Rainy Sundays

Usually my Sunday overnights are fairly quiet. A difficulty breathing here, a trauma or nursing home fall there. Occasionally I get a decent call but usaully, well its Sunday ......
Last night had to go and be the exception to the usually easy shift. Last night started with a diffculty breathing that turned out to be dramatic new onset Congestive Heart Failure. (Fluid backing up into the lungs and therefore causing difficulty breathing) Mr. CHF had ankles the size of basketballs, a sure sign of poor fluid movement. His lungs sounded like a water park and his skin was ashen.
Time to go.
Rain slicked roads made the normally easy shot from Warwick to RIH in Providence a massive pain in the ass. As did an 18 wheeler that decided flashing red lights meant jack on the breaks in the middle of 95. In front of said flashing lights.
We pushed Lasix, a diuretic that should pull the fluid out of the lungs and help our boy breathe. It did but he pissed all over my stretcher and the back of my bus. After transfering him to a critical care room I set about cleaning the peepee from the back of my truck with a spray bottle of bleach and a towel that was last washed several days before Nixon resigned the presidency.
After ensuring that my truck was urine free and smelled somewhat better, we drove back to satelite and tried to get a few hours sleep.
My partner, Dave, starts hacking and coughing due to the humidity and agrees to sleep in the day room on a couch instead of the bunkroom. Five minutes after he leaves, he comes back telling me we have a guy in Kent who needs to go to the cath lab at Miriam. A twenty to thirty minute drive sans rain and tonight its like Noah's Ark.
Our guy is upstairs in Kent's Critical Care floor hooked up to so many pumps we have to pin them to the stretcher and cary the extras. Kent has yet to unlock the magic of the pocket pump, a glorious device the size of a CD man. This guy has a thick accent so his words make very little sense to my sleep deprived brain, along with the fact that he can barely breath because of chest pain.....his skin is steel gray. Not good at all. As we rush him down to the bus with a nurse, he decides to pull out an IV and covers himself in Heparin thinned pinkish blood. Tearing through the emergency room we pass a 2o something covered in blood and vommit projectiling his expectorant across the room. Despite having a guy who has that "code smell" of too much triponin, I manage to slap a firefighter I went through EMT school with on the back and call him a fag.
We get our guy in the bus and beat feet to Miriam. Our guy goes into VFib, a useless death rhthym that means the heart is basically quivering. My partner grabs the paddles to shock him and has them jellied before sighing "O thank god....." For some reason our patient snapped back into a blood circulating beat.
Finally after litterally running this guy to the cath lab we clean up the mess made in the back of the bus. Again I am playing Martha Stewart with a bottle of bleach and a newer, cleaner and whiter towel. The rain still comes down in humid, choking sheets as we try to figgure out where to get more electrodes.
Once we get back at satelite I decide to lay down and no sooner do I have my boots off then I have to go back to Kent for a man with a massive skull fracture.
Upon arrival we find Warwick's drunk shaking and bucking violently as a nurse screams "We need to tube him!" repeatedly, in his drunk, drugged out state he is lashing out at whatever moves so I jump on him and hold him down while they push Ativan and shove a tube down his throat. We board him, collar him because if he broke his skull, he could have broken something in his spine too. His dope wears off and he starts spazing again. I get upset and just mutter "Oh, fuck this!" and use an abandoned backboard strap to loop his hands down with a California love knot, all while trying to soothe him by telling him to relax and give over to the tube, let us do the work for him.
Half way to the trauma center he goes into full on repitory arrest, pulse skyrocketing as a brand knew respitory tech doggedly bags him. On arrival, the RT is in awe of RIH and as we wheel our guy in I noticed her hands have stopped squeezing the bag.
"I've never been here before.....its huge."
"Squeeze" I tell her, politely to no avail. "Squeeze" I repeat, politely again but to no avail. "Honey, squeeze the fucking bag."
"O right, " she continues the breaths, her little lapse not long enough to cause any issue. And again we get a critical care code room. Finally it stops raining and cools off to some degree. Although how long our semi decent weather will last is really anyone's guess.