Streetwatch: Notes of a Paramedic

I started this blog over 20 years ago.  At the time I wrote mainly about the interesting calls I was doing.  Nowadays, besides writing about the opioid epidemic, it seems I write mostly about being an old medic trying to keep up, beating back father time.  This is another one of those posts. I worked…

Medical drama TV doesn’t get any better than The Pitt. This show (on Max) impresses me so much I am compelled to post again about it. Not only is it getting the medicine right, it gets the human drama right, and it honors health care workers with sentiment, not sentimentality. In other words, the emotions…

A pharmaceutical company is apparently targeting police departments to get them to carry OPVEE (nalfemene), a long-acting opioid antagonist that the two top toxicology organizations in the country say has significant risks and has not been studied in actual settings.  In an article by New England Public Media, Health experts alarmed at new overdose drug…

My daughter Zoey had to do 25 hours of volunteer time for her school so I hooked her up with the local harm reduction drop in center, where she helped put together safe drug use kits as well as naloxone rescue kits. Some days she sat outside the bathroom door and monitored the three-minute clock…

When I started as a paramedic in Hartford in January of 1995, I was given a 100-page protocol book to memorize.  There were fewer than 50 protocols in the book, along with pages for 24 medications and 8 procedures.  The book was approved by the two largest hospitals in Hartford.  Looking through the book today,…

There is a new “ER” style show on Max called The Pitt that stars Noah Wylie, the guy who played Carter, the young doctor on ER.  Wylie now portrays Dr. Rabinavitch (“Dr. Robby”), the senior attending in a busy Pittsburgh emergency department, who goes from patient to patient, emergency to emergency, overseeing a cast of…

I was talking to a doctor friend about the movie Asphalt City.  He mentioned the scene where the old crackhead lady was relentlessly berating the young paramedic who just sat there saying nothing, looking all burnt to hell already, not two months into the job.  We talked about burnout.  Burnout comes in waves, I said. …

President Joe Biden today commuted the sentences of almost 2500 people doing hard time for nonviolent drug offenses.  The action was aimed at righting injustice. Old sentencing guidelines provided disproportionately harsh sentences for those found with crack cocaine (largely blacks) while those found with powdered cocaine (largely whites) received much more lenient sentences. Biden, who…

The latest CDC provisional 12-month rolling numbers (through August 2024) are out for fatal overdoses and the news continues to be promising.  The US reported overdose fatal numbers are down 23.2 % from the August 2023 high. *  In Connecticut reported overdoses are down 29.9% from our November 2021 high, a level equivalent to July…

It all started on a hot summer day.  My local supermarket was selling generic Kool-pops — a box of 100 for about $5.  I bought a couple boxes and started stocking the small refrigerator in our hospital’s EMS room that previously only carried ginger ale and orange and cranberry juice.  The pops were a hit! …

“What do you feel like eating today,” my partner Erica asked when we cleared the hospital from a sick call. “I don’t know,” I said.  Some days I don’t eat, others I like to take advantage of the myriad of culinary offerings in the city, Jamaican, Dominican, and Vietnamese among my favorites.  A number of…

In a recent post I wrote about the movie Asphalt City and how many of the calls were reminiscent of my own.  The only exception being when there was an asthmatic trapped in a burning house, I never went into the house to intubate the patient, I waited for fire (in full gear with respirators)…

Last night, I watched Asphalt City, a movie about paramedics in New York City starring Sean Penn as a burnt out medic with a failed family life and Tye Sheriden as the young rookie medic studying at night for his medical school entrance exams. The movie is based on the novel Black Flies by Shannon…

Irked. The headline Irked me. Alzheimer’s Mortality Lowest for Taxi, Ambulance Drivers Some researchers out of Harvard Medical School did a study of over 443 occupations and found that taxi drivers and ambulance drivers had the lowest rates of dying from Alzheimer’s. Alzheimer’s disease mortality among taxi and ambulance drivers: population based cross sectional study…

In October of 2023, there were curious headlines out of Mexico that the Sinaola Cartel was getting out of the fentanyl business. Mexican Sinaloa Cartel’s Message to Members: Stop Making Fentanyl or Die blared the headline in the Wall Street Journal expose. According to the report, this written warning appeared throughout Sinaloa: “In Sinaloa, the…