Leonard Greene
New York Daily News
(TNS)
The horror stories his mother still tells about being a New York City emergency medical technician during the coronavirus pandemic should have been enough to keep Javon Fabien from following in her footsteps.
Diana Wilson’s 16-hour days, the weeks away from her children, and the mental and physical exhaustion aren’t exactly the things that make a successful recruitment pitch.
“It doesn’t scare me,” Fabien, 20, said Monday, a full day before he was scheduled to graduate from the city’s EMS academy. “I’m prepared to fulfill my duty, I’ve been waiting a long time for this.”
Fabien’s journey into the ranks of the city’s EMS unit and an ambulance of his own actually started long before COVID, when Fabien was in the third grade and his mother came to school for show and tell.
She pulled out the personal protection equipment, the rubber gloves, the CPR torso and all her other gear, and all the 8 year olds thought they were looking at a superhero.
“He was so amazed and proud of his mom and who I was at that moment,” Wilson, 45, recalled. “He said he could see him doing that himself.
“The kids thought he was the coolest kid ever.”
When Fabien turned 17, Wilson helped him enroll in an EMS youth program, and three years later, he was training in the EMS academy where Wilson is an instructor.
She admits she was harder on him than she was on anybody else.
“When he got into the academy he fell right into it,” Wilson said. “He was a natural. He definitely made a name for himself. I wasn’t a mom at the academy. Oh, I gave it to him. No favoritism.”
None needed.
“There was always somebody giving me the eye, and I could always tell,” Fabien said.
The Long Island mother and son still live in the same North Babylon home, but they’re not planning on a lot of shop talk at the end of the day.
“We have a balance,” Wilson said. “We find time for family time, for travel and we find time for work.”
For Wilson, the family time is important. For weeks, during her 16-hour pandemic days, Fabien and his younger brother stayed at a separate location with his father and their stepmother to be on the safe side, and avoid any exposure to the virus after her shifts.
“I came home to an empty house,” Wilson said. “I had to keep them safe. I couldn’t afford to get either one of them sick.”
Fabien has been at work for two days, assigned to Station 50 in busy Jamaica, Queens. Soon he’ll have war stories to tell of his own.
“My mom made her own name,” Fabien said. “Now I have to fulfill for myself and my career. I’m aiming for big things.”
©2024 New York Daily News. Visit nydailynews.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
