I'm Glad I Wasn't There

Medics like to be on great calls. For all the I want a quiet day talk, when all is said and done, medics want to be challenged, they want to be able to point to the big call and how they handled it. They may not want it every day -- in fact I am sure they don't, but they need a few jewels under their belt to define themselves.

And then there are those calls you hear about that all you can think is I'm glad I wasn't there. Here's one of them:

(Now I wasn't there and have only heard preliminary reports about it, but I was almost there. I just missed it. And because I don't have a first person account, I'm only going to lay out the situation. And in doing that I might not even have the facts right, but that's not what matters. What matters is a situation I would want no part of.)

Young person has their jaw wired shut post surgery I'm assuming on a broken jaw. Something goes wrong. Their airway swells. They vomit. Who knows?

The medic shows up. Young person in cardiac arrest. Jaw wired shut. Neck swollen to the point there are no recognizable landmarks. You have no time to think about what you might do. You are just dropped in it, and I am imagining a horrific scene complete with crying panicing family, desperate first responders, etc.

Boy am I glad I wasn't there.

***

Here's two more calls that I later heard about that I was glad I wasn't there for.

1) An undercover police office codes, just drops dead of a heart attack. A non-emt is driving an ambulance with an out of service sign on it. He is pulled over at virtual gunpoint and ordered to aid the officer. The best he can do amid all the shouting of ever multiplying police officers is call for help. I would not want to have been the arriving medic who finds the officer in arrest with puke streaming from his mouth, with the enraged masses of officers swearing at him, demanding he get moving to the hospital, and still not even knowing if it is a non-traumatic or traumatic arrest.

2) Man smashed in the face with a baseball bat breaking every bone in his face and throat. You arrive to find him unconscious moaning and drowning in blood.

I have no real problem with difficult calls(baby codes, traumatic arrests, etc. calls that require me to use my usual skills. I feel bad for the people, but I can do them because that is my job. In reflecting on this today, the two calls I most fear are calls that require you to do a surgical trach where the anatomy is screwed up, and calls involving crazed shouting police officers when their fellow officer is truly injured.

I have never done a surgical airway. I have done many calls with crazed police officers. For all their training when an officer is injured, their fellow officers routinely endanger them with their hysterical shouting. I was on a call where police officers dragged a officer with a neck fracture, 50 yards down the streets and threw him on my stretcher.

Both calls require maintaining extreme cool. When given a choice between the two, I will take the crazed officers over the surgical airway calls, particuarly over a surgical airway on a kid. I'll take that anytime.

***

Worked eight hours tonight. Hot and sticky again. Did a couple transfers out of the box. Then did two disturbed mother calls. One was for an assault on a child, which may in fact have only been an overworked mother spanking a child who wandered out of their apartment in a bad neighborhood, and was seen by a friend of her estranged husband, who called police, knowing it would bring in DCF. There wasn't a mark on the kid, who lived in a clean apartment in a bad housing complex, but it triggered an investigation.

The other call was for a nineteen year old girl with side pain, and her four hundred pound drunken mother was flipping out that her baby was sick. She tried to fight her way into the back of the ambulance. I did all I could to assure her her daughter was fine. At the hospital, they put her in the waiting room. The hospital was as packed as I have seen it lately. I assured the mother her daughter would be seen quicker this way, but she was barely containing herself. She's going to explode at some point in the six, seven, eight hour wait her daughter is facing.