Dare County honors ill paramedic with Lifetime Achievement Award

HARBINGER

The phone is ringing. There are at least half a dozen people in the house, at the table, in a wooden rocking chair, on a couch.

Cindy Midgette is in a recliner, a soft pink blanket on her lap, an oxygen tube extending from her nose to someplace out of sight. She is the reason they are all here – two sisters; a friend who is like a sister; two colleagues; her son, Jeremy; her husband, Forrest.

There is laughter. Midgette, who has no hair, says she just blow-dried it.

The visitors come and go and come again, a supply so steady the family had to hang a poster by the door asking folks to limit their stays to 15 to 20 minutes and to come only between certain hours.

Less than a year ago, Midgette did the visiting and the nurturing and the tending. She was in her 14th year with Dare County Emergency Medical Services a critical-care paramedic who responded to accidents and drownings and falls and heart failures and babies on the way.

Then, in June, a sore throat turned out to be lung cancer. Midgette underwent treatment, lost all her hair. The doctors found a mass in her brain, and she lost her hair a second time. The cancer, she learned, had spread further.

Midgette has not been back to work since June 23 – she remembers because it was the day she got the chest X-ray that revealed the mass on her lung. But work has not forgotten her, and last week her colleagues let her know.

It was Wednesday evening, and her boss, Dare County Public Safety Director Skeeter Sawyer, stopped by with several other colleagues. They came with a heavy glass plaque, five-sided and engraved: Lifetime Achievement Award, Dare County EMS, Cindy Midgette.

It’s the first time the department has given the award, and it’s the highest one there is to give, Sawyer said. They wanted to honor the way she treated every patient “like you’d want someone to treat your mom,” the way she mentored her partners, the way she dedicated herself to the profession, rising up from a basic EMT to a top-level paramedic.

Midgette treated thousands, Sawyer said.

She brought people back from the brink, or helped make their last moments a little easier. She delivered twins in the back of an ambulance, helped a woman whose heart had stopped to begin breathing again. She got thank-you cards and medical equipment donated in her name.

Midgette, 55, did not always plan to be a paramedic. But in 1987, a local fire department offered a CPR class, and she took it in case her young son ever needed it. The more she learned, the more she wanted to know.

“It was just one of those things,” Midgette says.

She started out as a volunteer. In 1993, she went to work full time with Dare County.

“When she found it,” says Jeremy Midgette, now grown, “it was like she found another life.”

Midgette’s longtime partner, Melissa Wright – the friend who is more like a sister – says it’s that way for everybody in EMS. “There’s no specific reason. You just know.”

Midgette and Wright met in that first CPR class two decades ago. They talked so much the instructor threw chalk at them. Ten years later, they became partners, going out on calls together.

“There were some that were easy,” Midgette says. “There were some that were difficult, some that were way worse than others.”

She saw life and death and learned to accept the inevitable.

“It shows me that God will decide when it’s a person’s time to go,” Midgette says. “We may help intervene. … But he makes the decision. I have seen people who I wouldn’t think would open their eyes again.”

But sometimes they do.

Kristin Davis, (252) 441-1623, kristin.davis@pilotonline.com