What about ME?

I wish that I'd had the experience of being in the position I have now when I'd been in college as a Psych major. I mean, human beings try so hard to be "normal" that they have no idea how absolutely ridiculous it is to try. This job is a jackpot when it comes to the study of human behavior I can almost picture Freud rubbing his hands together in absolute glee. And I'm not just talking about the patients. And god forbid I leave myself out of this little petrie dish of psychological behavior. I just don't have a whole lot of perspective on my own psyche.

Let's start with our Lieutenant for the day on Thanksgiving. I've worked with "Princess" before. I swear if I see her name on scheduling again, I WILL call in sick. Nothing pisses me off more than a woman who expects you to wait on her hand and foot, unless it's a woman who then stands in the middle of your work area and babbles incessantly and expects you to amuse you while she watches you work. At least twice she threw an empty soda bottle at the trash, missed and left it on the floor. The second time I gave my partner the evil eye and silently communicated "If you pick that up I will kill you." He and I were on the same page. The PO is a bit OCD and just could not let it sit there. At one point I went into the bathroom right after her where I found an empty toilet paper holder. It was all I could do not to hand her a roll of toilet paper and tell her to handle it. She was the boss for the day after all. She is 10 years my junior and boy-crazy. It's all she can talk about. Unless it's working out - which she talks about doing, but based on her physique... I don't know. Well, and napping. So her conversations focus on boys, working out and napping. At about 14:30 I went to put in the log that we had washed the equipment and the log was...empty. It's her responsibility to write that. I wrote in my calls but can't fill in the ones I wasn't on. The following morning when I went into the fridge to get the pancakes I'd saved for breakfast because I was working 48 hours...yeah. She was freaking eating them. Before she went home. Son of a...

My patients for the back-to-back shifts were mostly soft-balls. Nothing really major. For some reason I am running a whole lot of alcoholics. I'd say recovering, but they're not really doing that. Lot's of severe DTs. One lady was so bad that if ever I was in danger of being an alcoholic I won't ever be now. But the patient that stands out in my mind wasn't really much of a patient. By that I mean we didn't take him to the hospital and he felt really bad for calling us. He has a history of racing heart and his doctor thinks it's panic attacks. I think it might be, but in the middle of the night and while you're asleep? Don't know and I'm not a doctor. Anyway, the patient said the one time he had one episode while at a football game he was close to a medic who put him on a monitor and saw trigeminy. It's the only time they ever caught it. He does have mitrovalve prolapse but it's never bothered him. All of this started when he was going through his divorce (which is now final). Now let me describe this guy. About 6' tall, 40 years old and about 4% body fat. This man hasn't put anything in his body that's bad for him in a loooooong time. Let's just say doing a 12-lead on him sure beat doing a 12-lead on a 400 lb man. He works out. A lot. He shaves his chest. He had quite a few tattoos. I'm digging it, but also thinking that a man who works out that much is no fun - he spends way more time in the mirror than you do. So then I notice he has a tattoo on his left wrist that is the same as his first name. After we're done and I'm just talking to him I ask him if he has any kids. "Geez, no. I wish!". Uhhhh. So you had your OWN name tattooed on your wrist?

Can we say narcissism? Sorry baby. Had enough of that for the last 48 hours.

36 hours, two calls, both CRAZY

I went in 12 hours early Friday night to work some very rare overtime. Who turns down overtime when you could (potentially) sleep the night away? Crazy, right? Until your realize it's Friday the 13th. And a new moon. If you think a full moon is crazy, work in EBF when the moon isn't there to light your way where street lights don't grow.

Anyhow...Just as dinner hits the table (two hours late) the tones go off for an overdose. I didn't take it too seriously. It came out as an insulin overdose, 25 units. The patient was 32 years old, conscious and alert. My partner was an EMT-I and I'm not used to having someone at that level working with me. He jumped into getting an IV started and the paramedic EMS officer and Battalion Chief (also a paramedic) were crowded around making him nervous. He just passed paramedic school. He missed the IV and felt awful about it all night. The patient's husband said the patient shot herself up with the insulin (his stepfather's) because she felt "shaky". She'd had gestational diabetes a few years ago and was self-medicating. She kept insisting she hadn't taken anything. Her sugar was 66. The EMS officer got the line and we got an amp of D50 in her and her sugar went up to 292. Just for giggles, I got some fluid in her (her BP was a tad on the low side too and she was still pretty lethargic even after the sugar) and gave her narcan. Nada. No response. She smelled like alcohol, so I wasn't sure if she'd been drinking - she was still denying taking anything. Her vitals were stable and she was rousable so we drove to the hospital and turned her over to the nurse.

The nurse came out and asked us about our procedures. I recounted the blood sugar, treatment, etc. The nurse told me that they had just taken her blood sugar again and it was 63. Um, WHAT? From 25 units of insulin? WTF, over? There is something very fishy going on here... They gave her another amp of D50 and glucagon and her blood sugar went down to 22. They put her on a D20 drip to try to stabilize her. She signed out AMA today and went home.

I just got a call from my partner from that night. He said that he was just talking to that nurse said the family of the woman we brought in arrived at the hospital and immediately requested the police. Apparently the husband took off after we arrived. He found out earlier in the afternoon that his four year old son is not his - it's his stepfather's. His wife slept with his own stepfather. Ugh. Can you say motive? The police are looking at this as an attempted murder.

Bring on the court date!

Anyone up for a cruise late January 2011?

It's back to reality. Well, I like to think of it as the 11 and 3/4 months that pays for the one week of complete and outrageous fun. And for someone who generally follows a schedule, that's saying something. I'm the kind of person who goes to bed at 2200 and is up at 0600. I found myself going to bed at 0400. Of course, I'm still recovering... I still feel like I'm walking on a moving ship. My whole world still feel a bit "tilted". Twenty years ago I would have been puking my cookies up, but after years of standing up in the back of a moving vehicle with a bad rookie driver? Piece of cake. I guess I should thank them!!

So last October I signed up for this cruise to the Caribbean. Plopped down $25 to hold my spot. I had to pay something like $125 in June 2009. I then got a notice that the price of the cruise had dropped by like $86. I had to pay the balance by August 2009. Easy peasy. I paid less than $100 a day for a five day cruise. Where can you go and get your room, all you can eat food AND entertainment for THAT price? Now there are a few things you need to know. You will be charged $50 per person gratuity for your room for the cruise. It's worth it - your stewards are awesome and cute as hell. Also, your drinks are not included in the cruise price. That means soda, juice and all alcohol. You can get a soda/juice card for about $6 a day (it was $36.60 for me for the week) all you can drink. A gourmet coffee card is about $13 for 5. Sorry, no alcohol cards, though I think they had one you could buy that got you 20% off drinks. Worth it if you're a lush. Alcoholic beverages are about $5-6 apiece and EVERYTHING you buy aboard has a gratuity automatically added. The upside to this is that the person who serves you has their name printed on the receipt. Bad service? You know exactly who to complain about.

Now this cruise was only the first. We had about 24 firefighters or friends and family of firefighters. This year the family of a recently deceased pump operator and their friends attended. I was unable to attend this man's funeral but I heard so many good things about him. He was beloved. I met both his son and daughter (both young) who are volunteers and they were awesome. His wife is still hurting and she kept to herself this trip. Our aim is recruit firefighters, EMS, any friends of both and even anyone who has links to cancer. We ran into a group of hospice workers from Florida and invited them to join us next time. Many of us die from cancer and hey - we need those hospice workers too! We loved those ladies. One morning we had breakfast with them and one of them joked that the only way she could get a man to talk to her is if he had one hour to live.

I'd like to invite everyone to join us next time. We're shooting for late January 2011. It doesn't matter where you live, what system you work for, if you're career or volunteer or even what country you live in. Chances are we'll be leaving from Florida. This time we did not need a passport, only an original copy of a birth certificate. From what I understand, that is getting ready to change - so prepare to get a passport if you want to go. It takes a while so don't wait to the last minute. That should cost about $120.

If you're interested, shoot me an email. As soon as the president of the cancer foundation lets me know when and where, I'll forward the flyer to you. The more people we get to go, the better!! Let's fill the ship with, well, US!!

The TV show "Trauma", just my opinion

I finally got to listen to Jamie Davis' podcast on the TV show "Trauma" on my way to work yesterday. I participated in the listen and comment (chat room) portion held by Jamie et al. for the premiere and finally listened to the portion that followed that included a call in from the actress that plays Marisa Benez (Aimee Garcia).

I have to say that the show pretty much lost me early on. I have NO LOVE for the character of Nancy Carnahan (Anastasia Griffith). Her uniform is spray-painted on and she wears her hair for fashion, not professionalism. And then. And THEN. They show her having SEX with her partner in the back of her medic unit. LISTEN UP NBC. It's freakin' hard enough working as a firefighter/paramedic and not getting respected as a professional by your coworkers because they see you as a whore and plaything in their firehouse. Much to my dismay, this was demonstrated in the very chat room I was in. A fellow chatter responded to my comment about why the female medic had to be portrayed like a whore with a cheeky "Is there any other type of female medic?" My heart sank and to say I was highly offended would be like saying Ghandi was a little hungry. I didn't go through 4 1/2 years of college, another two years of college to get my paramedic and then spend nine years in EMS and now five in the fire department to sleep with men in the back of my medic unit. I've worked hard to try to get my male coworkers to see me as an equal. Must I now fight the public's perception of me just as hard? Miss Griffith just slides right into that ugly stereotype of the poor little 'ole female medic who just can't get taken seriously. Geez, lady. Wonder what the HELL you're doing wrong.

DAMMIT.

I was impressed with Miss Garcia's interview on the podcast and she may have sucked me back in. She spoke of the cast's attempts at EMS training and their realization of how hard our job really is. I MAY be willing to give it another shot for her sake. Look. I know this is supposed to be for entertainment purposes. I know there's a certain amount of liberty taken. I was willing to overlook that. NBC, there is a way to introduce the personal lives of those you are trying to represent without making us look...well, awful. It has been done before. Third Watch, ER... Entertaining, right? I remember anxiously waiting for those shows to come on - even threatening bodily harm if anyone bothered me during those show times.

*sigh* Oh, hell.

Chest pain conundrum

It's still dark outside despite the fact that it's well past the time my body says I'm supposed to be awake. I've spent the better part of the last 24-hours resting and sleeping, so I'm doing better. Good Partner, who I am re-naming Super-Sized Partner or SSP gave me a whopper of a cold. Oh, and I'm not naming him that because he's fat - far from it. He's just about a foot taller and, well, built like a football player.

I worked Saturday and even though we had back-to-back N'or Easters, we were still busy for us. I took a very nice elderly woman with cancer early in the morning. I tried to inventory the EMS closet and kept getting interrupted. I got a frequent flyer on PCP who SWORE he wasn't on drugs. So. You chose to sit outside in the cold, pouring rain until your body temperature dropped 10 degrees after the cops arrested your cousin with PCP two hours ago? By the way, your blood pressure is through the roof. And that huge swollen black eye you have. Any idea where that came from? No? Hmmm. You might want to re-think your position here.

The real puzzler came in the middle of the night. I had a relatively young guy with chest pain. He was only 48 years old and had obscenely high blood pressure. He's supposed to be on medication, but hasn't taken it in a while. He also had a history of irritable bowel, nothing else. I did the usual, oxygen, 12-lead (unconfirmed normal, no obvious ectopy), IV access. He got the 324 ASA with no relief. I gave him 0.4 mg of nitro and about 3 minutes later he said he felt a little dizzy. His appearance did not change, but WOW did his vitals. His BP dropped about 78 points systolic and his pulse dropped by about 40 beats. He never stopped chatting and I hung a bag and let it rip. Ten minutes later He was back up 35 points systolic. Now I have a hard time believing that 0.4 nitro has that much of an effect, and that 200 ml of fluid can turn it around THAT fast. I'm inclined to think something else is going on here. I may never know.

Anyone have any ideas?