Time for Christmas Shopping. If you enjoy my blog, please consider buying some of my books either for yourself or friends. They are all available on Amazon or to order at your local bookstore. Killing Season: A Paramedic’s Dispatches from the Front Lines of the Opioid Epidemic, (selected by Amazon as one of the best…
I wrote this post on Thanksgiving 2005. *** It’s Thanksgiving morning. I awake at 5:10, shower and dress, then open up the garage door to see a couple inches of snow on the ground. It’s beautiful, but I hate winter, hate the cold weather, hate driving in snow. When I get to the base, I can see…
I am pleased to announce, the EMS Novels, Mortal Men (2012) and Diamond in the Rough (2016) are now available in paperback from Amazon.com or for order at your local bookstore. *** Mortal Men is a novel about paramedics in Hartford, Connecticut in the 1990s when a gang war was raging in the city. It…
Patient cool, clammy, diaphoretic with sudden crushing chest pain, family history of MI. We do a 12-Lead ECG. If the 12-lead shows ST elevation of ≥1 mm in 2 contiguous limb leads or 2 mm of ST segment elevation in 2 contiguous precordial leads, we take the patient to a hospital capable of percutaneous coronary…
A fellow medic told me about a cardiac arrest he did recently where in the middle of CPR, the patient opened his eyes and flailed his arms. He and his partner stopped CPR thinking they had achieved Return of Spontaneous Circulation (ROSC), but the patient slowly went unresponsive, and when he checked for a pulse,…
So I finally got to watch the Ambulance movie, now that it is available for free streaming on Amazon Prime. I did not have high expectations for the thriller (having seen the trailer), but I am always interested in how EMS is portrayed by Hollywood. The movie is simply one long chase scene as the…
Earlier this month in Connecticut law enforcement arrested two men from Maryland for having 15,000 blue Fentanyl pills hidden in Nerds and Skittles candy wrappers. This was not the rainbow fentanyl (multicolored pills), just regular blue counterfeit oxycodone 30’s hidden in candy packaging to elude law enforcement. Nevertheless, news coverage following their indictment this week…
The DEA recently warned Americans about rainbow fentanyl, multicolored pills, powders and blocks containing fentanyl that the agency said were “a deliberate effort by drug traffickers to drive addiction amongst kids and young adults.” We haven’t seen the rainbow pills in our area (Connecticut) although we have seen quite a lot of blue and purple…
I turned 64 recently. Happy Birthday to me. A couple weeks ago, on two occasions, people offered to help me carry my gear. I work in the fly car so I am often on scene first, and then I turn the call over to the responding crew if they are ALS or if they are…
Many people retired from EMS lament their past as some of the best times of their lives and state how much they miss working the road. Why did they stop? Injury, Age, Working Conditions, Lack of Upward Mobility, Time Away From Family and Money or combination of the six are the likeliest explanations. Otherwise, why…
I worked my first shift as a paramedic in Hartford in January of 1995. Hartford was in the final stages of a gang war between Los Solidos (The Solids) and the Latin Kings. Homicides were at an all-time high. And there were far fewer medics on the streets then. It was a good introduction to…
A friend of mine who works in social services showed me a picture he’d taken of a rash on one of his clients who they sent to the ED. Came back positive for monkey pox. Fever, chills, exhaustion, painful sores and blisters. Just like with COVID once upon a time monkeypox was far away from…
When I see murals in the city, it makes me feel love and joy for life and the people of Hartford. And these Below, gone, but not forgotten.
When I was a precepting medic, I had a young boy as a patient. I heard a rumbling sound and my preceptor said “Look out!” Not a second later, the boy vomited all over me. “You’ll learn to recognize the signs,” my preceptor said, handing me a towel. The mark of an experienced medic is…
The patient had lost nearly two liters of blood and was barely responsive. I arrived shortly after the primary medic who told me to get the blood set up while he extricated the patient with his partner. As the rapid response medic, I carry the whole blood (0 negative) in a special cooler. I check…
The patient is lying under the slide at the playground jungle gym. It is a blistering hot day and this may have been the only shade she could find. She is unresponsive, cyanotic and breathing agonally. Her pupils are small. From the hard lines on her face and poor dentition, I surmise a life outdoors…
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…