Golden Acres Manor/Colostomy Bag

My old partner, who I work with regularly on over time has gotten a transfer to Florida. He’s leaving in two weeks. I’m bummed that he is going, particularly since it will leave me with partner de jour for the entire month of October M, T, W, when I would have been working with him. But I’m happy for him. He likes the sunshine. He was telling one of the nurses today he was going to Florida, and I cracked that he’d finally gotten into the Golden Acres Manor. “A Bed, a roof over my head and three squares a day,” he said. I think for a moment the nurse thought he was serious. “I’m only kidding,” he said, disturbed that she thought maybe he was really ready for the Manor.

Did a wait and return transfer for a psych patient – a young woman, who was fully ambulatory, but had to go by ambulance because she is a psych. A staff member accompanied her. We brought her into the doctor’s office. She hopped off the stretcher and walked over to the procedure table. We waited about a half hour then brought her back.

We got sent to a suburban town for a psych, only to find it wasn’t a psych at all, but a patient on the heart transplant list, who hadn’t been feeling well for a week and needed to go to a distant hospital beyond the range of the town’s service. That took up a good part of the day, seeing as we went at rush hour.

We did a dialysis patient with difficulty breathing.

A dead body. Neighbors came over and found lady dead, tried to start CPR, but she was stiff. An alcoholic, there was blood all over the bathroom, in the toilet, and hallway and bedroom and on towels. She must have been puking it up. There was a big open bottle of wine near her cold fingers.

We were sent priority one along with fire, two police cars and a fly car medic for a “burst colostomy bag.” I don’t think the dispatcher knew what a colostomy bag was. It turns out the guy just needed help getting into his wheelchair so he could wheel to the bathroom and clean himself and change the bag.

Last call was for a woman who passed out and twisted her ankle. I put her on the monitor and found her in a rapid afib. That could explain the recent falls, which she thought was just due to blood pressure.