Meet the Medics
With a shared love for the job and the people who do it, we are hopeful that we will leave the profession a little bit better than we found it and maybe, if we're lucky, we might share some laughs, make connections and build a community with those who we encounter along the way.
The Mission: To raise awareness, foster resilience, create systems of support and to cultivate a culture of service and mentorship.
#IAmMyBrothersKeeper
#DarkHumorMedics
Rachel Burton, EMT-P, NEMBA
Rachel is still breathing, which, after nearly three decades in emergency response, is perhaps her most impressive professional achievement. She’s accumulated a "wealth of knowledge" primarily consisting of which cheap coffee is open at 0300, how to look busy during VIP visits, and the exact volume of paperwork required to turn a perfectly normal Tuesday into a bureaucratic nightmare.
As a native Texan, she's legally required to have a strong opinion on everything, and as a former paramedic/ volunteer firefighter, she successfully escaped the fire-and-brimstone of frontline work, choosing the slightly different hell of emergency management paperwork instead.
Her disaster résumé, a depressing list of many major Texas catastrophe since the dinosaurs, includes helping first responders act like children during the July 4 2025 Kerrville floods, proving she can sit in a Command Staff trailer and look authoritative during Hurricane Beryl, and surviving the COVID response as Operations Chief for DSHS (ask her about the supply chain. Don't.). She also helped move things around for Fort Bend County during Harvey and Jefferson County during Ike, confirming her true worth is her ability to find the last pallet of MREs.
After spectacularly failing to "grieve properly" (read: immediately return to work and be a functional human) when her own life got curb-stomped in 2016, she realized two things: 1) She's garbage at taking care of herself, and 2) Every other medic/EM professional is too. She's now desperately looking for an outlet to help her colleagues when life inevitably kicks them in the face, because they are professional enough to know they have to carry on, but cynical enough to hate every second of it.
Rachel is now "passionate" about training the next generation of suckers to take her calls, thereby fostering the growth of future professionals who will inevitably develop a similar taste for cynical humor and excessive caffeine. She is committed to mentorship, mostly by judging you silently until you figure out the hard way that you should have stayed home.
Tara Drury, EMT-P, CISM, CIT & Menace
Tara is a professional Problem Child, skilled in sarcasm, saltiness, and insubordination, having honed her craft through working on an ambulance for the last 16 plus years, the last eleven of which have been spent serving with Fort Bend County EMS.
Tara's passion for the job is heavily centered around First Responder Mental Health advocacy, advancement and awareness, peer support team development, implementation and provision of services. Her efforts are primarily focused on advocacy for first responders facing mental health crisis, challenges and/or substance dependence, abuse, overuse and addiction, PTSD/PTSI awareness, suicide awareness and prevention.
Tara has shared her story and experiences of battling through PTSD across different platforms including podcasts and other speaking engagements. By openly sharing her testimony of hope and recovery she hopes to make it easier for others to share their own struggles, encouraging therapy and treatment and to support them through their recovery. Other areas of special interest include community engagement, education and outreach as well as first responder family outreach, education, and support.
She has a new-found interest in understanding the transition from an adult child into the role of primary caregiver to an elderly parent after the sudden unexpected death of her father in August of 2025. This has lead to exploring the nuances and unique challenges involved in navigating through these new found roles in the new normal, balancing the additional responsibilities and the logistics, going through the grief process and learning how to adapt to the realities life in The Sandwich Generation.