(An excerpt from a fictional work in progress.) Prologue Hernando already had a 200-gram bag of heroin on the table, as well as a smaller baggie of fentanyl, a canister of baby formula, four packages of Benadryl, and several small open cardboard boxes, each holding 600 of the blank glassine envelopes they would be putting…
A firefighter has already bandaged the patient’s head by the time I arrive in the fly car. The man sits on the front stoop looking like the fifer in the revolutionary war painting of the three marching wounded soldiers the way his head is wrapped. The firefighter points out the puddle of blood in the…
When I started as a paramedic in Hartford in 1995, I thought drug users had character flaws and belonged in jail. Last week at a panel discussion in Hartford I stood up before National Drug Control Policy Acting Director Regina LaBelle, United States Senator Richard Blumenthal, United States Representative John Larsen, and the Mayor of…
She took the Dilaudid pill a friend offered her twelve years ago when she was sixteen. Her sister had recently died and her young life, filled with depression and anxiety, had lost its only source of light. The pill made her feel well in a way she had never felt before. She liked who she…
I am sixty-three years old, six foot eight. I used to be six nine and a half, but life has beaten me down. Over thirty years in EMS has flattened my spine to the point that some days I can barely feel my legs. I have no business being back on a basketball court, but…
“Dopesick” is a new eight-episode series dramatizing the start of the opioid overdose epidemic that originated with Purdue Pharma’s marketing campaign for oxycodone .The series is populated with a fictional cast of characters, including a country doctor (Michael Keaton), a young woman injured in a coal mining accident and her parents who struggle to understand…
For many of us in EMS, our origin story began with watching the TV show Emergency. The decent paramedics Johnny and Roy, the wise Drs. Brackett and Early, and the beautiful unflappable nurse, Dixie McCall. Together they stood for all that was good in the world. They were role models for us in showing us…
Xylazine, a horse tranquilizer, has been increasingly found as an adulterant in the East Coast street supply of fentanyl. In 2019 in Connecticut, xylazine and fentanyl were found together in 71 overdose deaths. There were 141 deaths of this combination in 2020, and in 2021, through August with still many cases outstanding, the number…
I came to work the other day and saw a chilling site in the parking lot. Ambulance 911 — the ambulance that was assigned to me for many years when I worked the 5:30-17:30 shift, the ambulance that had been my EMS home — sat battered and wrecked in a line with other battered and…
You’re called to an urgent care center on a priority one. The nurse is holding the front door of the center open for you and directs you back to a treatment room, where a PA and another nurse are providing ventilations to a two year-year-old. The story they tell you is the the child fell…
Instead of following the same failed policies, if we are serious about lessening the deaths and ending the slaughter of far too many Americans, we need a new approach.
No one ever said being a medic was easy. Do the best you can. Know your protocols. Use sedation with caution. Act on your patient’s behalf.
800,000 Americans dead since 2000. No end in sight. People are dying because they use alone and their drug supply is contaminated. In the age of fentanyl, every bag or counterfeit pill bought on the street could contain a lethal dose. Stopping fentanyl at the border isn’t going to work. The War on Drugs (Interdiction…
Many years ago, a paramedic I know who worked for another company got into a spat with a nurse at a dialysis center. I don’t know the details of the spat. It sounded like nothing more than two people in a bad mood snapping at each other. Nothing that occurred resulted in a suspension or…
Tim was working for the company when I started. As tall as me and twice as broad, he was a strong EMT — a good lifter, quiet sense of humor, hard worker, gentle with patients. And if he was standing behind you, no one would think of causing trouble. One night fifteen years ago, he…
In 2012, I wrote a series called Street Lessons, but I could just as well call it any of the following: Things They Didn’t Teach Me in Paramedic School Things They Might have Taught Me in Paramedic School, but I Was on a Bathroom Break. Oh Shit! Things I Learned The Hard Way Trial and…
I am pleased to announce the relaunch of my blog on a new server. I began this blog almost 20 years ago on the blogger network. Quite a number of years ago, I was recruited to move my blog over to an EMS network, which I did in hopes it would increase my viewership. They…
We used to (25 years ago) pick Darryl up every night around 10:00 PM. He’d call from the pay phone on Barbour Street. He was drunk and cold and wanted a ride to the hospital where they would put him in the waiting room and he would fall asleep in one of the chairs. He…
“Falsehood flies, and truth comes limping after it, so that when men come to be undeceived, it is too late; the jest is over, and the tale hath had its effect.”- Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels *** This week, the San Diego County Sherriff’s Department posted a video purporting to be a deputy overdosing after minimal contact with fentanyl…
I was a new paramedic. The senior medic briefed me. They took two guys out of a basement apartment with high carbon monoxide readings after a dryer caught on fire. Ones already on the way to the hospital for evaluation. Your patient is the guy over by the building door arguing with the police officer. …