Another Attempt

I'm rotating through my time out of Station One, the station that houses our other ambulance and nothing else. At Station One, the two firefighters are on the ambulance, no cross manning an engine so when you go there, you know you're pretty much on the bus for your whole shift.

I'm on a thirty six hour shift which will then become a forty eight when we can't find coverage. The tones come through for a "Signal 21" which is dispatch's code for an attempted suicide. Had it been a sucessfull suicide, it would have been a "Signal 22". JT and I respond and take a student with us, the student is a 50 something year old woman who'd worked as an RN for a while and now was going to work as an EMT, supposedly.
The chief and several volunteers are already on scene including one of my favorite vollies of all time. We'll call her Sal but shes a cesspool truck driver who has been volunteering at the fire department for years. She was there when it was two seperate fire departments, two different districts. But Sal is one of those women who just exudes competence, she's calm no matter what and pretty much everything is met with the same attitude "Okay, yeah we can get this taken care of."
Sal is with the patient, a 60ish year old female who had taken 20 sleeping pills and some booze. While M, another volunteer who I like, is taking vitals and the chief is trying to figgure out how to get the patient out of the house, Sal gives me a quick run down in that no nonense, no bullshit this-reallydoesn't-impress-me tone of hers. The patient is pretty much fine, she's in and out of conciousness and this is one of many many suicide attempts.
My student is fumbling around with the O2 and puts a non rebreather on the bottle, cranking it all the way up.
"Woah, woah, she don't need that. Use a cannula." Just to be an ass I pronounce it "canoola" and the nurse turned EMT fumbles the cannula out. We end up carrying the patient down the front steps in a stairchair and I slip on a patch of wet cement, its raining like a bastard, the chief grabs my shoulders and forces me back to my feet before any damage is done.
In the truck I have the student take all the vitals and I try unsucessfully for an IV more times than I care to mention here. The woman's pressure is in the toilet so she goes into Trendelenberg with her feet raised and her head lowered to try and boost her pressure. Because I really have no idea whether she took more than just the sleeping pills I hit her with .4 of Narcan to see if it'll improve her at all. It doesn't and we end up BLSing her to Concord. She's sinus brady at 50 or so on the monitor and I really wish I had a line so I start looking at her neck for an EJ.
Even in Trendelenberg her jugular's refuse to dialate enough for me to see them and I'm not really in the mood to do it by palp (nor do I feel confident enough to get the stick if I try it) so we just screw to the hospital.
Once there we dump her in one of the rooms and the nurses do their thing. I still haven't found out about the outcome.

Growing Up

I've had a lot of different dreams and aspirations as to where and how I should proceed with my career. One of the highest aspirations I have is to be able to go out on a fire crew to fight the big fires in the Western United States, in Canada and up in Alaska.

On June 6th I was supposed to take my pack test, a forty five minute hike with a forty five pound pack for a distance of three miles. Practice had become a way of life with both a fifty pound pack and a forty five pound weight vest. As I said before my White's SmokeJumpers are perfectly broken in from Walt's saddle soap idea and simply wearing them for hours on end.

Unfournatley, a lengthy discussion with my wife about our current financhial situation and all of the work that needs to be done to the Vermont house convinced me that seeking a position on a wildland crew this year would be impractical. The deceision was ultimately mine to make as my wife would have supported me even if it meant she'd need to take overtime shifts or get a second job. Her schedule is three overnights a week, 36 hours but since she works as a vet tech, she's not able to sleep like I can on my overnights. So her internal clock and cyrcadian rthyms are all out of whack.

It came down to "Do I go on the wildland crew and maybe make enough money, because of a deployment, to move out of Manchester and into our dream house? Or do I do the safe thing and stay, work my regular shifts at the fire department and get a third job?" I had already spoken with my uncle, a house painter in Exeter, and he said that he could give me extra work this summer. A town run ambulance was also looking for paramedics. So it looks like I'll be home with these three goobers.

When I sat there and thought about it, practicality won out. I need to be in New England in order to do work on the house, it needs to be ready by January. Being out in the greater wilderness of America, while tempting and certainly a lifelong dream, would not really be benificial to moving out of an apartment complex that is basically a baby step above the projects.
So this summer I will be painting houses, hopefully bolstering my income further by working for a small town's ambulance and, of course, working for the fire department.

My wife knows that I have always wanted to do the wildland fire thing, I almost left college my freshman year in order to move to Truckee California for a job that would have had me working as a firefighter/paramedic doing structural firefighting as well as wildland. At the time I had stayed because of a girl, who in the end was not worth it or the four years of my life I had given her. But if I had left I never would have met my wife. So everything happens for a reason.

By staying in New Hampshire for the summer I can get all the work done on our house, I can work extra jobs and I can hopefully start putting some money away. Next April I will take the pack test, nice and early so as to not have to worry about getting things together at the last minute.

Just for the hell of it I had put on my forty five pound vest and boots and timed myself on a three mile course similar to that of the Forest and Lands crew. At 40 minutes and 12 seconds I had finished the course.

Tatters and Onyums

Everything seems to burn when I'm not on shift, it burns just enough to give the duty crew and the call company something to do but not enough for me to get a call back out of it.....

We'd been going to his house since before I'd gotten hired. He was an old, stubborn man who had been taking Lasix for his heart failure for years and refused home oxygen, prefering to call 911 when he woke up most mornings with trouble breathing. The fire department would show up, give him a few hits of O2 then he'd tell us to leave and sign a refusal.
After DC and I had put the ambulance back together after a car accident, we were finishing our paperwork up at Concord Hospital. The tones come through for a cardiac arrest at the address we have all been to at least once. Since we're twenty minutes away, we start the next town, we know they have a medic on today as they were at the MVA. For good measure, the chief of a second town takes several of his fire department's live in students and signs on to the scene. Five people to work a code should be sufficient but since it is our town we hit the lights and scream toward the scene, I curse the fact that I am still wearing bunker pants from the MVA.
En route the chief confirms a working code, the cops had been on scene first doing CPR and using their AED with no shocks advised. When we finally end up there, I find that there is blissfully nothing for me to do except hold an IV bag. The medic from next door has the patient tubed and is pushing her ACLS front lines.
"Hold compressions," I tell the student and watch as the CPR ripples on the monitor flatten into asystole. "Okay, continue." The kid goes back to pushing on the old man's chest and the line wiggles again.
We push two rounds of Epi, two rounds of atropine and continue to work the code for 25 minutes.
The cops tell us that the man had forgotten his Lasix up at his camp site somewhere in Maine. His wife had driven up to get it and come home to find him laying motionless in the chair. When the police got there, she'd been attempting to perform CPR with her husband still sitting upright. The cops hustled her out of the way and dumped him unceromoniously on the floor in order to try and get his heart going again.
In the end we determined that he wasn't coming back. He'd been down for an unknown period of time and our efforts had produced nothing to indicate he was capable of beating his own heart or taking a breath again. We took a sheet from the ambulance, draped it over him and told the family there was nothing more we could do.
I snagged an envelope marked "Publisher's Clearing House" and used the information on it to fill out my report. The table I rested the ambulance lap top on was really a cupboard that someone, presumably the dead man or his wife had handmade and carved "Tatters and Onyums" into the top of. For some reason, despite not knowing the man, I see this and want to cry.

Upside Down...For A Bit Anyway

The past week has been fairly crazy. We bought my wife a Volvo from a guy her parents know in Southern Mass. Nice guy, trustable and reliable according to her parents and he was. Is. So with the new car we go and gather a bunch of plants to transfer to the house we'll be moving to in January. The plan was to get some brush cleared off and plant some rasberry bushes and some blueberries.

All that goes fairly well except for me falling on my ass and nearly sliding into the woodshed.

But on the drive back, the house is in Vermont. The Volvo starts to sputter. Not good. After two minutes of sputtering, the car dies in the middle of New Hampshire 101 in Peterborough. We push the car off into the shoulder and pull out the two totes we had used to transfer the plants to Vermont and sit down. We go through the motions of calling the inlaws to tell them the car died. Mandy's mother in a stroke of sheer genious (no sarcasm, really) signs us up for AAA on the spot and gives us the activation number and all that.

We end up waiting about an hour for a tow truck to come pick us up. Three people stop and ask if we are okay, well one drove by and just yelled "YouguysokayorshouldIstop." At 70 miles an hour. The ambulance I used to work for in Manchester goes flying by and I assume the crew is headed to Monadnock for some sort of an "emergent" transfer.

Eventually the tow truck guy shows up, stinking of weed with eyes as red as Christmas decorations. The two of us manage to get the Volvo onto his bed truck and secure it. He thanks me profusely, saying "Its hard to do this alone..." and stoned. Its getting dark when he drops us off at a closed auto body shop in Temple. We end up calling my wife's aunt, who lives an hour away in Brattleboro, actually the former owner of the house we will be living in, and asking if she can come pick us up.

She drives out as its getting dark. When she arrives its pitch black and I have taken to annoying my wife by pulling out my Zippo, firing it and saying "Look, I'm a politically correct lawn jockey."

We drive back out to Vermont and stay at her apartment, I fall asleep shortly after the Wendy's Baconator burger and fries with a shake that she was nice enough to buy me. Keep in mind by this point I am filthy from brushing clearing and planting, covered in grease from helping the tow guy and probably smell like something out of Satan's asshole because it was close to 80 degrees all day.

The next morning I get a hold of the guy who sold us the Volvo and he agrees to have one of his guys come up and tow it back to Mass and fix it, all at his expense. See, I told you he's a nice guy.

By this point my Jeep is still in the shop with a bad seal on the gas tank setting the engine light off so we rent a tiny Mazada or some Asian something or other and drive back to Manchester. Luck was on my side as my cell phone rang telling me the Jeep was ready. So we picked that up and ditched the rental.

Originally the point of this article was to show a few pictures of the house so as to document the progress of our renovations. But I figgured this story was just too good not to share.

O and by the way, the Volvo is fixed, it was just a bad spark plug. We are probably going to pick it up on Saturday. Just in time for me to go back to the firehouse......