Good News!!!!

Praise the Lord for good news at the doctor's appt yesterday!!!

My friend's child does not have cancer, although the symptoms are still not explained and they do not have a diagnosis to fight and get angry at.

Back to regular blogging this next week.

Please keep my friends in your prayers

I rarely do this but I am worried to death and since I have readers all over the country and the world I figured that more prayers can't hurt.

Some friends of mine and their young son have been through hell and are almost back.

Please keep them in your prayers--they should have more answers by the end of this week.

Thanks.

When the rescuer becomes a patient

We had just left the station and our truck smelled really badly like exhaust. It was raining so we cracked the windows a tad and turned on the air conditioner. About 15 minutes later, I started feeling really sick to my stomach and my partner had a really bad headache. Neither of us had eaten that day so we stopped to get food and get out of the truck for a bit.

When we got back in the truck to go standby, I felt more and more sick and my partner noticed that my lips were turning white and my the skin on my face and arms was getting mottled looking. She called the supervisor and we went back to the station. I promptly ran to the bathroom and puked my guts up.

One of the supervisory people asked what was going on and we told her. She ordered me to lay down and told me to put on an oxygen mask or she would do it for me. I passed out in the truck for about 15 minutes with a NRB strapped to my face. I got up much peppier that I had been earlier, still nauseated and feeling ill, but much better.

We figured out that they had been doing maintenance on another truck and ours was running while they worked on the exhaust and changed the manifold on the other truck. All the exhaust got sucked into our unit and BAM! we wound up with carbon monoxide poisoning.

Friday night, I felt awful and sucked a few more hours of o2 down before going home. At dinner, my date said that I seemed "off" and he said my eyes rolled back in my head a few times and I skipped a few beats, but otherwise, he said I seemed ok. Yesterday, I felt like I had a hangover but I hadn't been drinking at all. I still felt a little "off" but otherwise I was OK, I guess. Today, I woke up feeling great and back to normal.

This is just a friendly reminder that we, as rescuers, are NOT invincible and are at risk for the same illness and injuries that our patients are. I was lucky. I could have gotten much sicker. Fortunately, I had an astute partner who saved my butt from a much worse fate.

From the archives of my EMS brain

I am trying to be better about blogging. I know that I will fail miserable if I commit to once a day, so I'm going for whenever I can remember.I have a couple to write about Medic school that were requested but other than that, when I think of something to blog, I'm going to do it!

Here, for your reading pleasure, from the archives of my EMS brain:

I had been an EMT basic for about 3 months, working in a small transport company out west trying to get my feet wet. I loved my job and was still a little (ok, well, a LOT) idealistic about how EMS worked.

We were dispatched one day to the large trauma hospital to transfer a patient to another hospital for an inpatient stay. We arrived at the ED and the nurse looked over at my partner and the trainee (both men) and said to me, "I am glad they sent a female." For a minute I was a little stunned because usually I was ignored for the boys, but ok if she was glad to see me, then so be it.

"Your patient is a 72 year old female who lived alone in a townhouse. She had someone doing some odd jobs for her and some gardening and the like. 4 days ago, after she thought that he had left, he rang the doorbell and said he forgot something. After she let him in, he barricaded the two of them in the house, locking her in the upstairs bedroom. For three days, he drank all her alcohol, destroyed her house, and viciously raped her. He cut her phone lines so she couldn't make a call for help. He stole all her money and beat her."

I couldn't believe what I was hearing. This lady was my grandmother's age and I nearly had a fit thinking of someone doing that kind of thing to my granny.

The nurse continued, "She begged him to let her go and he would just laugh at her and hit her again. By some grace of God, she managed to escape when he finally fell asleep after binging on alcohol for 3 days. She went to the neighbors house and they called 911. When she got here, she was beaten, bruised, and broken."

With disgust, she also said, "He even bit her breast and took a chunk out of it."

Well with all that, I was about ready to burst into tears. I put my happy face on and steeled my resolve to make her feel secure and safe while in my care.

I listened to her and told her that she didn't have to say a single word if she didn't want to. I held her hand and let her talk. I hope that I showed her some compassion and love.

After we dropped her off, I was beyond words. I am not ashamed to admit that I cried for her. For the sweet woman whose sense of security was shattered. And for the loss of my EMS innocence that day.

Somedays, I fell like a total ass...

Without too many details I told a friend last night that I needed a break from our friendship--that I had to heal my heart and soul from the inside. Blah blah blah...

Today in the mail, I got the sweetest card and gift to help me through a rough time.

Sometimes, I feel like a total ass.

You know what really makes me sad....

We went to the local hospital for Veteran's yesterday to transfer a patient.

The nurse taking care of my patient had to leave for a family emergency so she turned over all her patients to another one who clearly hadn't even gone in to look at my patient at all. She didn't know his baseline mental status, she couldn't tell me his history, and didn't know really anything about him.

We walked into the room and you could hear audible gurgling coming from his trach. He had recently had several very large strokes and had the trach for airway control. She had told me that he didn't need any suctioning but it was clear that he did. I wound up suctioning him several times before we left and then had to dc his IV because she didn't know if it was going with him or not.

I ended up having to provide deep tracheal suctioning all the way to our destination and learned more about this patient by reading his discharge summary than the nurse could tell me.

Not only did this sweet man give of himself to serve our country but as a Veteran and a patient, he deserves caregivers who know all about him and can appropriately take better care of him. And someone who risked his life to defend the freedom and honor of our country by serving on our armed forces deserves the best medical care that can be provided. It makes me angry and very sad that this is how our vets are treated on a daily basis by facilities that are supposed to excel at taking care of them.