Calls run in random, almost crazy patterns that sometimes give you cluster days where you are bombarded with all similar calls. Some days its psychs, other days its carry-downs. (What really sucks is when a carry-down cluster intersects with a humongous patient cluster.) Other days it is asthmas or strokes or MVAs. I once had…
Category: EMS in City
One of the First
Last call of the day is a nursing home transfer. Guy has one leg and sores all over his body. He says he is a former EMT in the city – one of the first.
Company Man Union Man
One of my partners used to call me a company man because I used to clear as soon as possible from calls. We’d be in the EMS writing up the run report and the dispatcher would scream. Can anyone clear? I’m holding two calls. Priority One. I’d clear, then she’d bang us with a transfer…
Company Man-Union Man
Farewell Tour
My old partner has finally gotten his transfer to Florida. He moved to this area from New York fifteen years ago when he first met the woman who would become his wife. Now that they have divorced, he says he has no reason to stay up here. He loves Florida and the sun – he…
My Patch
Nothing for eight hours, then we get a call for an unresponsive. When we arrive, a man meets us at the door and he says, “They are not certain if she is breathing.” We enter the house and I see an officer standing in a bedroom doorway. I can hear the mechanical voice, “No shock…
My Boy
We get called for a drunk. We find a fifty seven year old man holding the fence in front of a house. An old woman comes out and says it’s her son and she wants us to take him to the hospital. She won’t let him in the house drunk as he is. He doesn’t…
Variance
I’ve been playing poker seriously for over five years. When I say seriously, I don’t mean I play for big money, I mean that I am a student of the game. I read books about it, discuss the game with friends, run simulations, constantly try out new strategies. I started out playing in the local…
Viva Las Vegas
I’m on the Strip in Las Vegas. A volcano erupts in front of the Mirage, giant spumes of electrical lava shoot up into the night sky. Outside Treasure Island, an attacking pirate ship blasts it cannons, setting the rigging of a merchant ship on fire. I’m walking across the street when I hear a loud…
Check it! Check it Out!
The guy sits on the cement floor when we enter the warehouse. Co-workers kneel on either side of him, holding his hands. There are tears coming down his cheeks. “What happened?” I ask. “The beam dropped on his boot.” The co-worker points to a twenty-foot long steel beam that lays nearby under a hoist, but…
For What We Might Do
A medic I know likes to say we don’t get paid for what we do every day, we get paid for what we might have to do. This is the second day in a row, I haven’t done squat. I had a lady with a nose bleed this morning and an MVA refusal this afternoon….
Your Honor
There’s an article in the paper this morning about a family suing an ambulance company because the ambulance allegedly got stuck in the mud while at the scene where a family member — a previously healthy young man had collapsed while running. The article also reports that the ambulance arrived within minutes of the collapse…
Anthropophagi
an•thro•poph•a•gi — Pronunciation: (an”thru-pof’u-jī”, -gī”). She has beautiful blue eyes, a slender woman with long blonde hair who looks like at one time she was very pretty, but she has been sleeping on a mattress in a house that smells like urine. She says she has back pain and has been hurting too much to…
Codes
“Wife says patient stopped breathing.” I know this one is going to be a code. Just yesterday we were dispatched to a “Cardiac arrest,” but it wasn’t a code. It rarely is when it comes in like that. People don’t know their terminology. Every time we get dispatched for a cardiac arrest and it turns…