Escape, for a bit

Staying inside has never been one of my strong points.

Outlet or Cabin Fever Ramblings

Jonny has been released from the hospital at Balad. Army doctors are insisting that he live in a tent next to the hospital itself as they want to be able to monitor him for the next seven to ten days. He will need to have fairly regular MRIs.
I haven't had the chance to talk with him yet. He called his father and they spoke for a little while about how he feels upset that he wasn't able to help his buddy. JD called shortly after and the conversation touched on how they want to get out there and find the insurgents who did it and take care of them.
But for at least a week, Jonny is in the relative safety of the Balad area.
JD called my father in law as well. Apparently the mood in their area is that they want to get out and "take care of" the insurgents responsible for the attacks. When asked if it was "a revenge thing" JD stated that it was a safety thing. This group of guys has been lauching little commando raids on American troops for a while. Unfournately the death of Jonny's buddy is just one of the many lives they have taken. So for the safety of everyone in that area, they do need to be dealt with.
I'll try not to get all intellectual about the whole thing, this really isn't a political blog.
Instead I could talk about how excited I am to be using the crock pot to make BBQ pulled beef. (In case you can't tell the FD has been exceedingly slow lately) or about how I interviewed for a side job this morning at a certain Catholic run hospital in the city I live in.
The God is Great and You are Not Hospital staffs paramedics to work in their emergency department. Medics work side by side with the nurses and doctors at close to the level of field work. The only differences being that medics are not allowed to intubate or start EJ (external jugular) IVs in the emergency room itself. Since the program is in its infancy, there are still some pretty large loopholes. The medic functions as a member of the in house crtical response team, basically 911 for the hospital. When the medic leaves the ED, he or she is allowed to perform those skills not allowed on the ED floor. In addition to that, there is some more in depth training involving psychological emergencies and a few new medications and procedures to learn.
I'm not really sure if I'll get the job. Its rumored to be very competive, but we'll see. Its right down the street from where I live and the pay is supposed to be really good. Certainly would be nice to suppliment my meager public servant wages.
But thats not the real purpose of this post, I've come to realize that I need this blog, probably more than any of my readers do. In high school and well into college I wanted to be a writer. My family seemed convinced I had a talent for it but I never really thought it would go anywhere. When I started college I was a journalism major but I sooned realized that all that degree would really get me was four years of debt. Unfournately a degree in English/Education produced the same result.
I started this blog because I needed an outlet for what was going on in my life. My girlfriend of the time was not someone I could talk to about what I did for a living, she was convinced that I was going to be safely behind a desk teaching Acne incrusted youths about a dead homosexual who may or may not have written plays in the 16th century. She had thought that being a firefighter was a "phase" and that I would grow out of it.
If any of you have followed this blog or at least leafed back through the entries, you'll see that I'm not really one to grow up so things with the first girl didn't work out all that well. But I had this blog as an outlet for my feelings on what I do at work. Occasionally some of my insanely left wing political views will creep in, some times I'll discuss my work out routines or my undying love of Kettlebells. But its the one place I can put all of my ideas and thoughts and people can either take them or leave them.
I met a girl off the internet when I was doing my ride time for medic school. At the time she worked as a vet tech in an emergency center down on the Cape. We had dinner at a TexMex place in Plymouth and ended up walking along the jetty and out onto the breakwall in Plymouth Harbor. A week later I was at work at Fallon in Quincy, actually sitting on post outside the Faulkner when my cellphone rang. It was Mandy inviting me over for dinner.
When I drove down to her parents house I found her outside, barefoot, in the garden picking grapes off of a vine in order to make jam. I wasn't really even out my Jeep when this thing in my head made me aware that she was the girl I was going to marry.
And now we live together in Manchester, she commutes to a vet clinic in northern Mass and I go north to my fire department.
This blog has been a part of my life through the uncertain years of college when I was finding my way and realizing that maybe the easy path isn't the best one. It was there when I graduated college and realized I had to find something to do with my life that I wanted to do. I've always had the outlet of being able to put all of my conflicting ideas and desired out there. And occasionally my readers will give me comments that make me stop and think. Sometimes all I get is porno ads but hey, the little "1 Comment" makes me feel pretty good.
I was watching some reality TV thing the other day and it showed a San Diego Fire helicopter plucking some guy from the beach. They zoomed in on the flight medic and it was a guy who comented on my blog. He's the author of http://flyingvan.blogspot.com/ So I got a kick out of being able to recognize someone on the other side of the country I've never met.
This blog has cronicled my reinventing of myself from teacher to EMT to firefighter to fire medic. Its watched me work in Holden and Providence, Worcester, and Boston. Manchester was briefly touched on. Come spring time it will document my quest for a spot on the New Hampshire or Massachussetts Wildland Fire Crew. (The class starts in April).
The point is that this blog has become a part of my life. If nothing else its a record of what I've done and whats to come.
Maybe I'm getting melodramatic but this blog has been one of the few constants in my life until just recently.
I am at the early twenties, well lets be honest its mid twenties now, phase where I am trying to find where I'm going to spend the rest of my life. One things for sure its not going to be in this city, probably a nice out of the way cabin in Vermont. Hell of a commute but it'll be worth it. I found my wife, a hell of a feat because I'm sure if I didn't someone else would have.
When it hit, the realization that I crossed into adulthood, it hit hard. I have a wife, we're talking about trying to get her a new car, and a house where we can start a family. I've got a little under a year (when the lease runs out) to figgure out how to get all of our stuff to a house in Vermont, a house that will see some serious renovations this summer (her family owns it, so we'll be moving there barring some unmentionable tragedy, like her realizing that I am in fact a big kid and will always be)
And the blog will be there to capture it all. For those of you that read it, keep up the comments and tell your friends, the more the merrier.

Candles

We keep two candles in the window of our apartment. They're the electrical kind that people put up for Christmas. Ours represent my brother in law Jonny and his buddy JD.

Early this morning my father in law got a phone call. Jonny had been medievaced by helicopter to Balad Military Hospital in Iraq afther an attack that happened within the past forty eight hours. From what he told his dad, they were on a patrol in an MRAP, a kind of armored truck that was somehow flipped over. The gunner, was apparently unconcious but had a pulse, When they got out to try and right it, a Herculean feat, they came under small arms and RPG fire forcing them to take cover. In the insuing gun fight, the gunner died.

The team commander was the most serious and as such was flown from Iraq to Germany and the massive trauma center that serves the US military, presumably in Ramstein. Jonny and the driver are being evaluated in Balad. Doctors are trying to determine if Jon suffered any brain trauma and if there is any swelling. The driver's injuries are unknown to us at this point.

From the Email I received from my father in law this morning, I heard that Jon is beside himself over not being able to save his buddy. Its understandable, he is a very capable medic, very well trained and sure of his skills. He's used them on the streets of Boston and now, over seas he's been caring for his fellow soiliders. Its not the same impersonal medicine of EMS where we treat somebody for, at the most, 45 minutes and turn them over to the ED. Jon was alone, underfire trying to keep his friend from dying and unfournately the efforts and technology available in the field were not enough.

I had received an Email from Jon two days ago. On a whim I had noticed he had activity on Facebook so, in the hopes of contacting him I had sent a quick message. His reponse stated that he had "gotten his bell rung a couple of times." and that "Iraq smells like crap, everyone is really poor and they bombard the base with rockets at night." His father told me that kids were throwing rocks at the Hummers as they cruised out on patrol.

So Jon is in an inhospitable place, in a field hospital bearing the grief of losing a friend in a country that is basically hell on earth. I could go on about how much I detest this war and the Aemrican foreign policy that has lead to the injury of another one of my good friends. But if I do that I'll no doubt get Emails from gung ho "Patriots" who think these are necessary sacrifices in order to better the world. And I could say somethings that I'm sure would sound pretty racist about the Iraqis and the Middle East in general, but I won't because I'll get the other side of the fence complaining that I am not compassionate to their feelings and their culture. And again I think of what I would do if a bunch of people I'd never seen before came to my country and told me "This is how its going to be, assimilate." Chances are I'd find Klashnikovs and RPGs too.

And thats what my mind is doing. I feel for Jon, I worry about him. I know I won't ever trully know the grief of the gunner's family. (Out of respect for his family, I'm withholding his name.) I can understand military personell feel a need to finish what was started in Iraq, even if I don't understand why it was started (and please no comments trying to educate me on why we had to invade a sovereign nation, they will be deleted). The scary part is I can even understand the feelings of the guys with the guns that tried to kill him. They didn't see him as my brother in law, my wife's brother. They didn't see him as the guy who wants to be a firefighter and watches idiotic movies with scrotum jokes. Instead they saw him as a symbol of the evil they feel is being pushed on them by a foreign power, threatening what they feel is a just way of life. I don't condone what they did, but I understand it. A lot of conflicting emotions are bouncing around right now. Mostly, I want him and all of them to be home.

When my wife came home this morning at around 0830, East Coast Time, I was just waking up. I hadn't checked the Email yet so we were not aware of the drama affecting our brother in the desert. I heard Mandy fumbling around in the room where the candles sit in the window. She was changing the bulb on the one that I had always thought of as Jon. (It's one of those oddly childish things I do, "This candle is for Jon, that one is for JD.") Apparently this morning the bulb had been flickering, on the verge of going out.

Massachusetts Firefighting Academy Group

I decided to put together a group on face book for alumni of the Mass Firefighting Academy. It's a nice way to find people you might have lost touch with. Always nice to find others who have carried the rope and water bottle. Link is below and I have to preface this by saying it is in no way endorsed, funded or probably even to the knowlege of the MFA itself.

http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=41201390&v=info&viewas=41201390#/group.php?gid=67507037624

The Other Side of EMS

I tried rewriting this four times. I didn't like the way any of it sounded and whether or not I post this is really up in the air.
Initially I wanted to write about the car accident we had coming back from the woman with broken ribs. Both were fairly non eventful calls although I debated a chest decompression on the broken rib lady (didn't do it as positioning her alleveated the problem) and got to break a window to gain access to a minimally responsive head injury victim.
But when I got back to the firehouse I decided it was a good idea to feel dizzy and almost pass out for no apparent reason. My partner, BC, an intermediate put me on the monitor to reveal SVT at around 150, my 12 lead showed a bit of non specific T wave flattening. A 16 guage went into my Left AC and against my strenous objections I was transported to Concord Hospital by my partner and an off duty firefighter called back on rapid recall....to deal with me.
Now for those of you that follow my blog, all two of you :) You will remember that I have been suffering from kidney stones off and on for the past several years. A little gift, shall we say, from my mother. You will also remember when my mother became a patient of mine in the middle of one of her two STEMIs. So with a family history of kidney stones, which I now have, my partner was worried that I also inheritted mommy's heart problems.
I had been drinking water all morning in an effort to speed the passing of my little friend so its possible that the frequent urination may have altered my electrolytes to a level that caused me to slip into SVT. Its not that uncommon but younger people don't usually have the issue. Its also possible that I had a low grade kidney/bladder/urinary tract infection that could have played with other levels and threw me into a funky beat.
So all in all on the ride into the hospital, in my own ambulance, I was not that concerned that it could be a real cardiac event. Instead I thought that they would do some tests and tell me that my electrolytes were off and give me a bag or two of Ringers to make up for it. Instead all of the tests came back clean.
Now don't get me wrong having tests come back as negative for a heart attack, negative for issues of any kind is very nice. I like being healthy and I'm glad that I'm staying that way. I would like to know why I almost passed out and why I started vommitting. I want to know why my T waves are flat. Itd be nice to know what the hell happened.
But after laying in the hospital for eight hours, and being called a horrible patient by the nursing staff.....no one would show me my EKG strips and they took the monitor out of my room so I wouldn't look at it. I did however take my pulse a few times to see that at rest I was hitting 130. A couple of times when I got up to urinate my pulse would bounce back up to 150. The doctor, a cool guy who reminds me of the medical examiner on CSI New York, (he's got those awesome glasses that split at the nose bridge) has no idea why I had my issue. I'm cleared to go back to work, which is awesome because if I had to sit around I'd probably go insane. I just hope it doesn't happen again.
Their only real though on what could have happened involves possible swelling of my inner ear cannals. Or a foreign body such as a pebble or a piece of glass (from the car accdient) that some how lodged its way in there. They put me on Anti-Vert, a medicine that counteracts the effects of vertigo and so far has worked fairly well. Because of the sensation of vertigo, i.e. falling off of a high elevation, the body can sometimes be kicked into strange activity. But there is no real way to test for vertigo other than telling a doctor "I feel like I have vertigo."
The sensation was, in fact, so strange that I didn't even know what to call it. I can only describe it as feeling about six inches behind myself as though everything is rushing past me. It didn't affect my driving or my job performance as it hasn't happened behind the wheel or on a call.
Knowing its not a cardiac issue is nice but not knowing what it is, well thats a bit irksome. It's not that I'm annoyed at a lack of diagnosis, but would have preffered one in order to treat it and prevent reoccurence.