HP Car

I worked the HP - high performance car today for the first time. The deal with the HP car is you do nothing but transfers. As soon as you have done eight, you can go home and still get paid for your 9-5 eight hours. If it is slow or you have to wait too long for a transfer to be ready, you still get credit for a call. I took the shift because an old partner of mine was working it. He recently came back to work for the company after being away for four years, working a variety of other jobs -- group home, security, research lab, er tech. He likes the HP shift. "I did all those calls with you, the shootings, stabbings, digging babies out of toilets, I don't need to do that anymore. I come in, I do my job, and most days get out early."

We had a good time, catching up on news and rehashing old times. We did our eight calls and were out an hour and a half early.

I can't say as I really enjoyed humping all those transfers -- we didn't have a break -- but I was impressed with my friend and with the idea of the HP car. The first four calls were all dialysis patients. He does the same patients every Tuesday and Thursday. One of the calls involved helping an amputee down some narrow stairs, using two of those stair escalators, and then an outside elevator. You could tell the patient was comfortable with him and he joked easily with her and her daughter. I knew the patients liked having the same guy come for them every time rather than an endless procession of new faces. At one diaylsis center, he helped dress an old woman the way she liked, putting her hood up and wrapping a scarf around her. On our next to last call, we took a woman home from the hospital to her daughter's house. We showed the daughter how to put a cannula on the mother, how her 02 machine worked, how a foley bag needed to be keep low so it would drain, and pointed out a sore on the woman's ankle. We gave her the company's number and told her to call us if she needed transportation and told her to call 911 if any emergencies developed. She thanked us as she let us out the front door.

Tomorrow I'm back in a regular car.