sneaker x1, socks, all cut off …
Category: ems-topics
First Night
Brothers and sisters, carry those lights in your heart, and spread their warmth into every house you enter, every patient you comfort, every life you touch.
Everyday EMS Athlete
There is a profile of me over at Greg Friese’s Everyday EMS Athletes, a feature of Everydayemstips.com.
EMS Changes
The number one treatment change in EMS in the last twenty years is the increased emphasis on painmanagement and comfort care. Albert Schweitzer said, “Pain is a more terrible lord of mankind than death himself…. We must all die. But that I can save him from days of torture, that is what I feel as…
Annual Cold Report
Drones
I am one of my own favorite comedians. Perhaps you have seen me on the Johnny Carson show? No, perhaps not then. Sometimes I really crack myself up. I am easily entertained. I don’t perform publicly, other than in small bit roles for my partner and patient while on the job. My latest gag has…
Astray
I read a recent article in the New York Times that disturbed me. A Crash. A Call for Help. Then, a Bill tells the story of a 70-year old man in Chicago who was in a minor motor vehicle accident, not his fault, who was nevertheless forced to pay the local fire department $200 for their response. The…
Change
They wrote everyone up for not doing the new ambulance maintenance checklist. A couple weeks ago, they started handing out the checklist. Lights, motor oil, mileage, cleanliness, tire pressure. Scratches, dents. You name it, it is on there. I did it the first couple days and then stopped doing it because they stopped passing it…
The Heart of Health Care
You have these moments in life. Sometimes you see something for the first time. Other times you are just reminded of basic truths. This was such a moment for me when you see the world very clearly.
Back In The City
I had not worked a city shift in nearly three years since I took my second job as an EMS coordinator. I forgot how much I loved it. I feel like I am back to my roots.
Splinting
Perhaps if I had done what as a new EMT so many years ago I had done, the patient would have been more comfortable. Now, I am not saying take away my morphine and Fentanyl and just give me a pile of splints and cravats, but I am saying I recognize a clear area for improvement.
The Bridge
Please don’t let me slip and fall — I am already halfway across — please I do not wish to plummet to my icy death or to land on the jagged rocks at the river’s edge. If the bridge is to give out, let it break first at the far side and go one board at a time like in the cartoons and let me run fast, one board ahead of disaster. Please no Wyle Coyote falls for me.
My Hollywood Adventure
In 2006, I was asked to be a advisor/possible writer on the TNT show SAVED when the show was green-lighted for 13 episodes. Unfortunately, the money they offered me was less than I was making in 40 hours much less the 80 hours I was working. Had I been younger and less attached, I likely…
Second District
It is interesting seeing the streets you spent so many years working on the subject of film. Hartford is a small city, but like its sister cities New Haven and Bridgeport, it has always had one of the highest murder and poverty rates in the nation.
Called In Sick
If I feel like death, like I will never be well again, but I am well hydrated and my pulse is only 72, and my sat is 99%, and my fever barely a 100, what must it feel like to be really sick?
The Years
If I ever had a call – a double shooting or a status seizure — where I could look back and say here is where it all came together, then I have forgotten it. What I remember from my earlier years as a medic is not so much one specific call, but rather gradual realizations…
Cold Justice
Australian author and former paramedic Katherine Howell has written her third EMS-related crime thriller, Cold Justice. Like her first two thrillers, Frantic and the Darkest Hour, it is a great read. The books have a constant character in police detective Ella Marconi, who teams with a different paramedic in each book to solve the crime….
Paramedic Awareness
I recieved email this week from a Denver paramedic working to promote paramedic awareness and recruitment, asking me to post a Youtube link. On it there are a number of excellent videos.
Community
Last week I had the privilege of attending a ceremony in which a town received a Heart Safe Community designation, which goes to towns who meet certain criteria in terms of their EMS systems and availability of training, education and public access defibrillators and other factors affecting the Chain of Survival. At this particular ceremony there were…
Up the Stairs
Saturday night. 9:30. A half an hour before I get off after a 16 hour shift. It’s the worst time to get a call. Another fifteen minutes later and my relief would be in and he’d take it, but at 9:30, no such luck. I am definitely getting off late. The call is for a…