Catching Up
So the little old lady with pneumonia. Right.
She's sitting hunched over in her chair, and the fire department has her on oxygen. She's about 200 years old, and has a spine you could bend totally over without touching her. When your mom yells at you about slouching, listen up.
She's got a really cute old lady voice, and she's telling us that she was in the hospital two weeks ago for pneumonia, and they sent her home on antibiotics, but she hasn't gotten any better. (Seeing a trend here?) I like this old lady, because inside her clear blue eyes there's still a spark of life. She's still in there, and still thinking. She cracks jokes with me all the way to the hospital, and tells me about her 47 (no lie) grandkids.
We drop her off at Rex, and I'm off on another attempt at lunch. I'm backing into the bay when we're dispatched again.
It's a standby for Apex EMS again, so we head back down to Western Wake.
In the ER at Western there's a refridgerator that I like to think of as a little piece of heaven. It contains soda, juice, and emergency pudding.
It's a bunch of Snack Pack pudding that they keep stocked for occassions just like this where no matter what we do we can't seem to get any food. Today, it will save my life. God bless the Kraft corportation.
From the standby we're dispatched to a nursing home in Cary, when we're the only truck left in the western half of the county. It's supposed to be a simple case of LOLFDWB (Little old lady fell down, went boom) Communications tells us that our patient is 80 some years old, and fell in the shower.
We head inside, and the staff has this lady in a chair, with gauze on a 2cm laceration on her head. They tell me she had "signifigant blood loss" through this cut. It's physically impossible, but I don't ask questions. It's just not worth explaining how water might dilute the blood, and make it seem like there's a little more coming out...
Anyway, this lady is fairly out of it. I ask the staff if she's acting normally, and they say she's usually fairly confused, but she has good days and bad. They're a little confused about what I'm asking, and totally inept, so I turn back to my patient.
"Miss so-and-so. Can you squeeze my fingers?"
Nothing but the O-face. (The bad kind, where you just can't control your mouth) The lights are on, but nobody's home. The staff finally decides this is fairly normal though, and we move her to our stretcher to get her outside.
Once we get her in the truck, I start to finally get a good look at the lady, and notice that she's blinking her eyes very slowly. I decide that maybe she isn't always this obtunded, and check her blood sugar along with everything else. Turns out, her blood sugar is sitting right around 21. Normal is 80-120.
This has suddenly become a fairly serious call. I let my partner know what's going on, and we try to start an IV. Unfortunately, this lady has nothing in the way of veins. We poke her once in a futile fishing trip, and get nothing.
The next best option we have is a drug called Glucagon that will release stored sugar from the cells of your muscles and liver. We reconstitute the drug, and give it to the lady through a muscle in her shoulder. By the time we make it to the hospital, she's responding to our questions. True, she answers "What day is it?" with "I need to break wind young man" but it's better than nothing.
I head outside to begin restocking our truck and cleaning up, when I hear a call dispatched to the Doc-in-a-box "urgent care center" that's just down the hill from the ER. Literally, JUST down the hill. Maybe 200 yards. Close enough that Uncle Rico could kill someone with a pigskin at that distance.
They're sent to a lady who's dehydrated and might have a kidney infection. I watch our truck pull up, and the crew get out, and head inside with the stretcher. 5 minutes later, they walk out with the patient, and drive the 200 yards to the hospital. Total cost to the patient? $500. Good thing she saved all that money by going to the Urgent Care instead of the ER in the first place.
Oh wait. Whoops.
The people at this place are fucking morons, and can't handle anything remotely resembling an acute problem. Unless you're almost positive you only need antibiotics, or you're smart enough to know that you can refuse to do what a "doctor" tells you to do, avoid these places at all costs.
We clear from our call, and start to head up the street, so that I might finally get some lunch. It's now 5:30pm.
*deet-deet* "Pre-alert..."
We're dispatched again, and where are we headed? You guessed it, the Doc-in-a-box! These motherfuckers are so inept that they've managed to call an ambulance twice in 15 minutes. DOCTORS!
Turns out they've called us for a 9 year old kid who was playing on a treadmill at his friend's house, and broke his collarbone when he fell. The doctor at the urgent care center has decided he needs to go to the pediatric ER in Raleigh for a head CT because the kid got light headed and pale during their treatment.
What the doctor apparently missed in his 4 years of medical school is that this is a fairly normal response to having broken bone ends manipulated by a dumbass in a lab coat while they try to wrestle your arm into a sling that's 2 sizes too small without giving you any pain meds.
His ineptitude leaves me hungry, and pissed.
Luckily, the kid's mom is cute (pretty blue eyes) and makes the trip at least a little tolerable. On the way to the hospital, she asks me a question.
Mom- "So is there something special about the hospital we're going to?"
Me- "Well, they're staffed with doctors who specialize in pediatrics, yeah."
Mom- "They don't have pediatricians at the hospital up the street from the urgent care?"
Me- "Actually they do."
Mom- "Oh, so they don't have a CT machine?"
Me- "Actually..."
Mom- "So why the hell are we going to Raleigh?"
Me- "Well you see you doctor is a moron, and..."
Actually, I just said something about being careful, and following protocols, but that's what I wanted to say.
We drop junior off, and I say goodbye to the cute mom, and I finally make it back to the station. It's 30 minutes past the time I was supposed to get off, and I haven't eaten anything except a container of emergency pudding for 12 hours. I'm not a happy boy.
I drive home, cursing my grumbling belly most of the way, and cook (read- microwave) myself some dinner, before collapsing into my bed. It's about 7:3o when I pass out.
It's about 9:30 when an unfamiliar and shrill beeping wakes me up.
I look around for the source, and find it when I notice an indiglo sheen coming from my belt that's still attached to the pants I'd worn that day. I'm being paged. On my TRT pager. Shit.
I rub the sleep from my eyes, and see "Vehicle Accident- PI. TRT Activation, 1 SW"
I call Jordan, who's on duty and say "Is this for real?"
He says that he doesn't know, and then asks if I'm going to respond. I tell him I will, and I'm suddenly driving very quickly towards Chapel Hill.
I guess I ought to explain that TRT stands for Technical Rescue Team, and that what it really means is that if you find yourself in a really fucked up circumstance, like being in the middle of a raging river, or hanging from the side of a building, or down a well, we'll be on our way to help you shortly.
On my way in to Chapel Hill, I listen to the radio traffic, and find out that a car has rolled down a 40+ foot embankment, and they called for TRT so that we could rig a safe system to get the patient and rescuers up and down the hill safely.
While I'm still on my way to the station the first 4 people to make it there take one of the trucks and respond to the scene. A little while later, I make it there, and 2 other team members and I put the second truck enroute to the scene.
We never made it... they got the patient up safely before our truck could get there. Our other truck did make it, and they helped set up the haul system, and added some safety features, but mostly served as manpower when it came time to haul.
Not a very exciting rescue call, but they're few and far between anyway, so we'll take what we can get, and it's nice to know that if something does happen, people will actually show up to the station.
Sleep peacefully Orange County.
Anway, that takes us up through Friday night. I'll finish out the weekend tomorrow, and finally catch up to present day.
Highlights ahead:
Chris goes to an adult store in Durham
Chris tells a patient- "No, I can't hear your wheeze. Try harder"
Chris gets to eat, and sleep, while on duty.
Chris' patient says "But I don't give a FUCK!" for a good reason.
She's sitting hunched over in her chair, and the fire department has her on oxygen. She's about 200 years old, and has a spine you could bend totally over without touching her. When your mom yells at you about slouching, listen up.
She's got a really cute old lady voice, and she's telling us that she was in the hospital two weeks ago for pneumonia, and they sent her home on antibiotics, but she hasn't gotten any better. (Seeing a trend here?) I like this old lady, because inside her clear blue eyes there's still a spark of life. She's still in there, and still thinking. She cracks jokes with me all the way to the hospital, and tells me about her 47 (no lie) grandkids.
We drop her off at Rex, and I'm off on another attempt at lunch. I'm backing into the bay when we're dispatched again.
It's a standby for Apex EMS again, so we head back down to Western Wake.
In the ER at Western there's a refridgerator that I like to think of as a little piece of heaven. It contains soda, juice, and emergency pudding.
It's a bunch of Snack Pack pudding that they keep stocked for occassions just like this where no matter what we do we can't seem to get any food. Today, it will save my life. God bless the Kraft corportation.
From the standby we're dispatched to a nursing home in Cary, when we're the only truck left in the western half of the county. It's supposed to be a simple case of LOLFDWB (Little old lady fell down, went boom) Communications tells us that our patient is 80 some years old, and fell in the shower.
We head inside, and the staff has this lady in a chair, with gauze on a 2cm laceration on her head. They tell me she had "signifigant blood loss" through this cut. It's physically impossible, but I don't ask questions. It's just not worth explaining how water might dilute the blood, and make it seem like there's a little more coming out...
Anyway, this lady is fairly out of it. I ask the staff if she's acting normally, and they say she's usually fairly confused, but she has good days and bad. They're a little confused about what I'm asking, and totally inept, so I turn back to my patient.
"Miss so-and-so. Can you squeeze my fingers?"
Nothing but the O-face. (The bad kind, where you just can't control your mouth) The lights are on, but nobody's home. The staff finally decides this is fairly normal though, and we move her to our stretcher to get her outside.
Once we get her in the truck, I start to finally get a good look at the lady, and notice that she's blinking her eyes very slowly. I decide that maybe she isn't always this obtunded, and check her blood sugar along with everything else. Turns out, her blood sugar is sitting right around 21. Normal is 80-120.
This has suddenly become a fairly serious call. I let my partner know what's going on, and we try to start an IV. Unfortunately, this lady has nothing in the way of veins. We poke her once in a futile fishing trip, and get nothing.
The next best option we have is a drug called Glucagon that will release stored sugar from the cells of your muscles and liver. We reconstitute the drug, and give it to the lady through a muscle in her shoulder. By the time we make it to the hospital, she's responding to our questions. True, she answers "What day is it?" with "I need to break wind young man" but it's better than nothing.
I head outside to begin restocking our truck and cleaning up, when I hear a call dispatched to the Doc-in-a-box "urgent care center" that's just down the hill from the ER. Literally, JUST down the hill. Maybe 200 yards. Close enough that Uncle Rico could kill someone with a pigskin at that distance.
They're sent to a lady who's dehydrated and might have a kidney infection. I watch our truck pull up, and the crew get out, and head inside with the stretcher. 5 minutes later, they walk out with the patient, and drive the 200 yards to the hospital. Total cost to the patient? $500. Good thing she saved all that money by going to the Urgent Care instead of the ER in the first place.
Oh wait. Whoops.
The people at this place are fucking morons, and can't handle anything remotely resembling an acute problem. Unless you're almost positive you only need antibiotics, or you're smart enough to know that you can refuse to do what a "doctor" tells you to do, avoid these places at all costs.
We clear from our call, and start to head up the street, so that I might finally get some lunch. It's now 5:30pm.
*deet-deet* "Pre-alert..."
We're dispatched again, and where are we headed? You guessed it, the Doc-in-a-box! These motherfuckers are so inept that they've managed to call an ambulance twice in 15 minutes. DOCTORS!
Turns out they've called us for a 9 year old kid who was playing on a treadmill at his friend's house, and broke his collarbone when he fell. The doctor at the urgent care center has decided he needs to go to the pediatric ER in Raleigh for a head CT because the kid got light headed and pale during their treatment.
What the doctor apparently missed in his 4 years of medical school is that this is a fairly normal response to having broken bone ends manipulated by a dumbass in a lab coat while they try to wrestle your arm into a sling that's 2 sizes too small without giving you any pain meds.
His ineptitude leaves me hungry, and pissed.
Luckily, the kid's mom is cute (pretty blue eyes) and makes the trip at least a little tolerable. On the way to the hospital, she asks me a question.
Mom- "So is there something special about the hospital we're going to?"
Me- "Well, they're staffed with doctors who specialize in pediatrics, yeah."
Mom- "They don't have pediatricians at the hospital up the street from the urgent care?"
Me- "Actually they do."
Mom- "Oh, so they don't have a CT machine?"
Me- "Actually..."
Mom- "So why the hell are we going to Raleigh?"
Me- "Well you see you doctor is a moron, and..."
Actually, I just said something about being careful, and following protocols, but that's what I wanted to say.
We drop junior off, and I say goodbye to the cute mom, and I finally make it back to the station. It's 30 minutes past the time I was supposed to get off, and I haven't eaten anything except a container of emergency pudding for 12 hours. I'm not a happy boy.
I drive home, cursing my grumbling belly most of the way, and cook (read- microwave) myself some dinner, before collapsing into my bed. It's about 7:3o when I pass out.
It's about 9:30 when an unfamiliar and shrill beeping wakes me up.
I look around for the source, and find it when I notice an indiglo sheen coming from my belt that's still attached to the pants I'd worn that day. I'm being paged. On my TRT pager. Shit.
I rub the sleep from my eyes, and see "Vehicle Accident- PI. TRT Activation, 1 SW"
I call Jordan, who's on duty and say "Is this for real?"
He says that he doesn't know, and then asks if I'm going to respond. I tell him I will, and I'm suddenly driving very quickly towards Chapel Hill.
I guess I ought to explain that TRT stands for Technical Rescue Team, and that what it really means is that if you find yourself in a really fucked up circumstance, like being in the middle of a raging river, or hanging from the side of a building, or down a well, we'll be on our way to help you shortly.
On my way in to Chapel Hill, I listen to the radio traffic, and find out that a car has rolled down a 40+ foot embankment, and they called for TRT so that we could rig a safe system to get the patient and rescuers up and down the hill safely.
While I'm still on my way to the station the first 4 people to make it there take one of the trucks and respond to the scene. A little while later, I make it there, and 2 other team members and I put the second truck enroute to the scene.
We never made it... they got the patient up safely before our truck could get there. Our other truck did make it, and they helped set up the haul system, and added some safety features, but mostly served as manpower when it came time to haul.
Not a very exciting rescue call, but they're few and far between anyway, so we'll take what we can get, and it's nice to know that if something does happen, people will actually show up to the station.
Sleep peacefully Orange County.
Anway, that takes us up through Friday night. I'll finish out the weekend tomorrow, and finally catch up to present day.
Highlights ahead:
Chris goes to an adult store in Durham
Chris tells a patient- "No, I can't hear your wheeze. Try harder"
Chris gets to eat, and sleep, while on duty.
Chris' patient says "But I don't give a FUCK!" for a good reason.
posted by C at 12:57 AM
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