Category: EMS in City

 The mat outside the apartment door says “Coors Country.” Inside the door there are two empty cases of beer; Bud Light and Heinekin. There are two plastic garbage bags tied up and ready to be taken down to the parking lot dumpster. Straight ahead there is an open kitchen with a bar counter. Lined up…

The asphalt is white with salt. What grass pokes out from the crusted snow is a dull yellow. The houses in this lower middle class neighborhood are all grey. Walking up to house, I am struck by the only color I have seen for days. On a concrete slab of a driveway there is a…

 “You sound worse than I do,” my patient said to me this morning. “How about we draw straws to see who gets seen at the ED first,” I said. My cough is actually improved from a week ago. My preceptee was treating a lady with chest pain who had a deep rattling cough. I was…

Police cordon off the abandoned vehicle with yellow tape. It is an 86 Plymouth – an old man’s car. “Am I going to need all my gear, or just the monitor?” I ask the officer. “The monitor.” I look across the grass toward the tree line at the eastern end of the cemetery. I don’t…

The old man was upstairs in the room in this farmhouse in which he was born. His granddaughter explained that he had Alzheimer’s and would not go easily. She said he had stopped eating and drinking. In the past, they had always been able to get him to eat and drink when he had been…

We hear the cops go out for a minor motor vehicle up on the mountain, and then twenty minutes later we get called up there for neck and back pain. The accident doesn’t look like much as we get there. One vehicle rear-ended the other, but I start to get a little nervous when I…

The old man with Alzheimer’s who used to stand out by the road and watch the traffic go by isn’t there this morning as we pass. He hasn’t been out there for awhile. Ahead there’s a For Sale sign in the yard of the now vacant split-level ranch where for a time we used to…

The husband awakes to an empty bedroom. He reads the note his wife has left him on the kitchen table and then goes out into the backyard and finds her in the backyard at the edge of the woods, hanging from the big tree. When we arrive, an officer in the driveway tells us they…

Rick is standing against the wall of the EMS room when I walk in to write my report. “My hero,” he says. “No, you’re my hero,” I say. Rick has been a medic a few years longer than I have, but he has been in EMS way more years. He started as a boy and…

I grew up reading books like King Arthur and His Knights. Thus when I was a young boy watching EmergencyI imagined a paramedic as a sort of knight errant rescuing people in distress. The job of a paramedic seemed like noble work with the added reward of being thanked by rescued damsels – whether the rescue was saving…

The hot line rings. Two-thirty in the morning. The dispatcher says, 80 Dorchester. That’s all. Just the address. That’s all we need to know. Calvin. I don’t work the nights as much as the other guys, but I know Calvin. We take our time getting up. Take a leak. Walk out to the ambulance. Drive…

My preceptee got cut loose so I am back at work having to carry my own gear again. My rhythm is a little off, but I think I’ll get it back soon enough. Not much interesting so far – just the meat and potatoes of EMS in this town. 1) An old man with pneumonia…

The call is for a rollover, no injuries. Non-priority dispatch. When we arrive we see the car off the road into the bushes. The officer tells us the driver, who is claiming no injuries, is sitting in the police car. As the officer is talking to us, a bystander approaches and interrupts. “When I got…