Your patient is unresponsive. They are also cool, and diaphoretic. You are thinking they are diabetic. You have pricked their finger to get a capillary blood glucose. This is the moment of truth. You are actually hoping for the reading to come back LO or at least less than 50. If it does, you relax,…
Author: medicscribe
Storm Watch
A month ago, I swapped out of my Sunday shift for Saturday. Of course I had no idea then that a hurricane would be forecast to strike our state on Sunday. (My reason for swapping was so I could enter a mile open water swim in Boston Harbor called “Sharkfest.”) I will admit like most…
Doctor’s Offices
Doing calls in doctor’s offices can be tricky. “Do you start working the patient in the office or wait till you get out to the ambulance?” Here are the assumptions. You are a transport medic so you have the stretcher with you. The patient is not in cardiac arrest or so sick that they will…
Working Man
I’ve been fighting a respiratory infection for the last week. Every now and then I have a coughing fit that brings up lingering mucus from my chest. I have some medicine I can take to keep the cough under control if it gets too bad — when my cough is so rough patients offer me…
Come on, People
The young woman says her knee has given out. She thinks it is dislocated, but you can’t tell because you can’t even see the knee. She says she is five hundred pounds. She can’t get up on her own. One ambulance crew can’t do it. Try pulling her up by the arms and you will…
Your First Day
It’s your first day here. You might be a new volunteer, a paramedic student, or a fresh hire. This may be your first time in an ambulance or maybe you worked ten years for a service in another state. You might be nervous or you could have so much confidence you had trouble fitting your…
Astray
I read a recent article in the New York Times that disturbed me. A Crash. A Call for Help. Then, a Bill tells the story of a 70-year old man in Chicago who was in a minor motor vehicle accident, not his fault, who was nevertheless forced to pay the local fire department $200 for their response. The…
Jesus Took the Bullet
The call is for a GSW. The address is familiar. I did another gun shot there many years ago. When we pulled in that night, everyone was running out the doors, while we ran in. The D.J. was on the ground, shot in the chest. He’d spun his last disc. But this time it’s different….
A Lift
I worked with one of my old partners last week. Jerry and I used to do the dedicated Hartford car. Jerry is just a few years younger than me, although he doesn’t use Grecian formula like I do so he has had a mane of silver hair for almost as long as I have known…
Change
They wrote everyone up for not doing the new ambulance maintenance checklist. A couple weeks ago, they started handing out the checklist. Lights, motor oil, mileage, cleanliness, tire pressure. Scratches, dents. You name it, it is on there. I did it the first couple days and then stopped doing it because they stopped passing it…
The Grand Tour
You drive the streets of the city or towns where you work and you go by houses, intersections, businesses where you have done calls. The longer you are at it, the more memory pins are dropped on your street map. Over here on our left was the great lumber yard fire. I sat on that…
City Life
Two months back in the city and I have already given more Narcan and Haldol than in the last two years in the suburbs. I like the morning routine of punching in, getting the narc keys and computer, grabbing the ALS gear, checking it out fully, and then walking out to the ambulance and going…
Last Supper
85-year-old drives his Plymouth to the diner out by the highway every night at seven where he eats his dinner, then walks back out the door and gets in his car to head home. I stand by the open driver’s door and look at the man, who stares at me vacantly. His skin is cool…
The Heart of Health Care
You have these moments in life. Sometimes you see something for the first time. Other times you are just reminded of basic truths. This was such a moment for me when you see the world very clearly.
Back In The City
I had not worked a city shift in nearly three years since I took my second job as an EMS coordinator. I forgot how much I loved it. I feel like I am back to my roots.
Splinting
Perhaps if I had done what as a new EMT so many years ago I had done, the patient would have been more comfortable. Now, I am not saying take away my morphine and Fentanyl and just give me a pile of splints and cravats, but I am saying I recognize a clear area for improvement.
The Bridge
Please don’t let me slip and fall — I am already halfway across — please I do not wish to plummet to my icy death or to land on the jagged rocks at the river’s edge. If the bridge is to give out, let it break first at the far side and go one board at a time like in the cartoons and let me run fast, one board ahead of disaster. Please no Wyle Coyote falls for me.
Memory
The man has dementia to the point he forgets that he called us. He forgets that he went to the hospital yesterday for the same complaint, forgets that they saw him and sent him home, forgets what they told him about it. “You were the one who called them,” his wife says, after he demands…
Old Paramedics
I have been getting in and out of ambulances for over 20 years now. That means just what it does. Twenty years ago my knees and back and all my bones and joints were twenty years younger than they are today. I’m in good shape, but still, I find now when I get out of…
Paramedics and EMTs
Back in 1995 when I started working fulltime as a paramedic in the city, paramedics got to choose their own partners. This was great for the paramedics and could also be great for the EMT partners. You worked three twelve hour shifts together and you always knew what to expect. You picked someone you were…