Dilbert Land

We're called for dsypnea at an insurance company. A security guard leads us up to the third floor on a frieght elevator. The elevator opens horizontally like a giant steel mouth, and we step out, go through some double doors and then through a maze of cubicles. I have been here before. As often as we have picked up drunks on city street corners, done wrecks on the interstate, pnemonias in nursing homes and broken limbs on athletic fields, we do anxieties in Dilbert Land -- vast floors of nothing but cubicles. The calls come in as dsypneas, CVAs, unconciouses, diabetics, chest pains. We treat them, work them up, but in the end, they are almost always about stress and anxiety.

This time it's a woman in her late thirties, under stress, lots of problems, at work and financial. Tomorrow it will someone else melting down. There's worse jobs than being in EMS.

***

Did a basketball injury, a severe vertigo, a dehydration, a teenage psych, a neck pain from a rear end MVA and a probable pnemonia.

***

At the end of the day I talked to one our medics, who I precepted, who is now a new firefighter. He said he thought the fire department was still planning to try to take over EMS in the city, upgrading from first responders to being medics, and maybe even taking over transport. I can't see the city coming up with the money to swing it, but who knows. The day may be coming. Maybe two years out. More likely five. By ten, maybe its done. You can't count on life staying the same.

It will be a hard day for me if they ever shut us out of being medics in this city. We've put a lot of ourselves into these streets. The city is a part of us.