Really Getting In There

In the winter months, people tend to have a lot more accidents. Ice makes surfaces slick which doesn't go to well for people walking and driving. The volume of calls for my department has gone up considerably since the snow fell.
Just the other night, I was the only one working a 6-11 tour durring a training exercise on electrical hazards. A call came through for an elderly male who had fallen on ice and was bleeding profusely from the head. My deputy chief offered to ride with me and the two of us arrived on scene in a little under seven minutes. The whole houese was dark, the lights from our truck illuminated patches of eerie black looking blood stained snow. Of course, the interior of the house, when we finally did get in, was cramped and dimly lit. A man was sitting on the toilet in the bathroom of the darkened house, a once white towel was now purplish black from the blood it was stemming.
His wife was nearly in tears when I asked her to leave the restroom to give me room to work. I immediately removed the towel to reveal about an inch long gash oozing a steady flow of dark blood. I slapped on a trauma dressing and held it in place while my chief found a kling bandage to wrap it off with. Soon my fingers felt something warm and I realized he was bleeding through about an inch of gauze so my chief tossed me another one to slap on top of it. By that time the paramedics arrived in their ambulance and were hauling a backboard into the tiny hallway. Since the guy fell down there was the possiblity of a spine injury and he needed to be immobilized, plus it would be easier to carry him out than to have him stumble and limp out on his own.
When we finally got him packaged, bandaged and boarded, we had the pleasure of carrying all 270 some odd pounds of him back out of the house and down a flight of icy stairs. At one point the medic helping me carry him slipped and i was forced to catch the boarded patient on my thigh, leaving a swollen red line.
After getting the injurded man squared away, we headed back to the station and were just sitting down for some videos of "stuff getting fried" when the tones came through for a CO exposure. It was in an area known as the maze, for its twisted and tangled street paterns. Our response for a CO call includes two engines, the tower and my unit for the night, the Squad. Upon responding, we found the entire family complaining of flu like symptoms and exhuastion, they had been suffering from the flu for a week and had seen a commercial for a CO detector so they immediately thought they were dying.
Performing a patient exam on an austic 18 year old boy is not an experience I had been looking forward to. Thankfully, the boy was only mildly autistic and did not recoild when we performed our initial exams. After running CO meters through the entire house, we confirmed our original thoughts, that the family was still under the grasp of the flu.
In an attempt to build up my experience as much as possible, I have secured employment with New England Ambulance Service, an EMS unit down in Rhode Island. I'll be working 24 hour shifts with the ambulance and random shifts with Holden. All I have to do is graduate and I'll be able to do the job I love fulltime.