05/18/2026
It's EMS Week and we're using this week to share stories from our providers at Eagle County Paramedics!
Beckett Lilien is a paramedic at Eagle County Paramedic Services. He has worked in EMS for 13 years, starting in California as an EMT before transitioning to the Santa Monica Fire Department, where he worked for 2 more years. He then moved back to North Carolina (his home state) where he worked in Gaston County, just outside Charlotte. He spent several years working night shift in a significantly impoverished and violent urban area which he said afforded him the opportunity to experience nearly everything on his “paramedic bingo card,” for better or for worse. He then moved out to Vail and has worked for ECPS since October 2024.
Why did you choose a career in EMS?
Initially, I wanted to be an orthopedic surgeon. I quickly realized in college that studying biology and chemistry for the next decade was the opposite of what truly interested me in medicine. So I took an EMT course, thinking I would see what the real-world, frontline, hands-on medicine felt like while I adjusted my long-term career expectations. Subsequently, I fell in love with the autonomy of the prehospital environment, and the rest is history.
What's the most surprising part of the job?
I think I found it most surprising (especially early in my career) that maybe 90% of prehospital medicine is devoid of an actual life-altering or life-threatening emergency. We spend the vast majority of our time as a sort of field patient advocate as opposed to cutting people out of cars and dealing with large scale incidents on a daily basis.
It’s like I used to tell my students and trainees: “Your first and most important realization needs to be that we are here for the patients in whatever capacity THEY need. Whether the complaint or emergency or situation is real to us or not, the patients require our upmost professionalism in relentless fashion.”
What's one thing you wish people knew/realized about the job?
I feel like the toughest thing to get across to the general public is that while we may operate with a significantly autonomous nature, we are regularly railroaded by the broader scope of “healthcare” in America. While we may understand exactly where a patient is mentally, or what they may need in the long term to best suit their health requirements, we often find ourselves backed into logistical corners. In other words, our ethical standards and desire to provide the best care may be limited by the real-world options we have in the field as clinicians.
