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.
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.
posted by Nick Stabile at 8:26 AM
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