Ethan Quon will never forget his first overdose response.
A student on a field placement with the Hope Mission Rescue Van, Ethan recalls the team pulling over to check on a community member in distress.
“I remember getting out of the van, and I don’t even remember putting gloves on, but suddenly I already had gloves on and a Narcan kit in my hand,” Ethan says.
Each team member assumed a different role. Ethan was told to call 911, while the others checked on the community member and administered naloxone to reverse the effects of the overdose.
“During all of that, I ended up looking at this guy’s face quite a bit. We were able to revive him, and he ended up being okay. But as the day went on, something just wasn’t sitting right with me.”
“I couldn’t get his face out of my head.”
The experience stayed with him. But instead of pushing Ethan away from frontline work, it helped shape the direction of his future.
“Two years ago, this is the last place I would have expected to be,” Ethan says. “I never thought I would work at a homeless shelter.”
Ethan completed Hope Mission’s eight-month Christian Training Institute (CTI), a discipleship and leadership program that combines classroom instruction with frontline field placements across the organization. Upon graduation, he began working as a health advocate on the rapid response team (RRT), where he now helps respond to medical emergencies in and around Hope Mission’s downtown shelters.
- LISTEN: The Last Place I Expected (Hope Stories podcast on Apple and Spotify)
The health advocate supports the RRT’s medical staff during emergency responses and connects community members with recovery options afterward.
“What I love about this job is being able to care for people on both a physical and spiritual level, especially in critical situations, when someone needs it most.”
Through the program, Ethan discovered a personal sense of calling and learned the importance of mental health self-care for those working in emergency response environments. After the overdose response, he received support from CTI’s senior manager and debriefed the incident with an RRT supervisor.
“A big thing for me was realizing I needed to take time to process it,” Ethan says. “I needed time to sit with it. That experience eventually became something that no longer felt overwhelming to think about.”
- Read more: Why shelters are integrating health care
The encounter also deepened Ethan’s empathy for the people he now serves.
“At the end of the day, these are people,” Ethan says. “A lot of them came from situations where life just didn’t work out the way it should have. People who should have been there for them failed them.
“As time goes on, I’ve realized that any one of us could have ended up here. Sometimes it’s just one friend, good parents, or one different circumstance that kept us from being in their shoes.”
Ethan says he’s considering a future career in emergency services, possibly as a police officer, firefighter, or paramedic. But for now, he’s grateful for the unexpected path that led him into emergency response work.