Jonny

For the next ten months, my brother in law is going to be in Iraq, serving as a combat medic for the 772nd Military Police Company. He's 20 years old and has worked for a few years as an EMT at Fallon Ambulance in Boston, MA.

This Christmas was our chance to was the last pre deployment visit home he had before shipping out. Jonny is a good kid and a good brother in law. He got me an ice luge at my wedding, so we're close. In all seriousness though, Jonny is being shipped to one of the worst and most inhospitable places in the world in order to practice emergency medicine on our troops under the worst conditions.

A few times in my career I've been scared for my life, a roof would come down on top of us or a car would almost hit the truck. But for the most part when I put on my uniform it was always with complete conviction that in 24 hours it would come off again and I would be home. I've worked in some less than pleasant locales where violence was a real problem but never a warzone.

The next ten months will undoubtably be very trying for Jonny. He's worked hard to master all of the training thrown at him in boot camp and combat medic school. He has some experience in trauma from his job in Boston. He's leaving behind his girlfriend, a medic assigned to another company that he met durring his training. She has dreams of becoming a nurse after her enlistment is up. Jonny wants to work as a firefighter like his grandfather. The military will greatly increase his chances of hire at just about any department. His EMS experience won't hurt either.

It hit me while we were sitting around the dinner table on Christmas that Jonny was leaving. My in laws are devout born again Christians and they pray....a lot. But their prayers are always toward something, not the hollow words I knew from my Catholic upbrining. Hearing the prayers of Jonny and my father in law really hit home the fact that he is going to be leaving and is going to be placed in real danger. There were some tears, okay more than some and more than a lot because we love him and we're going to be very worried about him.

We ended up watching Stepbrothers, quite possibly one of the funniest but stupidest movies every made. And for those two hours, Jonny wasn't going to Iraq. He was laughing, joking and enjoying himself, like the burden of the coming months wasn't there.

When I met my wife we ended up marrying fairly quickly. The wedding was a beautiful one but it was one that was under the gun of Jonny's leaving. A few times the topic of Jonny's recruiter, a Sergeant from the MA National Guard, being invited brought my wife to anger. Both of us are dead set against the war. I don't think we should be in Iraq for a myriad of geo political, socio economic and legal reasons. But that doesn't change the fact that someone we love is going over there. I can be against the war all I want its still going to happen. And Jonny is still going to be there.

I don't want to pretend that our family is the only one going through the nervous experience of a loved one going into a combat zone. Thousands of families across America get to experience this with us. They have their own loved ones in ther service doing their thing in Iraq and Afghanistan. Unfournately that thought just makes it worse for me. How many people are feeling the pain of the unknown in regards to their loved ones? And how many more will have to feel that pain?

This isn't a political blog and it never will be. My views are so liberal that I don't think a party would ever accept me, my wife tells me I'm a step above an anarchist but lets be honest, they really have too many rules. I don't believe in the war that we are in right now and I never will but I know that people we love are "over there" and risking their lives for something they believe in. Jonny is going to be one of the ones taking care of them, providing life saving care for them should something happen. I may not support the war but I support them.

While I'm not religious I will have Jonny and our friend JD, an MP he serves with on my mind constantly for the next ten months. Both are young men who for their own reasons decided that the army was the correct path for them. My thoughts will be with them, my positive energy stored and sent for them. I ask that any of you that read this blog keep them in mind and if you pray, pray for them and all of our brothers and sisters, sons, daughters, mothers, fathers and friends in uniform. Like me, you can be dead set against the war, but know that the people over there are all someone's loved ones and deserve the hope that we can hold for them.

At the end of my father in law's two page prayer for Jonny, he said simply "Jonny, Godspeed."

Godspeed Jonny, come home safe.

House Interupted

The prisoner had just started hemoraging from all orifices when the guards were about to take him back to deathrow. They'd been trying to figgure out what had been giving him seizures and all of sudden he started to suffer severe abdominal pain. He was bein rushed to surgery
Then the tones drop "Lakes Region dispatching Ambulance 2, abdominal pain with constipation, Alpha Level at XXXX."
I sigh, I'll never know how House solves the case of the deathrow inmate with a rectal bleed.
Its snowing like crazy and another one of our frequent flyers has decided that at 10 of 2200 she needs to be seen in the emergency room. Because her last bowel movement was unsatisfying.
The four wheel drive ambulance slides and sputters all over the untreated roads as we respond to her house. Her son's very nice, very new four wheel drive diseal F 350, devoid of plow, sits in her driveway. I restrain the urge to yell. "make him take you!"
Shes waiting at the door in her coat with an overnight bag packed.
Our ride to the hospital is uneventful aside from the fact that it took twice as long because of the snow. The nurses laugh at me because I have my bunker pants on, but I'm not getting my feet soaked and cold.
As soon as we are pulling back into the firehouse we get banged out for a chimney fire on automatic response two towns over. We beat the second due vollie company on scene and their "district chief" tells us to stay with Engine 2, our truck, while his companies "assess the situation". No smoke, no fire, we go back to the house without leaving the truck and I sleep until 20 minutes after shift change.
Not all that bad for a massive snow storm but what in God's name was wrong with LL Cool Jay that made his character so sick.....?

Done Waiting

The snow finally started to fall about fifteen minutes into the only call I've done thus far.
We got toned out for a headache, charlie level, which basically means that the headache could be a symptom of something much worse, like a stroke.
It was cold when we pulled the bus out, happy to get away from the firehouse after spending most of the day trying to fix computer issues that cropped up durring the ice storm. Needless to say I was out at the work bench in the apparatus bay trying to do anything but fix computers. Instead I spent the time making various inexpensive forcible entry tools and drinking coffee ( we wonder why I have kidney stones.....)
A huge Shar Pei was pacing on the upper lawn of the woman's massive farm house. I of course instantly wanted to go play but my partner and the shift captain kept me in line so into the house for some EMS we went.
Fifty something years old and otherwise in good health a fairly decent looking woman with a paige boy haircut was sitting on a barstool and shaking at the kitchen table. The captain starts taking a history as my partner gets the back of the truck read. I go through a quick assessment and find her vitals are within the normal limits. She starts wretching so we give her a hand getting to her sink. Bile comes out but its nothing special. She sits back down and then we end up carrying her down to the truck. I feel a few flakes here and there but its not to bad.
Once I'm in the back she goes on the monitor and I see a normal pattern. A 16 goes in her left AC followed by ketrolac for pain and Compazine for vomiting. '
As soon as we hit the main highway, the snow opens up like a blizzard and the normally 20 minute drive to Concord stretches to a little over an hour. We end up turning the lights off because all they do is freak out other drivers. Besides, the patient is asleep now that her headache has been fixed.
And now its out to shovel the baydoors.

Waiting

The snow is set to start falling in another few hours, we're supposed to get hit pretty hard too. The last storm after the ice debacle dumped about six inches on the town prompting us to get called out for everything from a doctor's appointment to several roll overs.
Today I'm sitting at Station 2, my usual assigned house and waiting for the fun to start. It's bitterly cold out, just around 10 degrees and the sky was bright red on my drive in this morning. I grew up on the water down in Rhode Island so the old adage "Red sky at night, sailor's delight, red sky in morning, sailor taking warning" is never far from my mind.
And whenever it does snow, people tend to panic, 911 is dialed more frequently and what people would normally consider no big deal becomes a life threatening event. I don't mind though, I am paid to respond to calls and thankfully everything I have had to deal with since the ice storm came through has been fairly minor.
A frequent flyer with advanced end stage global cancer needed to be taken into the emergency room because he was too weak to stand and his muscles were sore.
A snow plow operator rolled his personal vehicle and suffered no injury, the car was even in such good shape that he wanted to drive it off once it was righted.
A seventeen year old girl somehow lost control of her car and slammed into a teacher's vehicle. Both cars were totaled but the drivers were seatbelted so both claimed no injuries. The longest part of the call was waiting around with the state troopers for the tow trucks to clear the road.
But now we wait, already a few residents have stopped into request that we check up on their neighbors should we lose power again. A good deal of people have just flat out left the town and went to hotels in the city so as to be away from the area when the storm hits.
On another note I did polish my boots, I've yet to try Mike's remedy of baking soda but tomorrow begins my five off so who knows?

Stones and Ice

I'm usually only up at 0545 when I have to go to work. The town I work for is just about an hour away from Manchester so I'm up at 0530 in order to get there by the start of my 0700 to 0700 tour. And today is one of my off days.
So why am I up this early?
Was there some great and wonderful surprise that roused me from slumber that was just too incredible not to blog about right this minute? Was there a recall at the firehouse? Did my pager for the hospital go off?
Nope, the kidney stone I have been carrying around for a little over a month decided this morning was the perfect time to send my right side into blistering pain and force me to take the dreaded Hydrocodone. I really don't like taking narcotic pain relievers because they make me loopy and a bit out of it.
Ketrolac, a marvelous NSAID usually works wonders buy my doctors refuse to perscribe it because of the frequency with which I am blessed with stonage. Long term use of Toridol (another name for Ketrolac) can lead to kidney dysfunction, which makes me wonder if they have missed the past three years of my life.....aren't the kidneys already dysfunctional?

But thats enough of my problems.
As I'm sure most people have seen, New Hampshire was hit by a massive ice storm over the past week. The night that it hit I was home in Manchester with my cats and not due into work for another two days. My wife was at her overnight shift at the animal clinic. I was in the middle of my Kelley Week and as such I was sitting up late after having finished watching a scary movie. I had decided to have a cup of tea and play a little bit of a Nintendo game with Navy SEAL frogmen that my brother in law, a combat medic for the 772 Military Police Company in Taunton MA let me borrow telling me "its the balls, its really fun." I had just brewed a nice cup and figgured out how to make my sniper rifle zoom in when I noticed the lights flickering.
This should have been a sign of impending fun not involving digital commandos.
Instead the entire city of Manchester and a good portion of surronding Goffstown and Bedford were plunged into darkness. My cats were immediately terrified enough to dart over and snuggle into my lap.
Because of the pension for the power to go out in NH and the fact that I learned a lot from my brief four month stint in CubScouts, I keep a MagLite by my easy chair and I grabbed it and turned it on. Everything seemed fine so I turned it back off and took a little nap, thinking the power would come on again fairly quickly. About an hour later it did and I went into the bedroom and went to sleep.
I woke the next morning at around 0730 or so to my cellphone ringing.
"Hello?"
"Nick?"
"Yeah."
"It's Captain XXXX. Come on in for a rapid recall. I know you live in Manch so drive careful. The roads suck and the entire town is without power. We also need a medic. So does Pittsfield. "
I told her I would be right in and took a quick shower and shaved. I threw on my uniform and grabbed a warm fleece to wear over my sweater and under my bunkers, layers are always good in 6 degree temperatures.
To say the roads "sucked" was an understatement. Untreated tarmac stretched from Manchester north. I joined a convoy of utility trucks with Rhode Island and Connecticut license plates and followed them up through a now dark Concord (state capitol without power is never fun.)
The scene at the firehouse was one of barely controlled chaos. A disel engine chugged in the back giving the building power and cars were parked litterally everywhere. Inside the chief and a groupd of select men designated the "emergency service committee" had taken over our kitchen table and the chiefs from several surrounding towns were there chiefing and trying to coordinate evacuations. Dry erase boards were set up with notes about road conditions and the status of various elderly residents scribbled on them.
I grabbed a cup of coffee and found the on duty LT. He gave us a briefing about what was going to occur. Apparently a lot of department members from our department and surrounding departments were out of state on vacation (it is the end of the year and all that earned time adds up) so I would be the only paramedic for three towns. We ended up staffing our ambulance, Ambulance 2, with me and a single role EMT from the town next door. I took all my bunker gear and tossed it in a back compartment. If need be I could meet the engine and ladder companies on the fireground.
For most of the morning we stayed at the station fielding phone calls from concerned residents and helping to fill water jugs with our garden hose. Most people in town have electric pumped wells and found themselves with no clean drinking water. I spent a good portion of time trying to find military cots at the local boy scout camp for a neighboring town's emergency shelter being set up in their high school.
We got toned out for a chimney fire and ended up taking care of it fairly quickly. A few elderly residents needed to be removed from their dark and cold homes. We ended up taking a chain saw from the forestry shed and I was dispatched with the Pittsfield guy, a kid named Kyle, to cut downed branches from vital roadways with highway department crews. We went to a house being run off of a generator for flu like symptoms, the people living there thinking they had CO poisioning, forgetting that they had the symptoms before they started their generator.
At about 1900 I made it back to the station long enough to have a chicken salad sandwich and a cup of stale Red Cross coffee. We spent a good portion of the night knocking on doors and helping residents get their cars out of branch choked driveways.
Come morning I got a partner from my own town and we were promptly banged out for a difficulty breathing in a house that I could see from the pad at the firehouse. When we got there a thin version of Grizzly Adams was sitting in an overstuffed chair surrounded by a pride house cats and several small yappy dogs. His gurgling and bubbling airway was clearly audible from the front door.
With the help of the engine company we scooped him out of the house and brought him to the back of the ambulance. I grabbed a girl from the engine and we took him into Concord. Thanks to Lasix, Nitro and Morphine along with poor man's CPAP (basically bagging the patient in order to blow the fluid back out of his lungs) because I always forget we actually have CPAP, he was pink and happy by the time we got to the hospital prompting the nurse to ask "And he was status two on your patch....why?"
On the way back into town we stopped for breakfast at a Dunkin Doughnuts, grabbing bagel sandwiches and iced coffee because it was now a down right balmy 8 degrees outside.
Back in town we were sent out on ground and pound, knocking on doors and talking to residents.
An elderly couple living in a really cool German ski lodge style house complete with the gingerbread looking outside and a wood stove upstairs waved us down. I went to check on them while my partner went next door to tell the neighbors that the propane heater they were running in doors needed to not be run in doors.
The old man was sitting in a highbacked chair in a World War 2 era field coat with a combat engineer badge on the sleeve. He had a multi colored fleece stocking cap with bells on the tassels on his head and a Beagle sitting on his feet.
"I was trying to clear some ice off the roof and I felt like I was going to pass out so I came inside." A glass of milk and a shot of whiskey sit on the table next to him. "I figgured whiskey with a milk back would fix me up but the first one wouldn't work so I'm doin' another one."
I run through a quick exam and advise the man he should go to the hospital. He refuses and downs his shot and then takes a long pull from the milk. The dog licks my hand and his wife offers me a sandwich in thickly German accented English. I tell them to call back if anything changes or if he feels worse, they agree to do that much and I am back out in the cold.
After eight more hours of door to door the chief relieves us and sends the ambulance back out with another crew. My bunker gear is set up next to Engine 2 and the monitor, medic drug box and a first in bag from the out of service Ambulance 1 are thrown in the behind the cab tool box of Utility 1, a pick up truck with four wheel drive but no heat, I will be on intercept duty so long as we don't get a fire. I spedn the next 12 hours answering phones reassuring residents that all is being done to get them power, giving them dirrections to the multiple emergency shelters that are set up, and explaining that they cannot have fire department generators for their houses. Basements flood when pipes burst and they call for us to pump their basements. Years ago the fire department would do that but now they have gotten wise and refuse because the trash that accumulates in basements is murder on pumps.
I intercept with the town to our north on a chest pain. IV, O2, monitor, Nitro and Morphine. Transport to LRGH and head back to town.
Eventually I am recalled again and I spend the next day knocking on more doors, talking on more phones. In one phone call that brought the entire station into roaring laughter I had to use the phrase "No, ma'm, diahrea is not traditionally a symptom of CO poisioning." I jump on the engine for a tree on wires call. We stand around and watch the energized wires jump and dance until the power company shuts them off. The branch smolders and smokes and as soon as the lines or powered down we hit it with a water can. No sooner do we clear from that call than we need to meet the ambulance for an evacuation of a bed ridden morbidly obese woman.
Downed branches are covering her driveway so the chain saws come out and we clear a path. My turn out boots stick to her floor as we help the two intermediates covering Ambulance 2 while I'm on the Engine, wrestle her onto the cot. They transfer her to a shelter and are soon back in service.
I finally make it home to find that my wife has bought a pot roast the size of a small dog. I fall asleep without even taking my boots off in my recliner. When I wake up to my wife shaking my arm, the roast beef is warm and pink in the center, the stick of butter with a little bit of mashed potatoes around it is sitting in the meat's juices and a generous dollop of beraise sauce is waiting for me on a a plate. A very cold Sam Adams, the box is living out on our balcony, is forming condesation next to it. I wolf down the first plate and follow it with a second, cleaning both with crusty Portugese rolls. My wife's a good Irish girl who grew up on the South Coast of Mass so she knows the value of Portugese bakeries. She had also been thoughtful enough to bake up some gluten free brownies complete with chocolate chips and rum filling. After two of those I am promplty asleep again while she knits and watches Jon and Kate Plus 8 reruns.

So that was my ice storm experience. A weather alert was just issued for a severe snow storm to hit within the next 48 hours. By this time tommorrow I will be on my way to start my 24 hour tour. The snow will probably fall and cause more havoc. I might even get rapid recalled again. But at the end of it I can come home, have a nice dinner and a beer. I can sit in my chair, I can see my wife and know that I work hard but I love what I do and I can provide a good life for her and our pets.
Now I really must be going because the pain relievers have kicked in and its getting harder to type coherent sentances without typos.......

The Trouble and The Stinky

My wife calls this picture "The Trouble and the Stinky", a very adequate description based on the fact that the cat, Keeley (ancient Celtic for little warrior) is currently trying to climb out our third story window and the boots are fermenting by our credenza. She's younger than the boots by about five years.

When I was in the fire academy I was told I needed to get steel toed boots or I would be ejected. So for Christmas my family bought me a pair of side zippered steel toe and shank boots that I have worn ever since.

Over the years those boots have been through a lot. I have kicked them off haphazardly in an effort to get into bunker pants more times than I can count. They have trouped through the blood of the dead and dying, they have been vomited on, pissed on. Their steel toes have saved my flesh ones from certain destruction at the hands of countless falling objects ( I drop a lot of stuff).

They've rarely been polished, in fact the only time they were polished was for my academy graduation. Rarely I zip the sides of them, although while evacuating residents from the town I work for they were zipped tight for warmth. They have taken me into grungy disease infested houses for overdose victims and into cushy mansions for the same. They have taken me into the backrooms of people's apartments and buisness for stroke victims. I have rapelled off of buildings in them and climbed into pipes barely large enough for my shoulders to pass through. They have kicked in doors and stood as a brace for the stretcher on an incline. And everytime I start an IV, the stillete falls to the floor of the ambulance only to be covered by the right boot, waiting for me to pick it up to get a sugar from the blood in the flashback chamber.

These boots have been filled with shaving cream by fellow firefighters, glued to the floor and when I worked in Manchester tossed into the ambulane bay by a fellow EMT because they smelled so bad. No amount of odor eaters will ever cut six years worth of sweat but these boots will stay on my feet until they fall apart....which reminds me that Righty (he likes when I call him that) needs a new insert.

I used to get threatened with demotions in the academy because they were never shined. Now as I look at them I wonder if I should break out one of the countless torn shirts I make my wife keep as rags and buy a tin of boot black......

Stupidity and Boredom

"People just don't understand that about 99 per cent of this job is bullshit." When I was in paramedic school one of my fellow students uttered those words. And to this day I have not found a better description for the feeling that grips me occasionally.
I first picked her up on Thanksgiving night at around 11 pm. Her "home healthcare worker" was nervously on the phone talking to a 911 operator while the patient, a 71 year old woman sat in bed in no apparent distress.
"She can't breathe!" Amy Alarmist yells as she hangs up with 911.
I look at the patient and see that she is breathing just fine with a nasal canula in place. "Hi, hon, I'm Nick. What seems to be going on tonight?"
"She can't breathe," the woman says again.
"Can you step out for a minute please?" I ask the caregiver, getting a bit annoyed as the patient is obviously breathing. She's pink, shes warm, shes happy.
"No, take her blood pressure."
"Be quiet and let me do things my way. " She simmers down.
The woman on the bed tells me she has had Parkinson's for over 20 years, shakes wrack her body fairly regularly. She asks for more oxygen so a I put a non rebreather on her at 10lpm despite her O2 sat being at 99 on the canula. I ask the woman what she would like to do and she says she doesn't want to go to the hospital. When I move to take the non rebreather she tells me to leave it in place, she needs it.
"Then I have to take you to the hospital."
"Why?"
"Because I can't stay here all night and give you oxygen. "
She gets a bit pissy and asks "Why not? Shouldn't you be here to take care of me?"
I start to try and tell her that I cannot stay and then decide its better not to try and explain the inner workings of emergency service to an asshole.
We transport her to a different hospital than my fire service favors because the people at Concord Hospital are "not very nice and they don't take care of her there." the home healthcare woker states.
On the way into the hospital the woman refuses a 12 lead, tells me not to give her an IV and allows me to take only one blood pressure because "it is uncomfortable."

I saw her again yesterday at about three in the afternoon. The CNA from Hell was on the phone with 911 again, all up in arms because the patient was having trouble breathing. Dispatched at Delta level, the Lakes Region Fire Dispatch code that means an imminant life threat, the only higher is Echo and that means that life has stopped.
When I walk in the CNA tells me. "She can't breathe and her chest hurts. She devloped a rash two minutes ago."
I nod and ask the patient whats going on. She states that her Parkinson's is acting up and she doesn't want to go to the hospital. She tells me she's had the rash for two days. I do an assessment and find that all of her vitals are not only within normal limits but they are also in the healthy end of the spectrum. Her rash seems to be heat related as the room is close to 95 degrees and when we open the window she does a lot better. She vehemently refuses an ambulance ride stating that she will be at her doctor's the next day.
Her CNA demands to know what is different about the oxygen condenser on the floor and our oxygen bottles, telling us that if ours are better than we need to leave one. I repress the urge to tell her to fuck off and describe how both of them provide the same amount of oxygen while the patient signs a refusal.

Five hours later I am back in the woman's bedroom. The CNA, who apparently never leaves, is just hanging up with 911 tells me that the woman can't breathe. Again she is breathing just fine and states she doesn't want to go to the hospital. "Her chest hurts in here." The woman pushes on the patient's abdomen and the patient says "No it doesn't."
This time she's going to the hospital. I'm not playing the press three buttons and watch the circus show up game. She refuses to be carried down the stairs and insists we put her in her electric wheelchair which she promply destroys a section of the moulding of her wall with. After piloting the craft for five feet, she springs up and walks outside, sitting on our stretcher. She refuses IVs, 12 leads and won't let me do a blood pressure because it hurts.
Her CNA follows us to the hospital in the patient's van, driving with four way flashers going as we instructed her not to do. Again we have to go to a hospital well outside of our area because the "people at the other one don't do anything for me."
In an effort to find out just why I need to take this woman to the hospital I ask her what is going on and she states that she feels "Like my whole body is a board." When I aks her what that means she states she doesn't know and when I ask how long its been going on she tells me that she's felt like this for 20 years. I ask her why she called 911 and she tells me that the hospital won't help her and I shoudln't take her there.
Too late, we're about fifteen minutes away now.
She gets mad that I put the pulse ox monitor on her finger and takes it off, telling me to leave her alone that she doesn't even want to be here. When I ask her if there is anything I can do she tells me that she has no problems other than the Parkinson's and that she wants them to fix her medication. She asks me why I didn't just stay at her house and give her the "good oxygen that my caretaker (the asshole in the van) tells me is better than mine."
The caretaker is waiting at the hospital and follows us in. I pull the nurse aside and tell her the whole story. At some point a social worker will sort this whole mess out.

911 is set up for use by people with emergencies. But what constitutes an emergency is up for debate. Some people only call 911 if they are on death's door and even then they don't want to. I once went for a med call on a guy who had been sliced from naval to neck by a shard of glass, he worked as a glazer and had droped the piece he was trying to fit into a window pain, he ended up being LifeFlighted to Boston, from the scene, for extensive trauma surgery. He stated he was going to drive himself to the ER but his boss wouldn't let him-- the guy seemed annoyed that he wasn't allowed to drive himself. My dad cut his finger off and drove himself to the hospital where it was sewn back on.
Thats the glamorous part of my job that shows like Third Watch and Rescue 911 (old school but you know you love the "Shat") publicize. What they don't show you is that the vast majority of people who dial 911 do so because they are bored. Pushing buttons on your phone will magically make a group of people appear with red lights flashing and all sorts of interesting questions to entertain you for an hour or so. People with nothing better to do have made a habit out of dialing 911 and stating they have a horrendous complaint and in reality they are healthy enough not to need emergency care. But when they call for "help" a bunch of cool things happen, even their neighbors get in on it, coming out and poking around, standing around and watching, some even walk up in the house prompting me to ask "And who are you.....? What's your purpose.....?"
Then they are the stupid people. CNAs who call for non emergency non events go into that catagory. 911 stands as a great shining hope for anyone who can't figgure out how to turn off their TV (an actual three AM Charlie level call I was sent on for a person "with difficulties.") people who took a dump four hours ago and saw that it was blue, people who have an itchy tongue for three days and my personal favorite a patient who had her appendix out in 1975 and states that it hurts again.
Emergency service workers, myself included, love their jobs because they allow us to make a real and immediate difference in people's lives. And that's the draw to this line of work. Deep down all of us have ADD and being a teacher or a preacher or a social worker or whatever is just not immediate enough for us. I know that when I push D50 on a diabetic with a sugar reading LO on the gluc they will become concious again, when I open up an Inch and Three Quarter on a roaring stove fire, it'll knock it down. So the reason I do my job is that I like to fix things but society has too many problems that can't be fixed quickly. Stupidity and boredom leading to misuse of the emergency system is one of those problems that unfournately will not be fixed.
But despite the fact that 99 per cent of my job is bullshit, I have that one percent that makes it all worthwile. Like the chimney fire in Strafford that got me back into the red stuff after five years off of Holden. Theres very little better than crawling through a smokey house with your buddies on a hoseline and tearing the place apart in an effort to put out a fire. The smoke smell stays in your gear and when you've got that coat on at three am for a person who stubbed their toe, the smell registers in your mind and even through the annoyance at being woken up for nothing, you think "Eh, its not so bad."