Sherry Miller has been interested in emergency services since childhood.

“My grandfather was on Jaffrey Fire and Jaffrey VFW Ambulance,” she said. “I grew up listening to the scanner. My dad and I would hear the calls, and if there was an accident, we would go out and watch,” she said.

When Miller and her husband Matt were looking to move from Peterborough – along with then-8-year-old daughter Tosha and while being pregnant with her son Harley – her list of criteria was small, “the school district, and it had to have an ambulance.”

The family ended up in Antrim, she has been with the ambulance service since 1997. It is that dedication to the service that led her now-grown daughter, Tosha Desmarais, to nominate Miller as the Monadnock Ledger-Transcript’s Hometown Hero for April.

“She’s done this for my entire life, and she dedicates her whole life to it,” Desmarais said.

Miller, deputy chief of Antrim’s emergency management services since 2008, has been an emergency medical technician for 30 years.

“I like helping people,” she said. “It doesn’t matter what it’s for.”

As an Advanced EMT, Miller also has the ability to give patients medication for conditions such as diabetes or cardiac arrest.

“When you can do that and wake somebody up, it’s an incredible feeling,” she said.

Of course, not every call has a happy ending, but Miller said, “Even if the outcome is bad, we’ve given them a little bit of hope.”

Miller explained that for the crew to stop working on a patient, all of the crew members must agree, to the point where they’ll pull out their protocols to make sure they have done everything possible

“We look at each other and say, ‘We did everything we could, and there’s nothing more,’” she said.

According to Miller, the ambulance service in Antrim receives about 475 calls per year, and she’s on more than half. A senior staff accountant for the City of Keene, Miller is committed to the ambulance crew Monday and Tuesday nights, typically does Friday and Saturday nights and is usually available other nights. She used to be committed four nights a week, plus weekends.

“It’s kind of 24/7,” she said. “Sometimes, it can feel like every night, which it can be.”

Desmarais said she has been nervous for her mother.

“They’re getting put in such life-and-death situations,” she said.

Of the time commitment, Desmarais said, “They leave their own family’s birthday parties just to help other people,” and that as she got older, she grew to understand better what her mother did.

“She was saving someone,” she said. “That’s more important than a birthday party, in my eyes.”

Miller, 56, said she can’t imagine not working on the ambulance.

“I love it,” she said. “I love the people I work with. I love helping the community.”