Category: ems-topics

The call is for a man’s defibrillator going off. When we arrive, it has gone off four times already. I put him on the monitor. “No wonder,” I say. “It looks like v-tach” to me. Then all of a sudden, he cries out as his whole body convulses in pain. (The artifact was caused by…

At a doctor’s office, there is a man in his 80’s with a BP of 70, dizzy, not feeling well for two days. I take his pressure — 68/34. He is pale and gray and does not look well. His capnography number is in the low to mid twenties, showing poor perfusion. I do a…

When I started in EMS paramedics rarely did transfers. Out of twenty cars, maye six were medic. Sometimes only two. One of my first partners used to get very upset if we were even dispatched to an ETOH. We were to be kept back for the bad ones. Who you work with, particuarly when you…

60-year-old female (a frequent flyer know to us) with low temp this am (87.6 –Shouldn’t they have maybe taken it twice to see if that was really what they got?) and low blood sugar(given 2 mg glucagon by nursing staff at 6 AM), now this afternoon (5 PM) has high blood sugar (400) and a…

I’m in the back, helping my preceptee with an IV. I repositon the catheter to get a blood flow, and then pull out the needle, occluding the vein with my left hand while I reach for the saline lock. All of a sudden we are decelerating and I start sliding to my right, and I…

The snow is coming down in near white out conditions. At one point we lose the road the snow bank kicking up snow that completely obliterates our view through the windshield. We arrive at a townhouse apartment complex where we have been called for an unresponsive diabetic. Carrying our blue house bag, heart monitor, and…

I walk through the ER. There are beds in the hallway. I step aside as a tech pushes a portable X-Ray machine past. I call a greeting to a nurse who steps out of a room carrying an IV tray. In another room a doctor intubates an extremely large patient. The intercom pages a cleaning…

It’s pouring rain and we get called for anxiety. 40 year old female sits in her kitchen holding her chest saying it feels heavy. We ask if she has been under stress and she says, “You don’t want to know.” But she has never felt a pressure like this before and she says it feels…

A number of years ago, one of our ambulances was involved in an MVA. The EMT in the back went flying forward and banged his head against the cabinets and sliced his ear against a sharp edge. When he regained conciousness, his ear was just hanging there. Shortly after, he recieved (I believe) a prosthetic…

An old woman in a group home slips and hits her knee. She mutters “I broke my leg, I broke my leg” so her aides call us. We find her sitting on the floor. I ask her how she is. She mutters, “broke my leg, broke my leg.” But she didn’t break her leg. There…

Ruby has been taking care of old Mrs. Johnson for seven years. This afternoon she finds Mrs. Johnson has been a little too quiet, even for a 93-year old. And she just won’t wake up. Her skin is cool, and she doesn’t respond to the throat rub that the doctor taught Ruby to do whenever…

A year ago I started another EMS blog, called Paramedic Journal: A Year on the Streets.It was my intention to only record “a year” of being a medic, so anyone interested in knowing what the day to day life of a medic was like could have a reference. In Paramedic Journal the entries are rougher…

We get sent for an EDP (emotionally disturbed person). The cop meets us outside and says it is an old lady with Alzheimers. She took the trash out in her nightgown even though the trash doesn’t get picked up today. This has happened before — the woman wandering the neighborhood in her nightgown. Her husband…

The call is for severe bleeding. It turns out to be a burst abscess in a teenage male, who three weeks ago tore his hamstring. He bled internally , but the blood wasn’t reabsorbed by the body and an abscess started to grow. He was scheduled to have surgery to remove the undrained blood. At…

Last night I watched Scrooged, the Bill Murray version of a Christmas Carrol, where Murray is the bah humbug head of a big TV network. Bill Murray is a very funny actor, and Scrooged always chokes me up at the end, when the little mute kid speaks for the first time and says “God Bless…

I rarely follow up with my patients. If they are in the ED when I come back with a new patient, I will stop in and see how thay are doing. Or I might ask a nurse or a doctor what was the deal with a certain recent patient from earlier in the day or…

A sixty year old woman who lives alone feels her throat begining to swell. This is not the first time it has happened — she has a history of angioedema — so she knows what to do. She takes her closest epi-pen (She has ten scattered about the house) and injects herself with the lifesaving…