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…
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A Blanket
It is during the tail end of a snow storm that has left ten inches in six hours. We are on the way back from the hospital after a call where we had to wade through deep drifts to get to a patient’s farmhouse. The roads are barely plowed. We get called for a 93-year…
People Care
If you are looking to get someone in EMS a great Christmas present, here is the book for them or for yourself: People Care: Career-Friendly Practices for Professional Caregivers Thom Dick is the author of Street Talk, a book of essays that came out about the time I was in EMT school in 1989. It…
New AHA CPR and ECG Guidelines
I’m like a kid before Christmas waiting for the new AHA CPR and ECC guidelines to come out. For almost a year I have been following the evidence sheets posted on the Heart Association web site, and nearly everyday in November checked the site for the new guidelines to be posted. When they finally came…
Bathroom Break
Today I did something for the first time I had never ever done before while working in EMS. In this job you learn when you are sitting around waiting for a call that if the urge to use the bathroom comes upon you, you act on it because it sucks to be suddenly hurtling down…
Scandanavian Beauty
We get a third party call for a woman with abdominal pain coughing up blood. The neighbor meets us at the door and tells us the older woman is feeling woozy, and has been coughing up bright red blood. She also mentions that she hasn’t been acting quite right. Yesterday she was out raking the…
Apnea
On another site I keep a daily journal. I record evey call I do in a day along with some observations. It is from this journal that I draw most of the material for this blog. Here I try to write simple stories that I have given some thought too. There I just write whatever…
Kind of Friends
We get called for an OD. A young woman took all her psych meds at the same time because she was depressed. Her ex-boyfriend broke into her house and stole her cell phone. And her best female friend committed suicide recently, so she was just feeling a little overwhelmed. She had a past history of…
Scouting Report
The local EMT class lets its students sign up to ride with us after they have made it through a certain part of the course. Over the years I have to say most of the students who ride with us don’t last. The course has a poor passing rate, and many of the students who…
"You're Going to Need a Bigger Ambulance"
“You’re going to need a bigger ambulance,” the police officer says when we pull up in our van. “I don’t like the sound of that,” my partner says. Niether do I. Already I can feel my back tightening up. Inside the small dirty apartment we find a tiny older woman, who points us down a…
Power Outage
Several hours earlier a car wiped out a telephone pole, bisecting it, and blowing out the powerlines exploding transformers all the way down the street, leaving half the town without power. It is still dark when we get called for a lift assist. An old man in a wheelchair meets us at the door with…
I’ll Be at Your Side
What I like best about this job are the moments you observe between people, moments that show the bonds that life creates, that show the love in people’s hearts, particuarly the love of a parent for a child. *** We are sent for a two year old who has fallen through a glass table and…
Hurricane Wind
I stopped at the State armory and unloaded five bags of clothes for the hurricane victims. I was ruthless going through my closet. Every Christmas I get a sweater from my father and his wife. They sit in my closet because I rarely wear anything besides my work clothes and then jeans or workout clothes…
Roommates
A woman in a nursing home is in severe respiratory distress. History of COPD. Her lungs are decreased with an expiratory wheeze. Her SATs are in the 80’s. The nurse’s aide who gives me her paperwork says she is a DNR, but the papers haven’t been signed by her doctor yet. I give the patient…
It is Unethical
230 lb guy slips in the shower, lands on his shoulder. When we get there he is in extreme pain and has an obviously deformed shoulder. It is either fractured, dislocated or both. What do you do for pain? Morphine. Okay, now here’s the catch. The location is a drug and alcohol rehab clinic, the…
School’s Out/ The Grasshopper and The Ants
I love being a paramedic, but I periodically wonder about the future. How long can I continue in this field? Will my back hold up? Will 70-80 hours a week of work destroy my life? Will there continue to be 70-80 hours of work a week available for me? What will happen to me when…
Dead is Dead (Or Is it?)
We get dispatched for a report of a man unresponsive in a locked car, covered with blood. Priority One. My partner and I speculate as we head out lights and sirens toward the address in the neighboring town, a street lined with cheap hotels, where many marginal people rent by the week. We both think…
Here’s to You!
A week or so ago I wrote an entry called “A Remarkably Heroic Feat.” It was about a police officer credited for saving a baby’s life by performing mouth to mouth on what appeared to be a child who had suffered a fairly typical febrile seizure, which may briefly convince a layperson that the patient…
Ritual
I drove up to Boston, left my car at my friend’s house, then took the train in to North Station, then took the T to Kenmore. Met my buddy at Boston Beerworks, and we drank several pitchers of beer while we got caught up. We do this two or three times a year. We tell…
Remarkly Heroic Feat
It was on TV, on the radio and the following article in the paper: Officer Praised In Saving Baby City police officials are praising one of their North End beat officers, saying his quick actions saved a baby’s life over the weekend. Officer X, a year veteran of the Police Department, was on foot patrol…