ST. CHARLES COUNTY—An adorable penguin is capturing the hearts of children while promoting paramedic awareness, thanks to St. Charles County Ambulance District (SCCAD) paramedic Trent Bowers.
Ambulance Adventures: North Pole is written by Bowers and he named the hero after his young daughter. The first time he read it to her will stick with him forever.
“Started reading it. This is Peyton, the paramedic penguin,” said Bowers. “Her mouth got real big. She smiled and she's like, AHHH, but not a little, you know, a little cry, and it was, it was just an awesome experience.
Bowers making his little girl’s day was a bonus for his reason to publish the children’s book.
“So one of the things with writing this book is, you want to let people know that we're here to help. A lot of kids, especially whenever they see paramedics, they see either their parents or somebody else in one of the worst situations of their life. Seeing that we're there to help, we're friendly, we're compassionate, you know, I want that message to get across to the kids.”
When people see first responder related material at bookstores, it tends to be focusing on firefighters and police.
“Paramedics are a very unique, in that they are working with a wide variety of patients performing some really important life saving interventions on the daily, everything from recognition and treatment for stroke or cardiac arrest or a traumatic injury,” said Kyle Gaines, public information officer for SCCAD. “No two days are the same for our team members, so, it is an important job function that they serve here in our community and it's great to see Trent working to ensure that (paramedics) receive that equal representation.”
With years of experience in the field, Bowers connected many aspects of the book to resemble professional and personal connections to him.
“We have our pediatric bag and if you look in the book, the bag is kind of based around this (the SCCAD pediatric bag),” said Bowers. “My wife, her favorite animal growing up was a penguin. In the book, there's a narwhal who gets injured. That was my son's favorite animal growing up, and the engine house that Peyton responds out of, that was actually my first engine house as a paramedic.”
Bowers recognizes that first engine house as where he grew confident and skilled as a paramedic.
The book has already sold hundreds of copies on Amazon and the support of his fellow paramedics has been paramount.
“Most of the people are like, you wrote a children's book? Very surprised. Once they read it, they all thought it was great.”
Bowers occasionally receives pictures at night of other paramedics, friends and family reading to his book to their kids. SCCAD leadership also was impressed.
“The chief and the rest of our leadership team were equally excited to see Trent embark on this journey and - it's really neat to see the other side of one of our team members and one of his passion projects come to life,” said Gaines.
The question he keeps hearing from his peers, family and friends is ‘will there will be a sequel?’
“That's the million-dollar question,” said Bowers. “With the feedback I've gotten from the community and just how much everybody has told me that they love the book and stuff. I'm really leaning towards doing another one.”
If a sequel happens, it could look a lot different.
“I will say it probably won't be in the North Pole. I might do a different type of terrain like maybe the Amazon or desert—I also have a son. So if I did one book for her, I got to do one for him. It's only fair.”
