Priority One

We do a minor motor vehicle in a suburban town and transport a young housewife to the hospital with a shoulder strain. There are three stretchers ahead of us. While we are waiting we hear med patches for a man who had a car fall on his chest, and another man who fell twenty feet and hurt his ankle. Three other stretchers come in and bypass us -– a difficulty breathing, an abdominal pain and a stroke protocol. The fall arrives along with the man who had the car fall on his chest. The ambulance crew is breathing for him as they go past. We are in triage about an hour when they finally get to us. Then they tell us to put the patient in a wheel chair and wheel her out to the waiting room.

After we clear we are sent from the southern most hospital to a post in the northwestern part of the city. Rush hour is just starting. When we finally get close to our assigned post we are sent to another post on the central western border. Before we arrive there, we are sent to a post between two towns on the south western most section of our territory. Traffic is achingly slow. We have already been traveling for over an hour. Then we are finally given a call – but it is a transfer to a town beyond our southeastern border. It is now 5 and the highway we have to take is at a standstill. We have basically been driving a big long slow box around our territory, although now we are going so slow, you can hardly even call it driving. It takes us 45 minutes to get there going non-priority.

Since we came on this morning, we have hardly had a moment’s rest -- all either calls or driving from one post to the next. Started with a transfer from the wound care center to a suburban nursing home, then went from another suburban nursing home to the hospital for abd pain, then went to a nursing home in yet another suburban town to a hospital for insertion of a feeding tube. Then a bunch of posting driving around, then a half hour posting actually sitting in a suburban town, and then sent for a transfer at an eye surgery center for a person who turned out to still be in surgery, then the MVA, then this Charlie on the MTA run around.

Rainy day too.

**

After our long call, we actually get to sit awhile. The book I ordered arrived yesterday and I started reading it. It is a slender novel and it takes me no time to blast through 120 pages of the 210 page book. It is hard to call it a paramedic novel. The main character is a medic and there are some scene calls, but it is not really an EMS book. The basic story so far. The medic carries a camera around and takes pictures of sick people and dead bodies all the times. He starts dating a girl he met on a call who has HIV. They start to fall in love. He sleeps with her. He's got some kind of pain inside that we don't really know why yet. The guy does writes very well.

**

We’re listening to the fire radio. They come upon a motor vehicle and tell the dispatcher to send an ambulance and a cop. The dispatcher asks if there are any injuries. They say, the person isn’t sure if she is hurt and the ambulance can evaluate when they get there. A few minutes later our dispatcher gives us the call on a priority one. We ask if he certain it is on a one because the Fire said it was just an evalve. Our dispatcher tells us to check with the PD dispatcher. The PD dispatcher tells us it is on a one. She calls it a major incident. Enroute we heard the fire asking for our ETA. We get there and no one is directing us in. Two firefighters are standing in the road where we are trying to go. They don’t even see us. My partner has to drive by very slowly to keep from hitting them. They see us now and knock on the window. She’s in the back of the cruiser. It was cold and we wanted her out of the rain. I check her out. She has minor flank pain. My partner checks out the car. No damage. We take her to the hospital on a nonpriority and they put her in a wheelchair in the waiting room. Priority One.

I have been trying not to whine in my entries I think for the most part I have been avoiding it. But lately, particularly as we have been talking about lights and sirens use in the regional meetings, I have been upset at the gratuitous use of lights and sirens – sending on us priority ones in the rain for calls that are not priority ones or sending us priority one into other towns to nursing homes for calls that are not more than "emergifers" -- transfers going to the emergency department. The blame goes all around. Sometimes it is the PD, sometimes the company, sometimes the caller, sometimes us(when we inappropriately use lights and sirens to go to the hospital.) That’s why we need protocols to let people know where the boundaries are.