I received a book in the mail about a month ago. I slipped it into my briefcase to read while in between calls in the rapid response vehicle in Hartford. It sat there in its unopened package for weeks as I was too busy between calls and writing PCRs to take it out. Yesterday, Saturday,…
“You need to get that checked out,” I said. “I’m not going to the hospital. They treat me like shit there.” “I’m sorry they do, but that’s not getting better.” The woman has a nasty necrotic ulceration in her AC that has eaten away the skin and some of the tissue underneath. It is black…
The CDC recently released data from their 2020 State Unintentional Drug Overdose Reporting System (SUDORS), which describes the drugs involved in and circumstances surrounding drug overdose deaths in 28 states and the District of Columbia. It is available for download here: https://www.cdc.gov/drugoverdose/databriefs/pdf/SUDORS_Data-Brief_Number_1.pdf Four points from the report are crucial to understanding the death epidemic. 1. …
Our unconscious patient’s chest heaves again and he coughs up another gob of high flying trapeze pink froth that splats on the ambulance bench seat where seconds before my partner’s knee had been. As he secures the IV, I check the patient’s pupils. Midsize, unreactive. No one home. Ten minutes before, bystanders who found the…
A podcast I did recently on the Addiction and Recovery Network of the Life Change Center has now posted. https://recoveryandcompany.podbean.com/e/a-paramedics-dispatches-from-the-front-lines-of-the-opioid-epidemic-part-1-episode-14/ https://recoveryandcompany.podbean.com/e/a-paramedics-dispatches-from-the-front-lines-of-the-opioid-epidemic-part-2-episode-14/
A young EMT saw me at the hospital this week as we were both bringing patients in. She had a present for me, she said. After I got my patient situated in their assigned bed in the hallway and gave a report to the nurse, I went back outside and met the EMT. She reached…