Patients and Recovery

I was eighty seven years old, I took Viagra and Nitroglycerin and then called 911 when my chest felt tight and I had trouble breathing. I was also a blazing mysogynist who took one look at the female EMT and told her to go back to makin' babies and pie.

Playing the patient is fun.
Some skills are best practiced on living, breathing and in my case bitching human beings. Just in case your wondering the part I was playing was not my idea, Joe the instructor told me I had to be an old man who hated women and the propper ailments.

So I'm telling Linda that I don't want "No young wippersnapper, and a woman to boot, to touch me in a medical way." When Linda tried to take my radial (wrist) pulse, I'd swat her hand away. When she finally did get my wrist I told her hand was too clammy and calloused to be that of a woman's . For one minute she broke character and laughed, telling me I'd fit right in prison.

All of the annoying things I did were not because I secretly wish to be an eighty something year old asshole (Although.....) but to make the scene more realistic. I've been on calls with patients who acted like saints and patients who acted like Peter Rubulov the Seventh, yes I created a fake name and funny yet touching backstory for my elderly woman hater.

Assessing a patient is hard enough on a dummy, theres an awful lot to remember. Its even harder when the patient becomes annoying, scared (wouldn't you be?), combative, or any of the other lovely things that people become when they are faced with mortality.

We each take turns being assessed, strapped into a collar and onto a backboard. All of us are dressed in MAST trousers, a device developed in the early days of the Vietnam War. Its purpose is to raise one's blood pressure by forcing all of the blood back up toward vital organs.

I've only been on the patient end of pre-hospital emergency care once, for a severe allergic reaction. Since I was not a trauma patient or a BP risk, I've never been strapped to a backboard or wore a collar. Being a patient was a new experience for me and it gave me a new look on patient care. Even in a classroom, when the procedures were fake, I was getting nervous. The collar and the backboard are very restrictive, the trousers feel funny. I have a new appreciation for what patients go through.

It all made me think of my friend Hender. He's back at his home in Rhode Island now, and will be for the next year until he is transfers to the Newport Naval War College for a position as a Marine Adminstrator.

He's got a long recovery ahead of him. Mobility specialists, Bayada Nurses and other experts poke and prod him nearly everyday.

The day after his return, we got together like we used to back in high school. Instead of cheap ass Chinese food we had steaks and beer from the BBQ in his back yard. We swapped war stories--- my latest fires and patients and his actual war stories. He told me about how he and his buddies were taking pictures one minute and engaged in a firefight the next minute. At an old bunker they were clowning around when they heard the ulations that the suicide fighters make before they attack. Being good marines, they charged into the bunker and got into a brief but brutal gun fight with a group of terrorists.

He says simply, with a hint of disbelief. "I killed 'em. All of them."

The lives he took were to perserve his own, and the lives of his squad mates. He's a hero and his only reward is a Purple Heart he doesn't want and scars he doesn't deserve.