Public Safety Training Center

Monroe Community College
Rochester, New York

You've got to update our bio on the web site. As you are aware, Val and I graduated PA school from SUNY Stony Brook June 2002. Passing the national boards that summer we both landed great jobs at Park Ridge Hospital. I am working nights in the emergency department along with one other attending and Valerie is practicing internal medicine on the floors at nights along with one other PA and they are responsible for approximately 250 patients at nights. Yes, we still volunteer with Brighton ambulance on occasions, not as often as we would like give that Valerie and I had our baby on April 13th, 2003. Katelynn Marie Hamann was born by emergency c-section at 3:51am, 6 weeks early, 4 lbs. 3oz. Both Val and Katelynn did great and now Katelynn is over 15 lbs and will be 7 months old on 12/13 and she is achieving her milestones ahead of schedule!! I, naturally, see the quality paramedics that have come through your class every time I work and hope this continues for a long time to come.

Hope all is well. Our new and permanent email is cnvham1@rochester.rr.com. Drop a line sometime. If you need help with the practicals in the future please let us know. We would be more that happy to help out the future of paramedicine clinicians.

Christopher & Valerie Hamann, RPA-C, EMT-P

Hello Peter,

Valerie and I wanted to drop you a line to let you know how we are doing. PA School, naturally, is very busy. Classes are at least 8 hours/day and we go home, have dinner, and study until we sleep. Weekends? What's that? We do sleep in as much as we can, but we study most of our weekends away. Stony Brook has been great. We went from one excellent program (yours) to another. We have been learning so much and it once again seems overwhelming that in just 4 short months we'll be beginning our year of rotations. In June we finish classes and start rotations with a 2 week rotation of H & P's. All we do is history & physicals for 8 hours/day to sharpen our skills. Currently, we go out to area hospitals once/month to do an H & P. We have been doing this since Sept. After the 2 weeks we begin our first of ten 5 week rotations which includes: a Medicine Clerkship, Medicine Preceptorship, Geriatrics, Emergency Medicine, General Surgery, Orthopedics, Pediatrics, Pediatric Preceptorship, OB/GYN, and finally Psychiatry. Our seniors tell us that, as PA students, we are treated well by most of the hospital staff. We tend to know more than the 3rd year medical students and are equal in knowledge to the 4th year med students, but they tend to know more of the minute details of pathophysiology of disease and medications....as they should! On rotations, we are essentially 1 & 2 year residents, for a rough comparison. We are responsible for all the patients given to us from beginning to end. Initial, H & P, diagnosis, plan, all treatments, discharge, and follow-ups. All of our work is reviewed and cosigned by a physician or a PA depending on who we are assigned to for that rotation. Kind of a scary thought for Val and I, but this includes all the prescriptions that we write, including Schedule III-V medications. I guess it's not so much that we are nervous to go out and practice, but that so much has been crammed into our heads in this past year we feel like we have been going through this by "load, test, dump" to put it into your words. The security in all of this is that we ARE students and that we have our supervisors around to guide us when needed......I am sure that will be many, many times. Although, we also have been told be our seniors and on certain rotations on the night shift, we are the only practitioner's available to the nurses.....YUK! We'll keep you up-to-date with that news.

Basically though, we have been doing well. We just finished Cardiology. You came to our minds many times and we thanked you many times for your education. It really did prepare us. So much so, that at times Valerie and I held after school classes on basic cardiology and 12-lead interpretation. I am sure that it won't come to much of a surprise that Valerie is beating, just slightly, academically. She has always been better than me in that area though. Our competition is friendly and fun though.

We have been to the Paramedic web site many times. It is looking very good and becoming more and more proactive with continued education and on-line education. I was looking for the "Were are they now?" class pictures section that you mentioned about in October, but you must still be working on that. I have attached our pictures for that section and you many put anything you'd like. I have some good news for you too! No, Valerie isn't pregnant!! Not until 6 months after we get our jobs and remember, we aren't graduating until June 2002. Anyway, the good news is that Valerie, on her own, has decided to move to Canandaigua!!! As you know, we wanted to live in a small area outside a city, near a lake, with a descent size community and hospital. Well, I had never given it much thought, but Valerie had been thinking about this for a long time. She decided that she wanted to be near some family, not half way between, and since Arkansas has nothing to offer us, she came to the conclusion to move to NY. Canandaigua came to her mind when she was doing a transfer for Monroe one day. I thought it was a wonderful idea for many reasons: 1) FF Thompson is a growing hospital with many disciplines and job opportunities to offer not to mention the satellite clinics. Val will be looking for the 9-5 MD office to work at, but FF Thompson is also a consideration for her. I, of course, would love to work there either in the ED or in surgery. Many PAs first assist in the OR because of cost effectiveness and I do have a strong interest in the area. We'll see after I do the Surgery rotation. 2) Val and I are currently living vicariously through some of our classmates that are CC or Paramedics volunteering locally. We miss practicing greatly and without a shadow of a doubt will be doing so were ever we live. We also have an interest in becoming flight paramedics...need I say more? Canandiagua....Mercy Flight. 3) We also would like to teach paramedics in the future. We have always enjoyed teaching medicine in the military and would like to do so in the future. We hear you are soon to be accredited!!!! Congrats!!!! 4) I want to learn how to fly and get my private pilot's licease....again Canandaigua's small airport. 5) We'll be designing our own home and we would like to put it on a 5-10 acre piece of land somewhere. Now were can we go for that kind of space? Hmmmmm, Canandaigua maybe?!!!! 6) Finally, we have my family close in Rochester that have been very supportive and loving and that kind of influenced Val's decisions. Besides, we are going to need someone to baby-sit our 4 boys!!! And these plans are definite. Basically, there are many reasons and opportunities for us to move back in the Rochester area.

So, look out for us Canandaigua, here come the Hamann's in June of 2002. What helps even more is that we have friends who work at FF Thompson that could put in a kind word for us when we are job searching.

Enough about us. How is everyone there? How are your Classes of 2001 and 2002 doing? How is Margie and your new PT instructor Joe (Congrats to him!) doing? Have you heard from Tom Gately or Larry Michael? Eran Muto is doing well in Med school. We talk to her about once/month. Actually, we might be moving into her area soon. Now we live about 5 minutes away from Stony Brook in a town called Centereach in Suffolk County, 50 miles from NYC. But with our rotations mostly in the 12-15 hospitals in Nassau County and Queens we are going to have to move closer to NYC and closer to Eran. Which will be nice to hang out with her more.

What is new in the streets of Rochester for Paramedics? We miss working for Monroe. Although Val and I were glad we read the patients H&Ps as we were transferring them It helped us to learn faster about what is important to write and what isn't.

Oh, you can tell Bob Breese that we have been in contact with Paul Werfel many times and I pasted on his greetings. Paul's office is right next to the PA staff's offices. Paul is actually doing us a favor. Valerie and I have offered to assist his Paramedic class with their up coming practice practicals. Paul is also doing the class a favor. The PA Class of 2002 has requested that we become ACLS certified and Paul is going to teach us in June. In the past, Stony Brook hasn't had time to put it into their curriculum, including this year. But as a class, we find this very important and as a result we'll be taught the new guidelines and become certified on a June weekend on our own time. Future PA classes will now have it a part of their curriculum.

Well, I have probably bored you enough. But that is the skinny on us. We'll let you know how things are going on our rotations. We have had access to a lot of neat things and education. We have found a lot of it would be beneficial to the paramedic students and their education. If there is anything that we could send to you or that you are interested in, let us know and we'll sent it to you. The instructors (mostly physicians) we have for our classes are experts in there field of training and research, (since this is a SUNY school and they fund a huge amount of research projects), we've got a lot of the most recent information out there. At times a pitfall, because the way the SUNY school works is that the school will house and provided materials and everything they need for their research if the physician/PhD gives them a part of their grant agrees and to instruct students in their area of expertise.

Anyway, hope all is well up there. We look forward to hearing from you. Sorry this was so long. I know you are a very busy man. You have our permission to us our pictures on the web site and any demographics you'd like. If there is a particular form you'd like us to fill out sent send it to us via email like and Adobe file or whatever and we'll send it back ASAP. You now have our email and it isn't going to change while we are in school/rotations.

Take care of yourself!!

Chris & Valerie Hamann

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