of Health.

She accepted her award Thursday at a ceremony in Orlando.

“It’s a very big deal,” Patterson said. She was surprised to win after being nominated by one of the nurses she works with, Patterson said. “I’d been teasing her. I said … ‘you can submit those letters but they’re not going anywhere.’ ”

Patterson worked in ambulances for 23 years before she took her work to new heights. She works with a team of pilots, nurses and a mechanic out of an office at the airfield in Marianna. They were not as surprised as Patterson to learn she had been honored by the state.

“We knew she was the best,” mechanic Lee Munshower said. “We didn’t need anybody to tell us.”

Being a paramedic is challenging enough, but being a paramedic in the air requires her to maintain more rigorous certifications. The certifications all have acronyms like PALS and NICU. She calls them the alphabet soup. Because she has to keep them current, classes and study keep her busy even when she doesn’t have any patients.

“A lot of times when you come in this base, if we’re not busy we’re on the computer doing class,” she said.

Patterson and company move patients in emergency situations in the Panhandle to hospitals from Pensacola to southwest Georgia and south Alabama. Getting them to a doctor five or 10 minutes sooner can have a big impact not only on patients’ survival, but on their recovery as well.

“Some whether they lived or died, but a lot of the times it’s how well they do, that they got well and were able to go on with their lives,” she said.

It’s rewarding work, and it felt good to be recognized by her peers before she retires in about a year, but Patterson used her acceptance speech Thursday to thank others.

“I told them I didn’t really deserve it; everybody in that room deserved it as much as I did,” Patterson said. “It’s a blessing to work here … they’ve added to my life.”