Number Three

I found out today that one our frequent fliers is moving to a nursing home in another town. Whoo-hoo!

I would estimate we have transported him over three hundred times in the last five years. Always for constipation or a clogged urinary catheter. He has visitng nurse who comes, but he can never wait for her. His house is a pig sty.

Many times I see him lying on a stretcher in the hallway at the hospital, waiting for a commercial ambulance to come take him home.

He was always miserable.

I feel bad for anyone who has to live like that, but when you see so many people who are stoic, you do lose a little compasion for the chronic complainers.

He was probably our third most famous frequent flyer.

Number one was a younger person with sickle cell, who called in the middle of the night all the time. Sickle cell is horrible disease, and I have given people in sickle cell crisis megadoses of morphine, but I never gave this guy morphine one. He just didn't appear to be in any type of pain. And it seemed he always called after a night out partying. He'd come home, then call for his ride to the farthest hospital. There were always three cars in his driveway. He's dead now.

Number two was a diabetic, who dropped her sugar two three sometimes four times in a week. She had a baby and a young child of maybe five, then six, then seven, then eight, who always called the ambulance. Her problem was she didn't like to eat. We rarely took her to the hospital. We'd give her D50, she'd come around, then refuse to go to the hospital. I wasn't hungry she'd say. Her son would fix her a peanut butter sandwich and we'd sit there and watch her eat it. She moved out of town. We heard a report of another responder going to her apartment in the other town an finding her unresponsive with a low sugar. Then she moved back to town, then moved away again. No sightings for over a year now.

This guy was number three.

***

Two calls today. Both cold and flus from elderly communities. Both went to the farthest possible hospitals.