'If I Don't Do It, Who Else Is Going To?'

Dennis Oden wanted to give back to his community in a tangible way.

So, in 2007, he decided to join the .

“I had always been interested in emergency medicine....I wanted to do something that had an actual impact,” said Oden, who earned his Emergency Medical Technician-Intermediate certification with DCVFD. The Dale City Civic Association named him “EMS Provider of the Year” this February.

“There are very few opportunities where you can have such a direct impact and actually see the results of what you’re doing,” Oden said. “It’s not a case where you send off money and you get a nice letter saying that you helped somebody.”

Oden volunteers for DCVFD one night out of every week and one weekend a month. He estimated that he works, without pay, a thousand hours a year, not counting the shifts he sometimes picks up for other people.

Each night is different. When he comes into work at 6 p.m., he could spend a few hours sitting around the station waiting for a call, or he could get a continuous stream of calls right away and not get back to the station until 6 a.m.

“There really isn’t any typical night,” he said. “We’re completely at the mercy of what happens out there, who calls 9-1-1 at any point in time. Pretty much every night is different, and pretty much every call is exciting.”

The hardest calls are sick or injured kids, he said, and people who are experiencing a host of medical issues, like a heart attack and a stroke, at the same time. He arrives at every call on a mission: stabilize the situation.

“It’s essentially that we solve the immediate problems and keep them alive until we can get them to the hospital where they can receive more definitive care,” Oden said.

He estimated that around eighty percent of the 9-1-1 calls they receive involve medical issues. “A lot of times we don’t really get much sleep at all on any given shift just because there’s just that many calls coming in.”

Many DCVFD volunteers work as career firefighters or EMS providers in another county. Oden works for the federal government during the day, then spends one night a week, from 6 p.m. to 6 a.m., saving lives. His daytime job is “completely 100 percent unrelated to fire and rescue in any form,” he said. Often times he’ll get off a busy shift and have to work the next day.

One of his biggest challenges is balancing work and family, with a wife and young child at home. He’s been thankful for a few days when his regular job gives him flexible hours, especially on days when he hasn’t slept for 36 hours. “I have an incredibly understanding wife,” he said.

When he found out he was selected for the award, he was “very pleasantly surprised.”

“I wasn’t even expecting it just because it’s a volunteer thing,” Oden said. “I don’t expect to get paid for it, I don’t expect any sort of recognition for it, so it’s an added bonus.”

“It’s fun. I enjoy it,” he said. “And it’s basically weighing the responsibilities of, well, if I don’t do it, who else is going to do it?”