Category: EMS in City

 As each of us will ultimately find ourselves before our god, many will find themselves before their paramedic. But unlike their god, their paramedic does not sit in judgement. We treat all of our patients the same. That is the creed. The man in the Mercedes Benz gets the same care as the man pushing…

A few days ago on our employees only Facebook page, someone posted a picture another person had taken of one of our crews while they were parked by the side of a street. The driver leaned against the window, arms folded, eyes closed.  The passenger had his eyes open, but he was slouched down in…

 Darkness. Cold. Reflection of fire in the water. Hoses on the ground. Onlookers. The stretcher, pulled by my partner and a firefighter, races through the scene to the the unknown victim carried out of the building. Behind them my feet are up in the air. I am three feet above the ground, suspended parallel, my…

On TV, the paramedics are met at the ambulance bay by at least two doctors who ride the rails as the medic gives the story. The patient is moved over to the hospital bed where a team of ED staffers are ready to go to town in a seamless continuum of care. Sometimes this mirrors…

I think EMS is a lot like baseball. It can be fairly slow-paced (boring, if you prefer), but it has its moments of excitement. You have your days when you don’t even remember the calls you did they were so routine. Like in baseball, you can stand around all game in the outfield waiting for…

When I was a boy my father used to bring home maps for my sister and me. We would spread them out on the floor and he would pay us a nickel for every river we found or every mountain range or sea. As a result of this practice, I always did well in geography…

We are called for the violent psych and told to stage for police. Years ago we would have just been called for the violent psych. Once we got there, if we needed the police we would call for them, or depending on how the call came in, they might already be there. This morning the…

The snow started in the afternoon earlier and harder than expected. I got the kids inside with some DVD’s and pizza. I cracked the thermostats up to give us some heat in the event we lost power that evening, which was the worry with the autumn trees still being so full of leaves and the…

 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…

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…

 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….

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…

 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…

 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…

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 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…