Doing it right

Added: 2026-05-07

[00:00:07]Um, one of the great things about living out here, you know, I had a pretty nice house in Cape Cod, lived across the street from a boy scout camp. It's about 350 acres of just trails and ponds and take the dogs for runs and swim.

[00:00:30]But I certainly didn't have the space to have a horse.

[00:00:34]Right. So, this is Jesse.

[00:00:36]She's a good girl. Um, she's happiest when she's chasing cows.

[00:00:45]Well, maybe when she's getting brushed.

[00:00:50]The great thing about the horses is they're going to tell you.

[00:00:54]They're going to tell you how they feel and what they think.

[00:00:59]And if they can't trust you, they're going to tell you that, too.

[00:01:05]And it takes a long time to build up that trust.

[00:01:10]And uh I don't know. I think even though I was a paramedic for 34 years and I I I can't even say how many people I treated in the back of a truck or was on a was on a rescue call for you know you pick up each person deals with trauma or injury or illness differently.

[00:01:42]And sometimes you get it right right off the bat. You know, you you pick up a sign, you think that that you've got it figured out and you're able to respond. And then there are some people that you just can't read and you kind of got to you do your best and you hope that it is comforting and supportive.

[00:02:04]And if you find that it's it's not that it's not working, hopefully you have the ability to change direction, right?

[00:02:12]But the goal is always to try and, you know, make the most horrible day in someone's life a little less horrible by letting them know that you're going to bear that burden with them and that you're going to make sure that if there's anything that can be done, you can't bring anybody back. I'm not going to save their life.

[00:02:34]But if we can make if we can answer questions accurately and ultimately save somebody else's life, you know, in an instance of a a product defect or a carbon monoxide poisoning or a virus or or we identify that we have some elicit drugs in our community and we're able to focus direction and taking some preventative measures.

[00:03:08]That's a win. And the hard thing about that is that as I worked as a paramedic, we could almost we could identify pretty quickly if if we're being successful or not. Right?

[00:03:24]So you could see change in uh physiology and watch somebody get better with this.

[00:03:33]We don't know the lives that we are saving but they're being saved if we're identifying these hazards.

[00:03:42]Um somebody talked to me recently about death certificate. My best friend, one of my best friends, I've got a few which I'm proud of, but one of my best friends is an emergency room physician and he started out as a paramedic. Actually, he and I went through the police academy together to start a tactical medic team um where we lived.

[00:04:09]And at any rate, I talked to him as frequently as we can with our busy lives.

[00:04:16]We'll talk about death certificates.

[00:04:19]And of course, before I was a coroner, I'd never signed a death certificate before.

[00:04:24]And of course, I imagine that all doctors know how to sign death certificates, right? They're doctors.

[00:04:33]And I found myself teaching my friend how to sign death certificates because they don't get that in medical school, you know.

[00:04:42]and what we put on a death certificate.

[00:04:50]There's about 44 different federal agencies that use the data from a death certificate and it it makes determination on billions and billions of dollars in funding.

[00:05:04]And if that data is not accurate, if somebody is not doing their due diligence and accurately identifying why somebody has died, that can affect resources, funding, um preventative measures, it affects everything.

[00:05:22]So although somebody may say, "Oh, the corner, yeah, they just signed death certificates.

[00:05:28]Uh what's the big deal?"

[00:05:31]those signatures and that data affects billions and billions of dollars in federal money every single year.

[00:05:41]And I don't know, being accurate means something to me.