BY GINNY PRIVITAR
WEST MILFORD — Rose Lewis is a super “Where In?” player who usually guesses the location of the West Milford Messenger photo quiz correctly. But when she’s not reading The Messenger, she’s usually helping people and making them laugh.
During the week, Lewis works as a home health aide four hours a day, taking care of a cerebral palsy patient she has looked after for the last 30 years.
She also works as an EMT on the West Milford First Aid Squad.
“I love it,” Lewis says, “The best part is helping people; that’s what I like to do. The worst part is getting a two-hour call five minutes before your shift ends.” She’s always enjoyed being an EMT. She also was the corresponding secretary for the squad for two years and vice president for four years.
Actually, she said, her worst call ever came when she was just starting. A man was thrown off his motorcycle into the roadside trees while the cycle kept going on the highway. Luckily, he fully recovered.
Most times, Lewis has a strong stomach. “You could cut someone open and I’d be fine,” she says, “but show me a nosebleed and I might pass out.” She had a lot of nosebleeds as a child until a blood vessel was cauterized around age 11, when she had her tonsils removed. It turns out her husband, Ed, has had nosebleeds, too, and would deliberately frighten her with them. “He knows that’s going to get me,” she said, but “he got cauterized last month.” So the terrorizing has stopped.
On Saturdays, for 15 years now, she rides with the ambulance crew from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. Her family would like her to ease off, so that she can spend Saturdays with the family. But, she says, this is what she’s chosen.
When the ambulance crew is taking a patient to the hospital, Lewis says, “We try to make them laugh on the way; it makes the trip better, I do that well, too.”
Her sense of humor is evident when asked why she wanted to become an EMT. She said her son Kevin, when he was younger, “used to take an ambulance ride every year; if it wasn’t a cut finger, it was something else. He got hit by a car one year.” Thankfully, he was okay.
Actually, she said she always wanted to join the ambulance squad, but had a pressing priority.
“I didn’t because my husband, Ed, was a firefighter and I was waiting for the kids to get older. When the boys were 12-14, then I joined.”
Lewis met her husband when she was a teenager. “He put an air conditioner in my mom’s house when I was 16. We’ve been together ever since; that was 42 years ago,” she said.
These days, sons Kevin and Ed are grown with families of their own. Her sons have a history of service, too. Kevin worked for 10 years in Air Force intelligence and is now working at an oil refinery near Newark airport. Son Ed was in the Army Reserves for 13 years and now works for Amtrak.
Lewis enjoys her grandkids and often sees them during the week: Ed’s son Morgan, 2, and daughter Abigail Rose, 7 months, and Kevin’s sons, Benjamin, 2, and Wyatt, born premature just three weeks ago.
Your community is grateful for your service and for keeping spirits up even in the most trying of times.
She also enjoys making her “cheese puffs” treats. Lewis says, “I make them for everything: gatherings, meetings, the ambulance squad. They are pretty good,” she said, “They’re easy and great.” Here’s the quick and easy recipe for you to try.
Rose's Quick and Easy Cheese puffs
Ingredients
Package crescent rolls
8 oz. cream cheese
1/2 cup sugar
1 tablespoon vanilla
Powdered sugar to taste
Directions
Open up 8 crescent rolls.
In a bowl, combine cream cheese, sugar and vanilla.
Put a dollop on each crescent roll.
Fold them over and press edges to seal.
Bake for 15 minutes at 350 degrees.
Cool thoroughly, then sprinkle powdered sugar on them.