One of the best parts of this job is the conversations you can have with your patients, but not yesterday. Every patient I had yesterday had dementia or was incapable of coherent verbal speech. An old lady from a nursing home trips on a curb at the supermarket. Her friend says she is more disoriented…
Richter Scale
Precepting has been going well. My preceptee has a knack for us getting calls – no cardiac arrests yet, but a steady diet of low grade ALS calls – chest pains, COPD, hypoglycemia, broken hips, pneumonias, syncopes. For the most part, I just sit back and watch her. I might draw up a saline lock…
Pain Control
My new preceptee is doing great. On most calls I am a complete invisible man, just sitting back and watching her work. If I offer anything, it is usually just a small trick of the trade. Since she is only part-time, we only work together a couple times a week so I am still doing…
Bleach
The house is dim and smells like a dead person. Dusty, unmopped wooden floors, filthy curtains, overflowing garbage in the kitchen. The patient is down the hall in a bedroom. Old man living with his two sons, or rather two sons living with their old man because what the old man is doing really isn’t…
Random Comments
Random Comments at the ER this Week “I’m the only nurse for 30 patients so its going to be awhile.” “No! No! I just got four new patients. I cannot take another. I’m calling her back. She’s going to have to put him some place else. We’re full here! No! No! No!” “We don’t do…
Ghost Blood
A medic who used to work for us a decade ago died the other day. He hadn’t yet turned fifty. He worked as a medic for many years, but then got hurt and had to find other work. He’d had some hardships and hadn’t been particularly healthy of late. We weren’t close, but when I…
Wine Coolers
The call was for a drunk. We were updated that he was seizing, but he wasn’t when we got there. His wife said he’d been drinking vodka for a week and she wanted him to go to detox. I put in an IV lock, checked his ETCO2 which was 35 and his sugar which was…
Obsession?
“Are you going to give me back my husband’s medicine list?” the woman asks. “No,” the medic says, deadpan. “I have a collection of them at home. Boxes actually. Overflowing. I particuarly like these — the little booklets with flowers on the cover. They are the Van Goughs of my collection. I’m seeing a psychiatrist…
Load and Go/Stay and Play/Load and Go Stay and Play
Stay and Play or Load and Go? I had many interesting comments on this issue following a brief discussion of a call in my post on scene management called An Unappreciated Skill. While my style is always evolving, these are my current thoughts on the continual question. *** First off, my goal is to arrive at…
EMT to Medic School
My post on Tuesday generated quite a number of comments centering around the issue of EMTs going right from EMT class to medic school. Here are my thoughts on it: When I started you had to have at least a year of field experience before they would even consider you for admission to medic school….
An Underappreciated Skill
What makes a great EMT or a great paramedic? I’ll start of with some common and easy answers –compassion, impressive medical knowledge, outstanding airway and IV skills, cool head under crisis. I could go on. While this would clearly make a great subject for another post, what I want to talk about today is a…
You Aren’t Talking to Me
There is a scene in Apocalypse Nowwhere the Martin Sheen character shows up at an outpost base that is under fire by enemy forces and has been every night for months. He walks through the chaos looking for someone to report to. He asks a soldier who’s in charge and the flustered man says, “I thought…
Class in America
We went to a doctor’s office for an unknown. The secretary led us to an exam room where a man in his sixties sat in a wheelchair, his chin on his chest,eyes closed, looking very tired. He had a huge distended abdomen and a hint of a yellow tinge to his skin. His wife was…
Letter to a New Preceptee
You are probably excited and apprehensive about starting your preceptorship. I know I was many years ago when it was my turn. I wondered whether I would make it – whether I was cut out for this job, whether I had spent so much time and effort studying only to fail, to have to hang…
EMS Haiku
Eric from the EMS Haiku site has just posted his trip report from the JEMS EMS Today conference. Like his blog, it is a good read. His post gives a good feel for what the conference is like, complete with educational session recaps and photos of interesting products. Add his site to your bookmarks.
A Cigarette
The mental health team meets us outside. “We should wait for the police,” the clinician says. “She’s a big woman. When we went back up there she had a knife near her that wasn’t there the first time we were up with her. She’s very anxious today. When she’s off her meds, she can be…
New Boots
A couple weeks ago I noticed the soles were starting to peel away from my boots. I tried to ignore it at first. I was in denial. I didn’t want to admit that the end was near. I spend some time surfing the internet looking at new boots, thinking I should have some on hand…
The Other Side
I had just left the locker room at the fitness center and was standing at the information desk when a man ran out of the men’s room and said, “Somebody call 911, he’s having a heart attack!” Now I hate these situations. I am in “plainclothes.” I am anonymous, yet I carry a card that…
King Sugar
It’s been my week for diabetics. Actually where I work, as I’ve written before, is a diabetic town. Some towns are trauma towns or heroin towns. I work the streets of a diabetic town. Lots of African-Americans and Jamaican-Americans with diabetes. I’m constantly going into dark cluttered homes or into nursing homes for the unresponsive….
EJ
Unresponsive in the waiting room of a large medical clinic. The woman is a GCS of 3 – no response at all. The staff thought she was sleeping, and then after walking by her multiple times, they finally noticed she was awfully pale and clammy. They checked her sugar. It was ten. I notice what…