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NATCHEZ — Even on a quiet day in the cozy portable building that houses the Air Evac Team 99 behind Roux 61 in Adams County, Christina Gibbs said she never fully sleeps. 

With the radio on, every sound of static makes her jump and gets her adrenaline pumping.

At times, a call will go out with only a few minutes left before the end of her shift.

“Please don’t say Natchez. Please don’t say Natchez,” she’ll say. Then, as soon as she hears “Natchez,” her team is out the door. 

Before they arrive on a scene, Gibbs said she and her team have a profile of the patient and their condition from the dispatchers and on-scene responders. There’s no room for charts or notepads, however.

“You’ll see each one of us has a strip of tape on their leg and on that tape, we’ll have drug calculations,” based on the patient’s height and weight. 

That’s the life of a paramedic. Except, unlike ground response, with Air Evac, there are smaller spaces to work in and no pulling to the side of the road when something goes wrong.

A stretcher sits usually with the foot end next to the pilot in the front of the helicopter and two medical care providers, whether a nurse or EMT, seated in the back. 

Usually, there’s no room for an extra passenger, except maybe one in special cases like when an infant patient is traveling with a parent. 

Gibbs and her coworker Joseph “Bubba” Williams started out at ground level and worked their way up — so to speak. 

For Gibbs, who lives in Natchez, her medical calling came when her sister was hit by a drunk driver. Gibbs had been the first one to arrive at the hospital.

“That was in 2007. I was in my junior year on summer break and she had just graduated from high school. … The only thing she asked me was, ‘Am I going to die?’ And I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t want to feel helpless ever again in that situation.”

She and her twin brother took the same class later that summer.

“That was the first time I ever had to crack open a book and study and I loved it,” she said.

After Gibbs had climbed as far up the ladder as she could on the ground, Air Evac had an outreach education program in 2016.

“To be honest, I never thought it was something attainable and still can’t believe I’m here today,” Gibbs said. “It was a two-day class. I enjoyed it so much that I couldn’t get enough. I thought, ‘I want to know what these guys know.’” 

After that two-day class, a clinical fellowship followed, which included a six-month orientation period with “a lot of requirements and standards to meet” before she could continue her career in air care, Gibbs said. 

Williams, from Jonesville, La., said his call to emergency medical care came much later in life. 

After 10 years of working in the oil field industry, Williams said he went to a vocational technical school in 1992 looking for a career change from the declining industry, thinking he could get a certification in welding or engineering. However, he was told the only option available to him at the time was EMT (Emergency Medical Training).

“I said, ‘Excuse me, but what does E-M-T stand for?’ When they told me, I said, ‘If that is all you’ve got, sign me up.’ I absolutely fell in love with it. At that time, someone had to die before you could get a job in that field. There were just so few EMTs and paramedics. I was commuting over two hours to work between 48 and 72-hour shifts.”

Williams said he wound up going back to the oil field for a few years before studying to become a paramedic in 1996. He joined Air Evac in 2013, he said.  

Ambulance services, even ground ones, are a relatively young part of the medical industry.

The EMS Systems Act wasn’t signed until 1973, which established 300 EMS systems across the nation. Even then, access to air care was limited and expensive to use. Only in the last decade did medical helicopters become common in the lineup of first responders after studies showed improved patient outcomes for air transport over ground transport, particularly when transport to urban trauma centers is needed.

That’s often the case in rural areas like Adams County and Concordia Parish, as hospitals here can only work within their resources. Air Evac 99’s response area extends to anywhere within a 70 nautical mile radius, said Janie Clanton, the base’s program director.

Air Evac falls under the parent company Global Medical Response, which includes other helicopters and medical transports such as AMR, AirMed and Med-Trans.

“We’re always backing each other up, so we do extend outside of our service area a lot,” Clanton said.

While minutes count in an emergency, Clanton said medical care in the air is about more than speed. 

“Yes, we fly really fast, but it’s also the skills and the healthcare that we bring to that patient at that time,” she said. “The skills these guys know is unbelievable. … But the real skill is their assessment skills — knowing when one line of treatment isn’t working and when they need to go in a different direction. They work really hard at developing those skills and keeping them once they develop them.” 

Williams said it’s much easier to become an air paramedic than it is to keep the position. It requires constant study and continuing education, training and focus. 

“We do cross training with Med-Trans Rescue 9 out of McComb so instead of quarterly training four times a year we do training eight times a year,” he said. “Physically, this job isn’t that bad, but mentally, it can be very taxing.”

While ground ambulances may get calls for anything from toothaches to heart attacks, air care is reserved for those in the worst cases. A lot of times, air transport is a last resort, Williams said.

“When they’ve done everything they can do on the ground, that’s when they call us. We get the people who are actively trying to die,” he said.

Clanton said being a first responder, whether it’s the first person on the scene who the places a 911 call or the last, is a team effort.

“We’re useless without a pilot. Our Uber driver gets us everywhere we need to go and our guys put their lives in this guy’s hand,” Clanton said. “I think people need to realize that we’re not just about moving people. Yes, moving people is part of our job … but it’s the care that they give during that move that makes the difference between a person living or dying.”