Hammered

Getting hammered in the city. The last two days it has been sign on, get a call, sign back on, they are holding two. Did a lot of BS again today too.

A guy who fell eight days ago, and today his legs started hurting. No deformity. We had to carry him down three flights of stairs.

We had a lady feeling weak for a week.

A 22-year old feeling weak because he hadn't eaten all day.

A teenage girl hyperventilating at school, who had the nurses running around like headless hens when she started arching her back and rolling her eyes. Then when we went to the hospital one of the nurses wondered if she was having a dystonic reaction. I wondered if she had ever seen a dystonic reaction. It turns out someone had written the girl a nasty note earlier in the day.

We responded to a 22 year old feeling light-headed who said he hadn't eaten all day. We did a two month old who got temprarily short of breath according to his mom when she brought him to the state welfare office. The person at the welfare office wanted me to investigate why the baby hadn't recieved any medicine when she was brought to the doctor the day before. I felt like saying maybe because the baby wasn't sick.

We did a drunk on Main Street.

The most interesting call was for a girl who'd had gastric bypass a year and a half ago and who suddenlt today started vomiting and shitting dark brown blood. She was very pale and clammy when we got there, but after some oxygen and a liter of fluid was looking a little better. When I patched to the hospital, I told them she was alert and oriented. The nurse on the other end of the radio asked, "What's the patient's GCS (Glaskow Comma Score). I responded, "Well, she's alert and oriented -- that would be a 15." Its like asking is the patient breathing after I say, the patient says she is in pain.

We got sent for a person in a wheel chair hit by a car. Another ambulance on the way to a sprain was passing by and stopped to treat the patient. Our dispatcher told us to continue there and take over care so that the other crew could go on to their call. We got there and they had the call well in hand. I told them to just go ahead and do the call -- their ambulance was even pointed in the right direction -- they were only a couple blocks from the hospital. So we went on to their call, which we should have been sent to when they came upon our call. By the time we got to it -- a strained thumb from an assault, the patient had already gotten a ride to the hospital.

Our last call was for an old woman who had been on the city bus earlier when the bus was in an accident. The cop who checked the accident out, asked her if she was okay, she said she didn't think she was hurt, but then when she got off the bus and started walking home, her back started to hurt. So she called for an ambulance a couple hours later. When we got to the hospital, her son met us outside and started yelling at me about what where they going to do, how were they going to handle it, her being hurt on the bus like it was our fault. I tried to tell him we had nothing to do with the bus and that was a matter for the police, we were just taking his mother in to have the doctors look at her, but he was not happy. Then when we moved her over on to the hospital bed, she groaned, and he started shouting at us that we were abusing his mother and we were too rough. He yelling this out to the whole ER like a man who had witnessed a robbery and was trying to call for help. I apologized and said, we had not intended to cause her pain. Then he accused me of treating all black people that way. I told him he shouldn't make assumptions. His mother apologized for his behavior, and thanked us for treating her well.

That was my day.

***

The other interesting thing that happened was one of our calls was to the headquarters of the city paper. We approached the call from the south, the fire department came from the north. They got stuck at the train tracks as a long frieght train came through. So we got there way ahead of them. I have no problem with the fire department, but the paper has been way pro-fire and way anti- ambulance*, so it is always nice to go to the paper and beat fire there.

*When I first started in the city, the fire department only responded to motor vehicle calls that required extrication. The police department was the first responder. The problem was the police were too busy to go to many of the calls, and when they did go to a call, they were reluctant to get too hands on. A few years ago the fire department after lengthy internal debate between the old school(we only fight fires" and new school "we need to justify our jobs because there aren't that many fires anymore" members decided to become the first responders. The best part about having them respond is we no longer have to look for the house or building numbers, we just look for the red fire truck(if they beat us). They are also very helpful with carrying equipment and are genuinely pleasant helpful people. Sometimes they even get to cardiac arrests before us and their CPR makes a difference in patient outcome. The bad part is they get all the good press and we get none. The paper, which bashes us constantly, reccomended that the fire department crosstrain its firefighers as paramedics and then take over all of EMS in the city. My problem with that is it assumes that anyone can be a paramedic as if being a paramedic is as simple as going to a few classes. Don't get me wrong. I would love to have a city pension, but I think paramedics should be first and foremost paramedics.