Middle Eastern Music

Slept until nine-thirty, got up refreshed, was getting ready to go to the gymn when the phone rang and the company supervisor said "Where are you? I have you on the schedule."

I thought I was off. But it turns out the first week in January is still part of the last six months of the 2005 schedule block because the week started on December 31. I had been written in for Mondays, Tuesdays and Wednesdays in the city 9:30-9:30 in that schedule block. My suburban shifts got switched two weeks ago, so I was taken off the Monday and Tuesday city shifts because I was now working in the suburbs on those days, but I was left on Wednesday. Anyway... I got uniformed up and went in.

Busy day.

Started off with a VA transfer -- nice forty minute out of town trip. Came back and hardly got a break the rest of the day.

We got sent for a MVA near the golf course. On the long icy entrance road we found a rollover, but no patient. While rollovers with no patients are common in the north end of the city -- they are usually stolen cars -- what was unusual about this was the car stereo was blasting middle eastern music, and witnesses say they saw a man with a turban fleeing across the snowcovered golf course. So why was he running? It couldn't have been a stolen car because I wouldn't think a car thief would bring his own music. Who was he? Why was he running?

We did a short fat little ten year old girl with huge pig tails, who had a fever at school. When I first saw her lying on the cot in the nurse's office, I thought she was eighteen, but then she stood up and was barely four feet tall. We had trouble lifting her up on the stretcher. By trouble I mean she was a lot heavier than I anticipated when I went to lift the stretcher up. At the children's hospital, she stepped on the scale and weighed 85 kilos. That's 187 pounds.

Later we did a tiny seven year old with a stomach ache, and a drunken eighty-year old Jamaican, who called from a pay phone. He sang all the way to the hospital. The nurse at triage crumpled up the registration slip I handed her. "Just put him in a wheelchair and set him in front of a TV," she said. "He'll get bored in a couple hours and leave."

We did a woman with chest pain from a doctor's office. Her twelve lead was insignificant, but she had a lot of risk factors so the doctor wanted her to get the full rule out workup.

We did an old woman with abdominal pain and severe nausea with a history of bowell adhesions. Her BP was 220/110 with a heart rate of 120. She didn't want me to try an IV. "Let them do it at the hospital," she said. "You'll never get it. I have terrible veins. You'll just hurt me. You just want to practice. I've never met an EMT who could get it. They have to call the special team at the hospital."

I love a challenge.

She did have spidery veins. I got in a 22. If I had been a real stud I would have drawn blood as well, but I knew there was no way I was going to get blood out of it, so rather than trying and failing, I just attached the lock. She told me I deserved a raise and a gold star. I've been challenged before, I told her. What I didn't tell her is I have lost some of those challenges. I could just imagine what she would have said had I missed. "I told you..., but you just wanted to practice on me. You hurt me..."

I gave her some IV phenergan for her nausea.

Tomorrow I am off.

I hope.