When you first become an EMT, you are extremely gung-ho, with a sense that you save lives, ... You are the antidote to all of life's miseries. You make people rise from the dead. But when you are an EMT for a length of time, you come to the grim reality that the number of lives that you actually save are small. You stabilize people until they get to the hospital. You make sure they can breathe and don't bleed to death and nothing more.