Man Tries To Shame Paramedic On Break; She Turns It Into A Positive
(CBS) - A paramedic in north central Illinois is making lemonade from lemons after a shopper at a Target disparaged her and her partner for making a stop at the retail store.
"Looks like you guys are working real hard tonight, right?" a man sneered at Meagan Ryan as she and her partner were getting back into their ambulance for the Peru Volunteer Ambulance Service.
"You didn't insult or humiliate me," Ryan writes in a Facebook post late this week recounting the incident. "What you did was teach your young children and your giggling wife that you hold disdain for public servants."
Ryan notes that paramedics like her are on call for emergencies and are permitted to make stops or run errands in the course of their shift. During the stop at Target, she says she and her partner got coffee at the Starbucks inside, and she bought a school binder for her 11-year-old daughter as well as a microwave lunch.
Ryan says her paramedic salary is paid through billings and donations, rather than a specific tax revenue. But she says even traditional fire department personnel should not be shamed for taking the occasional break. She says an Ottawa firefighter was impugned when he stopped by his child's baseball game near the fire station.
"I do understand that people are so fed up and angry with increasing taxes, I'm a taxpayer, too," she tells CBS 2. "I just wanted to shed a little light on the other side of the coin that the public may not understand. If we all thought about how just our words affect others, we might have a kinder society."
She says she's turning a negative into a positive, after her own experience, by making a donation to The Code Green Campaign. The organization helps first-responders who suffer from PTSD or other mental-health issues associated with being on the scene of traumatic incidents.
Ryan, in her Facebook post, says the workers indeed encounter "unfathomable, horrifying, unforgettable things."
