I was asked to give the following speech in 2012 at a gathering of the NYC EMS Blacksheep, a fraternal order known for doing what was best for the patients, despite the rules of the bureaucracy. It was a great honor to be voted into the Blacksheep organization.

When I was asked to give a speech about the contributions of women in EMS, I turned to Google for inspiration. But I discovered to my dismay that shockingly little had been written on the subject. So instead, I spoke from personal experience.

In the beginning it was intimidating. When I first came on the job in June 1980, there was only one other woman in the room. That seemed strange to me, because based on my experience at the volunteer corps that first inspired and trained me, I expected to see a lot of women there. But it didn’t take me long to recognize that I was now a member of a very small minority of women in NYC EMS.

My first assignment was in the Bronx, out of Jacobi hospital. My first partners were LW Johnson and Preston (Pops) Ford. LW and Pops were like fathers to me—they even invited me into their homes to share holiday meals and family dinners. They were my mentors, protectors and friends.

Working with them, I quickly learned the little things that mattered as a woman in EMS. I learned to wear a t-shirt under my uniform shirt so when the buttons gaped I didn’t invite stares and lewd comments. I learned to crouch at, not bend over, a table while writing out my ACRs and, most important, I learned that while driving out of a mob of angry people to just ease up on the brake and let it roll. They will move.

I was bled on, puked on, peed on and shit on—just like everyone else in EMS. I was punched, spit on, sexually assaulted and verbally degraded right in the back of my own ambulance. I dodged flaming trashcans coming off rooftops, and faced patients and bystanders with guns, knives, containers of acid and long handled machetes while armed only with a MagLight and occasionally a portable radio.

When my unit showed up at the scene and I stepped out, cops rolled their eyes, firefighters sneered and derisive comments about why they ever let girls on the job were mumbled at the volume of a public speech. My partners were peppered with questions about how I performed, and they weren’t referring to my delivery of prehospital care.

At first even our partners classified us. We were dykes, dogs, frigid or easy. We were “work-wives” or daughters. We were anything but equals. Yet, we continued to prove ourselves every day. We lifted stretchers to the level of our shoulders, carried patients who sometimes outweighed us by hundreds of pounds, lugged equipment and wrestled with drunks, all while refusing the assistance offered by male cops and firefighters who believed we couldn’t cut it just because we were girls.

But over time, we were offered help not out of irritated condescension at our very presence, but out of a genuine respect and caring. Our male partners came to accept us in time, still torturing us relentlessly like the older brothers we never asked for while defending us fiercely if anyone dared to mess with us. We were chosen for our smaller statures to go into the tight spaces where our male partners sometimes couldn’t fit—under subway trains, into collapsed structures and squeezing between mountains of hoarded rubbish to get to our patients. Eventually, as more women came on the job, we’d work two women to a crew. That took the cops, firefighters and even our patients some getting used to, but we did it while knowing we had to work twice as hard to be considered half as worthy.

Some of us went on to fighting for respect in supervisory positions and doing the job with a sense of humor and the authority of a mom. But that improved too. When the men under our command stopped referring to us as “ma’am” and started calling us “boss,” it was like the sound barrier had been broken. Boom! We were there.

Some of us went on to paramedic school, holding our own in the classrooms and operating rooms, elbowing our way between interns and residents for a shot at the central lines and intubations, reminding the doctors on our rotations that we weren’t nursing students.

But even as a paramedic, I still tried to disguise myself as “one of the guys.” I thickened my skin and toughened my attitude, because I still thought that to be good at my job I had to hide my femininity. At the time, I didn’t realize that the very femininity that was being belittled and disrespected was actually a secret weapon that I and other female EMS professionals brought to the job.

What are the stereotypical personality characteristics we think of as feminine? Would you say empathetic? How about caring, nurturing, cooperative, patient, gentle and compassionate? Would those characteristics be an asset in dealing with patients in the field and on the phones? Would those characteristics be beneficial in forming teams, diffusing conflicts and communicating with coworkers and the public?

This femininity was one of the greatest contributions we as women brought to EMS. We weren’t girls, we were women, delivering the best prehospital care in the nation.

So to those of you on the job today, you need to know that the women who came before did our best to pave the way. And in that respect, each of you walks in our path. I urge women to go out there and write your histories and tell your stories, so the next person who Googles the contributions of women in EMS will come up with more first-hand accounts than they know what to do with.

Valerie Frank Serao is a retired EMT-P. She worked for NYC EMS from 1980–1990 and in that time had a variety of assignments. She worked in the Northeast Bronx, the South Bronx and Harlem. She was also an instructor at the EMS Academy.