Baby Steps

Not many things scare me. I'm not trying be Johnny Badass but its true, I don't scare all that easy when it comes to reallife events. Fires, explosives, diving. When I was a cop I had a subject threaten me with a claw hammer. He was a good foot taller than me and had a few pounds on me but I just told him. "Fuck you, pal. I don't get paid enough for this. Put that down before you do something you regret." See, a real Bullit, right? Just trying to say I've seen alot.
But kids, babies, little people, hell even midgets scare the bejesus out of me. I was once taking care of my girlfriend's little cousin and she wanted to be picked up. Now, I've never held a real kid before so I just picked her up like a football. She promptly asked "You've never held a little girl before, have you?" Later I was holding her baby brother, surrounded by pillows and a special padded ring to add an extra layer of baby drop protection.
Back when I learned childbirth procedures as a first responder, I was terrified. All I had to do was basically catch and help the EMTs. Now, I'm the EMT. I have to be able to reach up inside the birth canal and manipulate the fetus so he/she is no longer choking or ingesting his on meconium. I have to cut the chord, ventilate and treat the newborn.
My previous experience with babies included lots of pillows and a tutorial from Colleen, my girlfriend. Now I have to be able to move around, sans pillows, with the newborn. I have to make it breathe and live on its own, all while calming the mother.
I decided long ago that when the mother of my children gives birth I will be in the waiting room handing out fine Cuban cigars. It took a lot of string pulling but I managed to arrange to have my children birthed in a fifties TV show. It was going to be just Swell. Now I'm learning how to clip the umbiblical chord, not cigars. Hell, I can't even use the same piece of equipment.
Of course I'm kidding, I want to see my children born and we all know Cubans are illegal because Castro is a dirty Commie. But I am trully, and honestly, afraid of delievering babies. The vast majority of births will go off without a hitch. The baby instinctually knows how to twist and turn himself in order to propperly allign for what my instructor termed "the Life Louge". Drummed into to every baby ( in some sort of testicular flight school I imagine) is how to move itself in order to exit. Armed with this innate knowlege, the only help the baby should need is support and some suction to clear his airway.
But some babies slept through the lecture on how to twist their shoulders and upper body, some come out feet first. Some poke out an arm first. Other problems can occur such as the baby sitting on his chord or wrapping it around his neck. All of these are multiple life threatening conditions. Both mother and baby are in danger of injury or death when the baby does things that its not supposed to. Since I'm usually first on scene, its my job to move the baby around and keep him from hurting himself and his mom.
I have to be able to move the baby into the right positions.
I don't mind big people, or fire, or big people on fire. But babies scare me. Maybe its because they're so little and they have so much ahead of them. I want to be able to help them and make their transition from womb to world as easy and safe as possible. Hopefully I'll be able to do it and do it well because thats what the baby needs.

Frogman

Trying to work out your no-decompression dive table when you're dead tired is an aquired taste. As a public safety diver, you'll need to work out your tables at any time, usually its two in the morning, snowing, and you have to walk to the dive site up hill, barefoot over broken glass. Well you get the idea. Anytime, anywhere.
So, after a slew of mock tables, we all gather around the table to take our final exam. The test was a review of the most important diving lessons we learned. Every fact drilled into our heads was on the test. Including no-decompression tables. Great for a guy who just barely past high school math.
We filled out our international information cards, in about a week or so after our open water drills we'll be mailed a photo ID giving our rank and an international serial number. If I want (or need, if my dive unit is ever loaned to a foreign police service, yes it does happen) to dive anywhere in the world, I can.
After all the paper work we suited up for our pool final. Previously in the week we had done a drill called the Bermuda triangle, notrious for washing out dive candidates. Three instructors arranged themselves in a triangle about forty five feet away from each other. Each stayed underwater with his gear on and held out their emergency regulator. The idea is for a candidate to swim from each instructor, underwater sans scuba gear and not surface. All the while we have to exhale so as not to damage our lungs. From the first instructor to the first corner wasn't so bad, I managed to arrive with just enough air left in my lungs to clear the regulator with one good blow. After a few breaths I moved on to the next corner, my air was lagging about halfway through but I toughed it out and nearly bowled the poor guy over in my effor to grab his reg. The trip to the final corner, known among washouts as "The Bitch" was the worst. About halfway through the swim I was totally out of air. Now at this point, most candidates surface and fail the drill. They have the oppurtunity to re-test twice and then thats all she wrote. There was no way in hell I was going to be that close and blow it, or in the case of my lack of air, not blow it. So I powered on, I've been free diving before, it happens. I could feel myself cramping up, my body wanted to spasm me to the surface, suck in lungfulls of air. My brain won though, I drove until I had the regulator in my mouth and took the sweetest breath I've ever known.
Actually, I sucked down about 800 pounds of air in a little over ten seconds. Thats usually about ten minutes worth of air. I was taking so much air the instructor tore the reg away and pushed me to the surface. I passed the Triangle on my first run out.
The pool final was somewhat different. We had passed all of the really hard stuff. I breathed with or without a mask. I held my reg fully open and sipped little bits of air in ten feet of water. Tonight we had to doff all of our gear while still breathing and then re don it. Under ten feet of water.
The procedure is a lot like re donning a ScottPack, something I was trained to do for the fire department. It is, however, slightly different underwater. All of your movements are exagerated. The purpose of this drill was basically to see who would panic.
I stripped off my weight belt and slapped into my right hand. My left undid my BC and slid the entire unit around in front of me so I was looking at the back of my tank. I breathed steadily the whole time, it was nerve wracking but not all that bad. Again my dumbass Coast Guard self training was coming in hand. (Apparently having a screw loose is a good thing.) So with the whole righ infront of me, I scoop it upside down over my head and let the vest openings slide over my arms, I slap the tank into place where I want it and tighten the belts. Game over right?
My primary regulator hose was slid under the vest, I had missed the instructor stealthily move it into compromise. So I spit it out and blow my air bubbles, going for my emergency reg. He moved that one too. Now is when the panic starts. I felt it building in my throat, bile threatening to escape. Calmly I blew out my bubbles and redoffed the whole unit. When I grabbed my regulator, I was treated to the second sweetest breath. Re donning my gear was not as bad when the hoses weren't moved and the instructor gave me a little underwater clap and the OK sign.
Our instructors had done all this before. Some of them had even experienced it in real life. Chris, our head teacher had been diving since he was a boy. He'd lived all over the world and made a name for himself as a wreck/salvage diver in Asian waters. Once while exploring a sunken Japenese destroyer at 100 feet, he doffed his gear to squeeze through a kneeknocker door. The gear got free, tearing the regulator from his mouth and plumetted four decks below. So now, without air, 100 feet under, he had to search for his tank. Lungs bursting, he found it wedged under what was left of an old bunk room. Everything they were teaching us had real life applications that could save our lives.
After everyone completed their panic and gear drills we were all sent to sit on the deep end of the pool, up against the wall. Both instructors gave us the OK sign and a round of underwater applause. Then they swam over to each of us and shook our hands. Firm handshakes underwater. Since we couldn't talk to each other it was all in the handshake and the eyes. You could see they were proud of us and feel it in their grips. Its strange but that was a very moving experience. These guys who made their living underwater (one instructor had nearly thirty years of international experience) were welcoming us into their elite club.
With four open water dives, scheduled to be at Fort Wetherill, my old stomping grounds I'm now a diver. Dropping down under the waves without air is a hell of a rush and I can only imagine what it will be like when I get down their with enough time to play around.

Halfway There

EMT school is half over. Last Monday was the mid-term exam and a slew of practical labs that had me backboarding and examing my classmates. The mid-term was a 150 question test written in the vaguest terms possible in an effort to confuese EMT students.
Oweing to national standards 70 was the minimum passing grade, which proved to be to high for several of my classmates. They are no longer eligible to test for their EMT license upon graduation but may stay in the academy until completion in order to study and improve their chances should they choose to reattend.
Watching some of my classmates fail out was bittersweet, these were people that I had worked with, trained with--but all the while I had known they were not up to the stress and fatigue of emergency service. It was hard to see them go but I knew it was for the best. The classroom is an ideal condition, everything is controlled. If the students who failed had problems in a pristine environment, the field would have froze them at the wrong moment.
The purpose of the intensity of EMT school is twofold. One, EMT training is, by nature, an intense and trying expierence-- the job itself is a very nerve wracking career. And two, emergency situations are stressfull, so EMTs and responders need to be acclimated to the stress they will be experiencing on a daily basis.
Unfournately, the stress of this type of training proved to be too much for several of my classmates. As much as I am pained to see them leave, it's better for them to find out that they can't perform these skills in a classroom than on scene.
Seeing the empty seats upon return to EMT school will be difficult, but at the same time I'm very proud to still be there. The EMT patch is worn on the right shoulder, while the department patch is on the left. Those without EMT have a bare right shoulder, they're not lazy or any less firefighter but those who have EMT, especially after attending the rigorous Roger Williams EMS Academy, wear that patch on every uniform shirt they have. A lot of time and study went into earning that patch, and a lot is yet to come.

Off The Deep End

You're not supposed to breathe underwater. The entire time you're going under, you're brain is screaming at you to hold your breath. But, when you scuba dive, holding your breath can lead to an overexpansion of the lungs. The air in your tank is at the same pressure as the water around you so when you breathe in a lungfull at 60 its really twice the diameter of a lungfull at sea level. If you ascend with that much, your lungs can pop like balloons. With that in mind, I depress the button on my BC and do my damnedest to continue breathing normally. I guess I suceeded, as my lungs are still in working order. Dive school teaches you how to plan for and overcome nearly every problem that can occur in the water. What to do if you run out of air, loose your mask, your regulator blows open and you watch your air piss away, you get lost.....you get the picture. My class consists of six firefighters, myself included and a teenager whose father wants a dive buddy. Firefighters from anywhere in the world will automaticaly gravitate toward each other and after a few minutes we determined who the probie was and started giving him all the shit jobs. In an effort to make the teenage Sean feel like one of the guys I asked him to be my dive buddy. He's a thin little stick figgure of a guy and I'm pretty big so it was a Laurel and Hardy match from the begining. We practiced what to do if our masks became inundated, basically look up and blow out your nose. After learning how to maintain vision we got on to how to breathe off of each other's systems. Remembering to constantly exhale, as to not blow up my lungs, I grabbed Sean's emergency regulator, cleared it and took a breath off of his tank. We swapped several more times to get the feel for it and then practiced sharing the same regulator. Puff, puff pass, puff, puff, pass. Really, two breathes, pass. After going through our diver in distress senarios for the evening, the instructor let us goof around underwater with what was left in our tanks. He showed me how to use my tongue to blow smoke-ring style bubbles toward the surface. I laid on my tank on the floor of the deep end and blasted rings toward the surface and then grabbed emergency regulators from buddies. After breathing off of a ScottPack, I was prepared to breathe out of a Scuba bottle. What I wasn't prepared for was loosing my mask underwater and being able to breathe without vision. Even though its one of next week's drills I decided to tear off my mask underwater and practice remasking and clearing. At first, the sensation of breathing with water swamping your face feels alot like drowning. Having practiced Coast Guard Drown Proofing Training (binding hands and feet and swiming from the deep to low end with no snorkle/mask gear ) I wasn't as panicked as one would expect. The initial shock wore off and I remasked. Of course the face plate was full so I just cleared as usual. Underwater operations are not for everyone, any kind of claustrophobia will induce panic. Looking up at the shimmering surface can cause vertigo. And then theres always that little, almost insignificant fear of drowning. All can be overcome (although I strongly urge you NOT to do the Coast Guard training that I put myself through as it is dangerous and upon retrospect, not all that bright) but in the words of Lt. Mike Dexter, Smitfield Fire/Rescue: "Divin', its not fer everybody. Ya know?" Picture that oh so articulate phrase coming from a dimunitive Jewish man weighing little more than 130 soaking wet. Then think about the fact that he's one of the most highly trained underwater rescue/recovery specialists in New England. The training is intense, even for the entry level I'm going for but its certainly worth it. Eventually I'll have my Public Safety Diver certification and my PADI (international) Rescue Diver with Search and Recovery, but for now I'm having a blast just learning how to breathe underwater.

Silent Guns and Murky Waters

EMT-Basic class takes up a good chunk of my time, so when I have a chance to go out for a day on the water. Last Friday I managed to go kayacking and free diving off of Jamestown with my brother. I loaded up the Tahoe and put in from Fort Wetherill, an old Navy/Marine Corps. emplacement from WWII. The diving was exceptional, if a bit chilly. In retrospect, I should have probably worn a wetsuit, but the cold keeps you sharp. The water was a bit murky from an excess of silt and choppy conditions from the storm I was racing. The horrizon was one long raised bruise, bloated with the coming rain. Jamestown offers a lot of trully amazing views, particullary of the bridge with the Naval War College in the background. The main view I was interested in, however, was from the top of an enscarpment outside of Fort Wetherill. Because of the water conditions, beaching my boat was a bit dicey. I had to ride a wave up onto a beach of smooth rocks and jump out before the undertoe pulled the craft back out. From there, my brother and I went climbing on a rock face that lead to the highest point of the cliffs surrounding the old fort. We were able to watch as the fog burned off at the begining of the day. From there we paddled out of the relative safety of the harbor and into the channel for a run toward the bridge and Jamestown Harbor propper. A massive aircraft carrier swung at anchor with at least two 25 foot Coast Guard security boats, complete with bow mounted M-60 machine guns. After watching two gigantic ocean going tugs manhandle the ship into position, we beached on a private club dock and went diving under the structure of the dock. Visibility was cloudy but the rock and debris garden under the wood pilings was an impressive collection of stones and glittering bottles. Overall, the day was a well needed break from EMT and the stress associated with medical training.