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 a 12-hour shift last Friday. All my patients were younger than me, even the old and infirm ones ones. You don’t take care of yourself, it shows on your face and in your bones, and the quality of your life. Despite all my aches and pains, I feel I am in good shape compared to many others. Still, it is hard getting old. Fortunately on Friday, I didn’t have any tough carry downs and didn’t have to get on my belly to intubate anyone (and worry more about how I was going to get up than how I was going to slip the ET tube through the vocal cords). I didn’t get much chance to eat that day. We were on the go. At one of the hospitals, while my partner finished up the run form in the passenger seat –she’d teched the call–I announced I was going back into the ED to the EMS room to see if they had any pizza.
A retired nurse who was always nice to EMS now goes from grocery store to grocery store picking up old food, and dropping it off at homeless shelters, and yes the EMS room at his old hospital. He often leaves us old pizzas that are still edible. I was craving a slice of pepperoni that I could heat up in the microwave. There was a box of pizza there, but only two slices of cheese pizza. Not being under 20 cheese pizza had no appeal to me — I have to have meat on my pizza. They had more food in the EMS room, but I wasn’t in the mood for Oreos or ice cream or browning bananas. By chance, I opened the freezer door of the refrigerator and found they had these large hot pocket style rectangular frozen pizzas for one. Meatballs and Mozzarella it said in large letters on the wrapper. I was thrilled. The only problem was the instructions for how long to microwave the pizza were too small for me to read. I left my glasses in the ambulance. I squinted to no avail. I couldn’t read them. Fortunately a young man who works for us was there and I handed him the frozen pocket and he read the instructions for me. 4 Minutes. I thanked him and then while I was standing there waiting for it to be done, he called my name and I said what, and he said, “this young lady here is talking to you.”
Sure enough there was a nice young woman who was riding as a third for another service, standing right there next to me, and I hadn’t hard her ask me a question. When I focused on her, she asked if I liked being a paramedic. I thought for a moment about putting my stethoscope in my ears and holding up the diaphragm and asking her to speak into it. Instead, I told her I loved being a paramedic and it was a great job. The young man told her then I had written some books about being a paramedic that she should read. She didn’t know I had written books. I told her about them briefly, and she smiled at me, but she didn’t write down my name or the names of the books. I went outside and ate the pizza which was delicious. It really hit the spot.
I love being a paramedic for a lot of reasons. I told the girl I liked it because everyday was different, but I also liked it because there is downtime and during that downtime, you can do things you like. Eat pizza or read a book. Shoot some hoop at one of the many baskets in the city, always one near where you post, or jump rope, which I was doing quite regularly until my knees started hurting me (Maybe I shouldn’t have been jump roping on the asphalt.)
My knees have been bothering me quite a bit, particularly my left knee. Sometimes it hurts going up and down the stairs, particularly if the stairs are steep. Other days they don’t hurt. I went to an orthopedic doctor recently. She took an x-ray and said I had some arthritis, but I didn’t need a knee replacement. She said it wasn’t worth doing an MRI because at my age, I probably had a bunch of tears. I wonder if I had told her I climb up stairs and then carry people down the stairs for a living, if she might have viewed me differently rather than just as a 66-year old man with a sometimes aching knee. She told me to take up yoga. The last time I went to a back doctor to talk about the numbness in my legs, he told me to stretch more. I suppose that was better than the back doctor, who years before that told me after looking at my back x-ray that my back was past its expiration date.
I recently read in the New York Times about an app called Bend, which they highly recommended. I looked it up and it looked okay, but it was a little more than I wanted to pay I went to exit out and then boom, they dropped the price to $20 a year. $20 I could do. So I bought it. And I don’t regret it. Bend has a variety of stretch routines you can do, from full-body to targeted areas all of varying time length and difficulty. It also lets you program your own routine. Some stretches were ridiculous like the Saddle Pose, where you basically lay all the way back on your legs till your head and shoulders are resting on the ground. I can’t do this one. Others are pretty simple like the Upward Salute where you just reach up for the sky.
I am proud to say today I am on 37 days straight of stretching, and while I still can’t touch my toes (I have long long legs) I am closer than I was when I began and I believe I will be able to do it soon. I am feeling better. My knee still hurts and my legs are still numb, but I feel decent. Friday during some down time between calls (when I wasn’t eating pizza) I took my phone out and fired up the app and did some stretches. The stretches were all ones I could do standing, so I worked the upper body, chest, shoulders, neck. I also did some standing leg stretches. Maybe when the weather gets better and the ground is not so wet, I will bring a yoga mat with me in the ambulance, and get down and do some of the lower body stretches like the butterfly stretch and the pigeon stretch. That’s what I love about being a paramedic, getting time to improve myself on the job. Like I told the young woman, being a paramedic has many advantages as a job. And the more I stretch, the longer I will be able to work. Hopefully.