Paramedic makes ultimate sacrifice
WASHINGTON — When the call went out from New York for volunteers to travel to the U.S. epicentre of the COVID-19 pandemic, Paul Cary raised his hand about 2,900 km away.
The veteran paramedic got in an ambulance March 28 and drove for 27 hours straight from Colorado Springs, Colo., to New York City, trading shifts at the wheel with his colleague. They were part of a fleet of 29 private ambulances and 72 medics from across the country, from the company Ambulnz, headed there to ease the burden on the city’s overwhelmed EMS.
From the moment Cary arrived, before they had even gotten settled, “Paul just kept asking, ‘When are we going out in the field?’ ” said Ambulnz CEO Stan Vashovsky.
Cary spent his final days in the field on the streets of New York, tending to coronavirus patients in the back of his ambulance as it raced from hospital to hospital. He worked for nearly three weeks until he fell ill with the virus himself.
Cary, a 66-year-old father of two and grandfather of four, died Thursday after spending several days on a ventilator at a New York hospital.
On Sunday, a procession of ambulances and fire trucks carried him home to his family in Colorado. He arrived at a Denver funeral home in the back of an ambulance, his casket draped in an American flag. New York EMS workers and a state health official came to pay their respects to Cary’s family in person.
His family said in a statement that they are devastated by his loss, but that they knew Cary “risked his own heath and safety to protect others and left this world a better place.”