To the Rescue: Umphrey honored for years of ambulance service
Megan Strickland
Valerie Umphrey, left, trains with younger EMTs Joe Mitchell and Annie Morigeau.
Megan Strickland
Megan Strickland
Megan Strickland
Megan Strickland
Megan Strickland
Megan Strickland
Valerie Umphrey, Annie Morigeau and Joe Mitchell communicate in a training exercise.
Megan Strickland
Megan Strickland
Valerie Umphrey high-fives with EMT Annie Morigeau using a training arm during a training exercise.
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When she speaks about almost 30 years of volunteering with the Mission Valley Ambulance Service, Valerie Umphrey is humble and says she’s nothing out of the ordinary.
“I do the same thing that a lot of other people did; not as well, I just did it longer and got old,” Umphrey said of her service that earned the recognition of Governor Steve Bullock’s office earlier this month. She was one of the seven recipients of the ServeMontana awards handed out to outstanding volunteers from across the state. “This is a surprise to me. It’s odd,” Umphrey said.
The people who volunteer with Umphrey didn’t find it strange at all. They believed it was a perfect fit.
“They could have designed that award to represent people like Valerie,” fellow EMT Teri Miller said. “… Really, they could have written that award for her.”
Umphrey doesn’t remember ambulances being part of her upbringing. People were much more inclined to take people to the hospital in the back of a truck than via emergency services.
“It wasn’t part of the culture,” Umphrey said. “It wasn’t available (or) it wasn’t what people could afford.”
Umphrey first began volunteering for the ambulance service almost three decades ago, after her husband joined. At the time, there were four volunteers covering a huge swath of southern Lake County.
Umphrey became a vital part of the team. Crew members say she’s the glue that holds them together. She is the one who never gets dragged into arguments, who analyzes every call from start to finish in an attempt to improve, and will snap everyone into place in a time of crisis.
“She’s the heart and soul of the ambulance,” Umphrey’s son and fellow EMT Michael Umphrey said.
He and his sister Gwen Couture remember the click of Umphrey’s emergency radio sliding out of its hip holster as an auditory childhood reminder that mom was home. The woman is seemingly tireless in her commitment to community. She’s spent years working days at the St. Ignatius School District and nights on the ambulance crew, without anyone being able to recall a single time she complained about being tired from either.
“Does Valerie sleep?” Miller joked.
Her commitment has spread to others, namely her family.
From a young age the Umphrey children learned that service was an integral part of life. Four of the five children are EMTs. The other child is in nursing school. Umphrey said she wouldn’t be surprised if the next generation of grandchildren also join because they’ve been used as dummy patients at training after training. One grandson isn’t very old, but could probably write an evaluation of EMTs being trained, Umphrey said.
It’s not something that’s unique to the Umphrey clan. Several crew members are children of past EMTs.
“It’s not particular to our family,” Umphrey said. “Annie (Morigeau)’s mom was on the ambulance for years. Now she and her brother are. It’s like in a small town, if we can’t get volunteers, we’ll just make our own.”
Those that aren’t Umphrey’s blood get treated like they are part of the family, whether they are patient or trainee, crew members said.
“When we do recruit people she takes them under her wing and she teaches them how to care for a patient, both physically and emotionally and I think a lot of other services forget that there is an emotional component of patient care that is vital,” Couture said. “She does a great job of taking those new people, making them feel part of the crew, making them want to stay, making them feel that they are needed and then she passes them along to her patients. I think a lot of the new EMTs that she trains and she mentors see that as well.”
Recruitment is critical to the crew which currently has 14 people and is half the size of the average volunteer EMT crew in the United States with twice the average geographical area to cover. While the job is time consuming, it often seems more intimidating that it really is, Umphrey said.
“It’s not as hard as it looks,” Umphrey said. “I’ve gone to the conventions where there’s a doctor there and I swear they go through contests to see who has the grossest photographs. We’re going to gross them out with this and this and this. I don’t like to look at those. I’m uncomfortable, but you give me those same injuries in real life and I have something I can do, it’s a whole different feeling.”
That’s not to say there aren’t moments that are difficult, especially in a small town where patients are almost always friends or neighbors. Anything involving family or children can be difficult to handle, Umphrey said.
“I taught kindergarten for a few years,” Umphrey said. “When I pick up one of my kindergarteners when they are a teenager or early 20’s – you know, this was my little baby, my five-year-old that I saw all your potential, you were great – and now you’ve got a knife in your belly? Those hurt.”
Caring for older community members in their later years also evokes emotion.
“Probably the hardest one is the old cowboy, that he knows is his last ride going in because he never would have called an ambulance,” Umphrey said. “They are always very stoic, but you can see it in their eyes. That’s hard.
Overall Umphrey feels being able to render aid feels much better than being unprepared.
“If you have to stand by and watch someone suffer, very uncomfortable,” Umphrey said. “It’s painful. It’s hard to do, but if you can go in and help someone who is suffering because you have the skill, it’s a way different way of approaching life. It’s just so rewarding in so many ways.”
Finding people willing to withstand the guts and gore of the job sometimes isn’t as difficult to locate souls willing to dedicate a scarce precious resource: time. EMTs have to commit not only to calls, but also to extensive training sessions. Most volunteers have day jobs, and the 9-5 ambulance shift is tough to fill, despite the fact that sickness and trauma never sleep.
“It’s not like putting on a bake sale one afternoon,” Umphrey said of the time commitment.
It’s a job that has to be done and Umphrey said she’s glad there are young people stepping up to the plate to do it, although the group still needs more volunteers. She’s backed down to covering nights and weekends in an attempt to let the next generation take over, but crew members say she still ran almost 300 calls last year, of approximately 500 total for the department.
That doesn’t count the numerous times she’s given people rides to or from the hospital of her own accord, separate from the ambulance.
“But she can’t do this forever,” Michael Umphrey said.
Ultimately, Umphrey said she’s amazed by how valuable volunteers are to Mission and Montana overall.
At the ServeMontana banquet, Gov. Bullock said Montanans serve more than 28 million hours annually — the equivalent of 13,000 employees and $607 million.
“The numbers are quite impressive how much Montanans are willing to give,” Umphrey said. “I have to give you the perfect example, we got a call about a man out in the cold when it was 20 below. One of the volunteers was on her QRU. By the time we got there this man was in her house sitting by her fire … They didn’t wait for help and I think that’s what is amazing about Montanans. It’s not ‘who’s going to do that?’ It’s ‘I’m going to do that.’”
