Score one for the good guys!

Well, my past 2 duty days have been pretty boring for the most part except for 2 runs. Two duty days ago, we were called out to a woman with difficulty breathing at 3:30 in the morning. Of course my first reaction is that this is another stupid run... I mean, who is up at 3:30 in the morning to even know they have problems breathing? It's usually something like "I've been short of breath since last Tuesday and now, (after drinking those 3 40 oz beers), I just can't take it any more". We get to the house and here is this woman, in respiratory distress. OK, so maybe she is having problems, but she's a dialysis patient that hasn't been in 5 days. She's full of fluids and now can't breathe. We get her to the medic and the first thing she asks for is a bag valve mask. My partner and I look at each other and say "Ut oh..". A bag valve mask is one of those things that you see being used on people to help them breathe.. If she's had one used on her before, she goes downhill fast. We give her a nebulized breathing treatment, begin to get her set to nasally intubate her and boom, she arrests on us. We work her all the way to the ER, do all the things that we're supposed to do.. Evidently even did them right. By the time we left the hospital she was back, on a ventilator but back. Good prognosis and everything.

Early this morning we were called out to an unconscious person. On the way, dispatch informed us that the patient was elderly, recently discharged from the hospital, and not breathing. Sure enough, when we arrive we have an old guy in full arrest found by his son in a recliner. Evidently the guy likes to get up early and watch the news. The son heard a moan, went out to check on his dad and found him dead. We got the guy to the floor and began our voodoo. Normally, on a run like this, we do all of our resuscitative stuff. Go thru one or two rounds of drugs and with no response, call a field termination. Unlike on TV, it's rare to find someone dead and get them back. But low and behold, we got a pulse on the guy. By the time he made it to the hospital, he had a good perfusing heart rhythm and a good blood pressure. Looks like he'll live to "wake up dead" another day.

Nothing extraordinary

Well, the past few days at work have been pretty quiet. It must be the nice weather. We did get called out on a a report of a guy, laying next to a ladder , by the road, with wires down all around him. Sounded like it had potential for a good run, but it ended up being a false alarm. Someone out there has a good imagination.

Brenda and I did get to see Alison Krauss and Union Station in concert at Taft Theater in Cincinnati. I know she's not for everyone, but damn it was a great concert.

I'm on EDO tomorrow, and we're supposed to have great weather this weekend. Maybe I'll get a chance to get the yard in order.

I Love My Job!!

How many people can say that? I love my job! Sure, there are days when I love it a little less than others, but for the most part it's pretty cool.
I'd like to say that I chose being a firefighter/paramedic because I want to help people, maybe give a little back to society. Nah.. that's not it at all. I like finding people in predicaments that they've put themselves in, mostly through stupidity. I used to catch a show on tv every once and a while, it was one of those real "life in the ER" type shows. One of the ER docs said it best when he was asked how he deals with the stuff he sees every day. He said that 99% of the people he treats are there because they've done it to themselves. Either by drinking and jumping on a motorcycle, drug deals gone bad, or just plain being stupid. They've somehow, someway put themselves in a bad way.

I know I've talked about how most days are the same over and over. Picking up the same people, for the same reasons. "I'm having chest pain" How long has this been going on? "A couple of weeks, but it's 3:00 in the morning and I just can't deal with it anymore". Every once and a while, we get a day where every run has just a little twist to it to make it different. Yesterday was one of those days... I 'll tell you about a few of them.

We started off with an elderly lady that called 911 because she was tachycardic, (rapid heart beat). Everyone has at some time felt their heart flutter before, most people don't call 911. Turns out this lady was a retired OR nurse and knew what she was talking about. Her rate was @ 170 bpm. She had a couple previous procedures done for this before, the last was in 1999. I talked in a previous post about "fun" drugs to give people, one of them is Adenocard. What it does is stop your heart for 6-9 seconds, and when it starts back up, hopefully it's at a normal rate. You can imagine how odd you'd feel if all the sudden your heart stops beating. We had to dose this poor lady twice, but we got her converted on the second try. Turns out, at the ER she went back into her rapid heart rate. She may end up with a pacemaker.

Next we were called out for a "trauma". Turns out that the police witnessed a crack deal going down, and had to taser the dealer to get him in custody. Our city cops can pull out the darts on their own, but these were county deputies, and they have to have a paramedic pull em. So we yanked the darts out of the guy and they stuffed him in a cruiser and took him off to jail. Tasers are awesome...

Then we were called out for an unconscious woman. We follow a protocol for treatment, and if we run across an uncon/unknown, we give them Narcan, (In case of drugs), and Dextrose, (In case of low blood sugar). It turns out that this lady was both an insulin dependent diabetic, and she had a prescription for Oxycontin, (narcotic). This is what we pieced together. Looks like this lady took Oxycontin the night before and passed out in bed, unfortunately for her, she had about 5 pillows under her head which tilted her head too far forward, cutting down her air supply. She laid there all night and became hypoxic, which caused her to become tachycardic. That then threw her into Congestive Heart Failure causing her lungs to fill with fluid. After we gave her the Narcan, she became more aware, but then became anxious because she couldn't breathe, (because of the CHF). We did all the right stuff for her, but before we left the hospital, they had her on knocked out and on a vent.

The best run of the day though was this one. We had a lady that was sitting in her car, watching a fist fight between an ex-husband and her boyfriend. Don't know what started the fight, but here she is watching it from her car... Oh yeah, she also had her 8 and 10 year old kids in the car with her, one of whom is the ex-husbands kid too. At some time in the fight, the ex stood up, pulled a gun, and shot. He missed the boyfriend, but hit the lady in the car right smack dab in the side of the neck. She realizes she's hit and takes off for the hospital, with her kids still in the car. She got within a mile of the hospital and hit a pick-up parked along side the road, then hit another car, and then almost hit some poor guy mowing his lawn. Both kids and the lady managed to get off with just a few bumps and bruises from the wreck, but you should have heard the phone call I had to make to the ER to let them know we were coming in with 3 patients.
"Hi, this is Medic 11 and I'm just letting you know we're coming in with 3 patients from a MVA. I have 2 children, minor injuries, blah.. blah.. blah.. Oh! and I have one female with a GSW to the neck."
"Did you say a gun shot wound to the neck? From a MVA?"

We got her into the trauma room, they wisked her off to surgery, I heard later that she'll be just fine.
She told us several times while we were on our way to the hospital "I've never been shot before" and all I could tell her was "Nope, me either". Today, only one of us can still say that.

It's all fun and games,

until someone gets an eye poked out.. Isn't that what they say? I haven't seen a poked out eye yet, but we do manage to have a good time around the engine house. I've seen Backdraft and Ladder 49, and even Rescue Me on tv. Backdraft was a little over the top They'd all be dead by now running into burning buildings with no masks, turnout coats flapping in the breeze. Rescue Me was somewhat realistic in the fact that most of the stuff they talk about has probably happened in an engine house somewhere, sometime. Ladder 49 is as far as I'm concerned, pretty much dead on, except for inside the fires. Although, I understand that because it would be a pretty boring movie if they ran in a house and the screen went black because you can't see through the smoke. The scene where Joaquin Phoenix has his first fire gave me goosebumps because of the way they captured it. Scared but wanting to do everything right so bad in front of the other guys that you just tear in, all jumpy and rushing, trying to get the job done. That was an excellent scene. The other thing that the movie nailed was the practical jokes around the engine house. THAT happens constantly.

My first day at the firehouse, I was warned to always bring a couple changes in uniform. It is a common practice for somebody to be lurking on the roof with a 5 gal bucket full of water, waiting for someone to walk underneath. Let me tell you, it'll almost drop you to your knees if they hit you good.
I've seen guys hit with mashed potatoes, cake frosting and biscuits. I saw one guys roasted chicken turned the prettiest shade of blue, which wouldn't have been half as funny except he was so upset that he locked himself in the watch office to sulk for a while. I think the chicken still tasted fine...
We had a guy spend the night cutting 4x4's to length so he could jack up cars in the parking lot and set them so their tires were just off the ground. He worked all night on that one, only to be discovered at the last minute.
One guy was such a pain in the ass to everyone else, that he ended up with a dead fish stuck in the heater duct of his car. It probably wouldn't have been so bad, except he drove it home in the morning, parked it, then left for a 2 week summer vacation. He called when he got home begging for the location of the fish. His wife never rode in the car again.
It was common to tell an explorer or another firehouse visitor that spent the night with us that it was his "job" to wake up the district chief at midnight and remind him to take his medicine. The chief was pretty good natured about it, one explorer was so upset when he found out that the chief didn't take medicine that he never came back.
Plastic tumblers make a God awful sound when they're thrown into the bedroom in the middle of the night. So do china plates when they're spun on edge on a tile floor with the PA mike laying next to em. They'll spin for a long time...
Firecrackers thrown into a bathroom while you're on the toilet will literally scare the shit out of you.
There have been guys duct taped to a chair and set in the front yard under a sprinkler...
"Blue Boy" magazine subscriptions that no one signed up for, at least that's what they say.
The list goes on and on.
The only thing off limits in an engine house is our bunker gear. The guys like to play hard, but when the time comes, it's all serious. Everyone goes home at the end of the shift.

.. minding my own business...

Never, and I mean never just sit around or walk down the street minding your own business. Evidently there are a group of evil, nasty guys out there that hate that and will shoot you for it. I don't know how many runs I've been on when I was told that "I was just sitting there minding my own business when a guy jumped out and shot me". Last night was no exemption. There was a poor guy sitting in his own, pay by the hour, motel room "minding his own business" when two unknown guys stormed his motel room and shot him in the head. For no reason at all! Maybe they thought he'd be loaded with money so they thought he'd be an easy mark... But wait, this was in a kind'a seedy part of town. The guy didn't even have a wallet, not even a shirt on his back. The motel is a rat hole. Known drug and prostitution area... I think if I was robbing easy marks, I'd head up to the ritzy hotel @ a mile up the road. The poor guy evidently didn't have enough money to eat well because he was about 5' 10", 130 lbs, bone skinny. He did evidently have enough money for the 4o oz beers that he'd been drinking that night.

I know I write this tongue in cheek, but it does amaze me how many times I've heard this. Maybe I'm profiling, but I doubt this guy was just spending a quiet evening at home. Either he tried to short a prostitue or drug dealer. Lucky for him, they must have been trying to hit him in the brains.. I think he may have been a little short there, or they had bad aim. The bullet entered @ 1" in front of his left ear, and exited right above his right cheek bone. This dude was awake and talking when we arrived. It looked to us like the bullet passed through his sinus cavity and out the other side. He was bleeding out his mouth and nose, and at one point tried to blow his nose to get the blood out which would have been ok, except he blew blood out of the hole in the side of his head. We asked him not to do that anymore.He even complained about how rough the medic rode while going to the hospital. I told him that most people that have been shot through the head don't have a chance to complain about the ride. He quieted down some after that.

His tattoo/teeth death index was high. I'd have to say a good 8 of 10, lots of tattoo's, few teeth.

Sorry for the lag in posting, my last duty day before this one was pretty boring. Just more cold and flu sprinkled with diabetics. Prior to that I was at Disney for vacation, but hell, you knew that, you were probably there... the rest of the entire world was.