07/18/2025
Congratulations to Crystal Shramek, our latest First Responder Friday honoree! Crystal was nominated by Mary Shramek, and the entry reads:
"Crystal Shramek worked on many badges towards the medical and first aid side of things during her 8 years in Girls Scouts, and was a 'Trauma Ju**ie,' as we called her, when she was growing up. She volunteered to play roles as a plane crash victim and car accident victim for both Cedar Rapids Fire and Swisher Fire Departments. As a very young girl, she would help both of her grandmothers with taking care of wounds on her two grandfathers, as they were both accident-prone and needed multiple surgeries. As she got older, she wanted to follow in her uncle's footsteps and join the Jefferson Monroe Fire Department. So, as a junior in high school, she gave up playing some sports and joined the fire department as a cadet. And, while attending high school, she took Kirkwood classes and received her EMT-B, and then went on to become what she thought would be her dream job as a paramedic.
At the beginning of her career as a paramedic, Crystal ran into a little hiccup. She wasn't old enough to drive an ambulance under companies' insurance policies. She looked everywhere for a place to hire her, but she ended up heartbroken. So, instead of being a paramedic, she went and started working for UIHC Burn Unit as an tech. When she became old enough to work as a paramedic, she worked in the field part-time while keeping her job at UIHC Burn Unit. The experiences she had on the unit taught her so much.
Crystal continued on with her schooling while working full-time and part-time in roles as a patient tech and paramedic, and she loved what she was doing. After a while, she moved up the ladder in the medical field and became a Captain EMS EMT for Jefferson Monroe Fire Department in Swisher. During COVID, she worked wherever she was needed on the frontlines. She stayed with patients as they were passing away that didn't have family with them so they wouldn't be alone.
Crystal also organized a SXS fundraiser for the fire department. She has trained many of her coworkers on the department and is there to help her community any way that she can, whenever she is available. Being a volunteer and paying back her community is what she loves to do. There are many times that her pager goes off and she is immediately out the door heading to a call, even during family get-togethers and holidays. She goes no matter what.
After graduating from RN school, Crystal still stayed on the Burn Unit full time. During that time, she also went to burn camp for kids, gave speeches on burns, and joined Simulation in Motion – Iowa (SIM-IA) as an educator for the Eastern Region
while she worked on getting her ARNP. SIM-IA is a mobile education program designed to bring state-of the art clinical education to pre-hospital (EMS) and hospital professionals throughout the state, using high-fidelity human patient simulators and trainers.
After she received her ARNP, there were no openings on the Burn Unit, so she moved to the Medical Intensive Care Unit (MICU) and continued educating others at the fire department and with SIM-IA. She really enjoys being able to teach both her department and others to keep them up to date with what's happening in the medical field. Crystal has also worked with other agencies to help get medical treatment faster for her community. They have multiple paramedics onboard now for Swisher, which is life-saving.
Overall, Crystal Shramek, ARNP, NREMT-P, CCP, has put her life on hold to make things better for all. One doesn't have to be family to get the compassionate, down to earth side of Crystal. She gives it everyone she works with and takes care of, including their families. It is so nice when someone asks my name and then asks if I know Crystal. I'll get an entire story about how nice and caring she is. She always gives her best, and giving up is not in her vocabulary."
