Ex-model fashions new life as medic

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Ex-model fashions

new life as medic 

 

By HUGH SON

DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITER 

 

 

Former model Rhona Chambers prefers life as a lifesaver. 

 

She's the model paramedic. 

Rhona Chambers has been vomited on, cursed at and assaulted on the job, but she still prefers racing to accident scenes and shootings in Brooklyn over her former life as a fashion model.

"I don't mind blood and guts," declared Chambers, 38, during a run to Red Hook last week for Long Island College Hospital in Cobble Hill. "It's definitely not a job for the squeamish."

Chambers spent more than 10 years with top firm Elite, sashaying down catwalks in New York and Europe and appearing in glossy magazines before training to be a paramedic.

One day recently, Chambers and her partner, Walt Maroldo, headed to a Columbia St. home for mentally disabled youths to assist a "difficult breather."

The case turned out to be routine - an autistic resident punched a home employee, causing her to hyperventilate - but it's the unpredictable nature of the job that Chambers loves.

"People will call in and say they're having trouble breathing," she said, "and it's because they have a bullet hole in their head."

It's a privilege, she said, to be allowed into people's homes when they're sick, Chambers said.

"Some people have next to nothing, literally just a mattress on the floor, but are the nicest people," she said.

Then there are the characters - the hypochondriacs, the mentally ill, the emotionally disturbed people - and "violent, drug-crazed lunatics," who will lunge or spit at her if given the chance.

There also was the drug dealer who was shot twice in the back and who asked her to remove a cocaine stash from an orifice before the cops could find it.

"I didn't do it," she said.

In the courthouses and prisons, she sees a fair number of drug overdoses and other cases.

"People have anxiety attacks after they get sentenced to 20 to life," she said. "They'll make something up just to get to a hospital."

Through it all, Chambers values the bond she has with her co-workers.

"You build relationships in this line of work, which I never had in fashion," Chambers said. "A model will walk over you to stiff you."

She was still modeling when she started as a paramedic eight years ago.

"I would show up to the hospital with makeup on from a modeling job - it was nuts," she said.

Despite being a hardened medic, Chambers still cringed when a Daily News photographer snapped photos of her.

"It was constant, being told at such a young age: 'You're too tall, too short, your eyes are too small,'" said Chambers, who moved to New York from Utah when she was 16.

Her husband, Eric, and two young children know very little of what she faces in her job each day before she returns to their Greenwich Village home.

"I used to tell him, but then he'd get upset," she said. "It's not easy being married to a paramedic," she added. "There's got to be a lot of blood and bone to get sympathy from us." 

 

[Remember585 815]

Any pics of her?

[BFD1054 1,552]

Why John, thinking of a career change lol??? From Westchester County DES straight to City EMS? May not be a smart move...wait to see pictures first