Why Don't You Just Hit More Bumps While Your At It

Week three. Time here is going so fast. I can't believe it. Alright here goes the low down of calls.


Day one call one. An elderly man fall. Enough said. He was Mr. feisty though. He says “why don't you hit more bumps while you’re at it” as you request sir. The roads are just magnificently paved so well here. Call two crazy lady on board, complaining of chest pain. She is asking for nitro but won't let us give aspirin to start with. Also not a fan of letting me do the IV lameee. I keep doing my thing looking for a prime vein and she continues to throw her fit asking if one of the guys could do it. Why is it such a problem for me to do it? Idk. But anyways I poke her and get it so she was throwing her fit for nothing. Whaterr. We establish she is just crazy and take her in. Call three we seem to have just lost gravity today another fall with another lac to the head. No different run down there. [ As I'm sitting in the ems room another truck had come in and I'm talking to that medic and she goes can I tell you a problem I have with one of the BYUI students I say go for it. So she tells her story about a patient she had last week and she went to do an IV and it blew and the patient told her well one of the kids in the blue shirts (aka a BYUI medic student) got it on the first try. I thought to myself well if that's the only problem you have with us we are doing pretty good here! :) ]So we stop and get lunch then get another call for chest pain. We pull into a car wash parking lot and this pt is in the passenger seat just freaking out screaming her chest hurts. So we get her on the cot and in the ambulance hook her up and find that her heart is racing at 226 I slap a 12 lead on her while my medic gets an IV and then we give her adenosine and it converts her to sinus tach. It was pretty cool to see. I had never seen it before. The patient began to feel better but still complained of some chest pain. So initially  the patient was screaming in pain at us but by the time we get her to the hospital she was carrying on a normal conversation. It was a good feeling to know that there are those people who are out there that really do need the ambulance and we are there J So we get a call for unresponsive. We show up and the FD is trying to assess her and she is responsive but barely. We get her to the ambulance and are trying to figure out what is going on we give her some narcan and boy did that do the trick. She was all over everything at that point. I've never had an adult that age act worse than a 2 year old. I asked her to put her capno back in her nose she decided to start trying to snort the spo2 monitor and proceeds to tell me that it is not cocaine. I said no, that is not cocaine but I need this back in your nose to monitor your breathing. The last call of the day was for another fall. I'm telling ya something with the gravity today it's got everyone trippin. Overall a good day.


Day two. So I wake up and Laura just got home and Merritt was still awake. That never happens. So it's really Monday but I forget its Monday and forget there are more cars on the road and so I left a little later than usual an had to wait on a train I was like man. I was also exhausted. So anyways get to work and I'm in the truck just so tired and I fell asleep but then we get a call for chest pain. Naturally. We load that up and take it in nothing too special. Next call was for pedal edema I didn't know you call an ambulance for that but really you call the ambulance for anything these days so we take him in. He requests the heart hospital but we weren't sure how much treatment he will get there I call in report and they weren't too impressed about the complaint of the patient we were bringing in and they hang up. I thought "she didn't even say goodbye" so we show up I give report to the nurse and he looked at me and was like good job (since I'm still new to this) and he asks if I got that 18 gauge IV I said yes and he was like way to go you deserve these and he hands me a pair of blue shears that say air evac life team. Hey thanks I’ll take em. We get back out on the streets end up getting called to a pedestrian who got struck by a vehicle. I start think oh that'll be good. Turns out nothing exciting and she refused transport. I wanted to refer her to an eye doctor because she stated she didn't see the car as she was running across 5 lanes of traffic. Some people’s children these days. After that we get a call to take the pedal edema pt back to his assisted living facility. We get in his room and he states it’s cold and wants the heat on. Me and my crew thought it was hot but he wanted it on at 82 it was already 80 in there so my crew walked out and left me to get the patient in his chair and they tried hiding from me when I came out but really you have a big stretcher you can't hide too good with that. But nice try guys. Next was a transfer, lots of lines and wires to not pull on and get tangled. The next call was for abdomen distention. Excited eh? The patient was way hard of hearing so that was fun. I felt like a retard because I had to yell at him for him to hear me but oh well. So after that call my truck had been cleared for the end of the day. My medic packed up the bag I packed up the cot and we were sitting there about to head back to 41 and at 1818 dispatch goes sorry we need you to respond to this traffic accident. So my medic hands me the monitor batteries to put back in and I'm trying to unpack the cot while my basic decides hopping curbs is the way to go then they cancel us. I was like I did that all for nothing.. What a day.


Day three. So today is just starting off great. I didn't want to wake up and I'm just grouchy. So we are sitting in the truck when a different ambulance got a call for a person who felt a spider crawling on their neck. Wow all I can say is wow! So we get our first call of the day is for abdominal pain or something to that nature nothing too spectacular. Call two was for an assault and the patient had sliced her finger over and made a mess with blood everywhere. She was the only one home with her baby by the time we got there so we ended up transporting her baby with us too and let me tell you he was quite the little cutie. So when we got to the hospital my medic hands me the baby and says have a baby. Awesome I always wanted a baby. Just kidding so we took them in and then left. Next call  was for a shoulder dislocation. That was mainly just pain management and not too much fun for me. He was kind of smelly and then I smelt him the rest of the day :/ no fun. Take a gander on this next call. A fall! You got it. Alright this next one is exciting. Call for constipation! Woot woot. My basic likes to tell me I have small hands and can just fish to help things move I like to disagree and refuse to do any such thing! So we walk in and the patient is on the toilet screaming it hurts so we ask him to pull his pants up so we can get him loaded up. He was complaining of such terrible pain so we did pain management and that’s about it. I was unaware that constipation was something to call an ambulance for, but just these crazy people of OKC I guess. The last call was a diabetic wake up and the patients sugar level was 17, for those who don’t know it should be anywhere from about 80-120. FD was there already just waiting for us so we get there I go straight for the IV and give him D50W and we get his sugar up to 128 but we know our sugar doesn’t last long so he needs to eat something, but he was not answering our questions correctly and just kept sleeping so we had to transport him. But that was a first for me having their sugar so low. He wasn’t combative at all so it was good!

Day four. It’s my Friday! I always love when I can start my day and be thinking it’s the last one for the week. Call one is for an altered mental status and confusion for someone in the nursing home. Well that is usually pretty typical for those patients but okay. We show up and the nurse is just freaking out, she states that the patient is so confused and her oxygen saturation is like 80% and her blood pressure is high, but the patient shows no signs of distress. So we put her on our monitor her sats are 96% and her BP was just a little elevated. Nothing too concerning. But so we transport her anyways and didn’t find anything significant with her. Quite possibly just a UTI. It was a slower day and my medic wanted to stop at the gun store, so we took a look at those guns. I’m thinking I need one! Anyways our next call was for a patient on an airplane that passed out so we get to the airport walk right on through security (im pretty sure that is the only time I will get through that security with as many knives and scissors I had on me). So we are standing at the gate in that hallway thing waiting for this plane to land so we can get our patient. The plane lands and the patient isn’t in much distress she seemed pretty okay for us. They had to make an emergency landing just for her, so that was sucky! But everything is fine for us so it was just a nice easy ride to the hospital. Third call was for vomiting, super! I hate vomit. So anyways my medic looks at me and says go ahead so I walk in as she is just vomiting in the toilet, head in the bowl and everything. I was like man you’re going to have to stop. So I ask her if there is any way we can get her out of the bathroom so we have more room. She goes I need something to puke in so I hand her a bag and she comes out and sits in a chair. She was babysitting at the time so we had to wait for the mom to come get her kid and so I start the IV and she is in a chair I am kneeling on the ground, but she is leaning over and her head is pretty close to mine and she is like about to puke, which made me just work faster cause I DO NOT want to listen to you puke next to me ear. So I give her some Zofran to help stop puking. And then we can finally get going to the hospital. Last call was for a fall. So we essentially do the whole work up back board and transport him.

So a side note, OKC has crazy storms with some crazy lightning. Someone in my class has taken some pretty dang awesome pictures of the lightning. Thanks Stephen. This is one of them:

Everything else is going great. :) Sorry I never posted week twos adventures. I decided to just skip that week. I may or may not ever post about it; we will just have to see. 

What Year Is It? 204?

So I survived my first week on the ambulance. It was a blast! I had some good calls and some lame calls. That is about normal though.
Day one was nerve racking, but fun. The first call came in as a possible stroke. I start running through how to treat a stroke in my head before we showed up. We pull into this truck stop where we meet FD and the patient outside of the big rig. The patient walks in to the ambulance and we get started asking her questions and my medic turns to me and says go ahead and start an IV so as I get the stuff ready I was like sheesh its been awhile since I've done this, but I nailed it thankfully. She was negative on the stroke test, but we transport her anyways. We get a second call for a fall. Show up and this lady states she was walking down the hallway and her toes gave out. I don't know about you, but I've never had my toes give out to where I land on my butt, but okay. We take her in per request. Call three was for another fall. Elderly man was said to have fallen twice during the morning, but we found a greater concern was his breathing. We could hear across the room his congestion in his lungs and see him struggling. We load him up and get him in the truck and start the assessment you could hear bilateral crackles. He was a funny guy. We asked if he was short of breathe he said no. We asked what year it was and his reply was 204. He was pretty certain that was the year so we said okay. Our fourth call came in and we start going and my medic tells me you got a shooting! I got excited and thought wow first day on the job and I get a shooting oh Oklahoma. So we show up, but the guy was a goner so no treatment needed. We then had a break from calls for awhile and our last call was respiratory distress. We show up and load him up. His story was a little weird because what the wife told us we weren't sure if we could believe it because the daughter was telling us other things and how the wife is a little forgetful and such. We start him on a breathing treatment in the back and his sats start climbing back up which eased our worry. We were ready to do CPAP if this treatment didn't help. But it did luckily. My medic is so great because he likes to quiz me on other situations and treatments similar to what we have at the time and sometimes I just can't think of the treatment but he helps me out and is a great teacher.

Day two I am working with a different medic because my medic had something he had to attend. I go up to the clipboard to look to see what truck I'm on today and it says 73 so I go to find it and it turns out to be this truck:

 Our first call is for a lady who passed out in the bathroom in downtown, my EMT was like she is probably just trying to get out of work. Sometimes the things they say I'm like rude, but then sometimes you just find it true. So we get to the patient and she is lying on the floor. We try to get the story of what happened out of her, but her coworkers state that they have called the ambulance three or four times in the last 2 months for this. So we automatically think okay she is a frequent. We ask her what makes her pass out like this she states low BP but that was normal range. No diabetes and her BGL was normal range. We ask her what else could have caused this if she has any other conditions we need to know about she states no. We ask if the doctor has ever given her a reason of why this happens and she says no. We take her in and she just seems out of it the whole time. Afterwards my medic told me that she was a patient that if we were to ask specifics such as do you have trouble breathing or do you have chest pain that she would feed off what we say. He says that sometimes you have to be careful with that. Call two was for a man acting funny. They also said he overdosed on two pills. We show up to the patient and he seems normal. The PT said that he had been glazed over and he was lethargic. We looked at the drug he had taken and it was his prescribed pain med and he had taken the right dose as prescribed, but the patient said the pills looked different today and he just got it filled. The only thing we could think of was they changed the dose. Everything we checked on him was fine and he was not glazed or lethargic for us so the patient did not want to go. We had to call the supervisor to okay the refused transport. Third call was for an elderly lady who was lethargic and family wanted her to get check out. So while in our care there wasnt much for us to do. I did start an IV in the foot because that was the only vein we could find so that was fun. We were still in the parking lot so i was standing halfway out of the truck while doing it. Call four was for a motor vehicle accident with a  vehicle that had rolled I get to the scene and thought well this is exciting, but none of the patients were too badly injured just complaints of neck/back pain. My ambulance transported two patients and we had called three ambulances. So that was a first. Our last call was for a seizure in a bar. The patient stayed pretty postictal while in our care, but by the time we were close to the hospital he started coming around and didnt know what had happened.

Day three: My normal medic is back today. We leave post 41 and get a call. First call of the day and im thinking today is starting off good. My medic tells me its a motorcycle accident possible DOA. Well maybe today isnt starting off good for others. We show up and my medic tells me just grab the monitor we arent thinking we are going to be doing too much we approach the patient and all the firefighters are around him bagging him and such so my medic goes oh rap load him up fast. As soon as he gets in the truck we start driving. There was no time to waste. We could not secure an airway on him due to his trismus and we tried nasally intubating but that was a no go as well he then just starting coughing up blood. We ended up just bagging him all the way in. Luckily it was not too long of a drive. I am getting better at my riding while standing in the back. I'm getting lots of practice. That was a cool call to see. Call two is for someone who dislocated her shoulder and decided to just be a pain in the butt for us the whole time. Call three was a cardiac call but the lady just felt weak and dizzy. Her 12 lead was a little suspicious and once in the truck she did complain of chest pain but she did not want her son to worry. Call four was for another cardiac complaint so we did the whole work up again. The last call was just a transfer from one side of town to the other so we didn't have much to do there.

Day four: Its my Friday but it is only Wednesday how nice! I am pretty lucky for having a three day weekend every weekend :) So the passed three days i have had a trauma call so my medic goes what kind of trauma are you going to get us today I said I don't know guess we shall see. First call we get is for a kid we has a seizure. I was thinking my first pediatric call woot. We show up and this was the boys first seizure no history of them and he is still postictal. We get him on the cot and do an IV while he is still out of it and my medic let me do that IV so that was cool. We had to wrap his whole arm because we did not want him to pull it out. He was autistic as well so it was not a normal ped call. A little more challenging. His dad met us at the hospital due to the mother not able to leave the other kids. Lucky for us the boy slept the whole time and we didn't have to freak him out too much. Call two was for an OD out in the boonies. I swear we were driving for 20 minutes going lights and sirens, but we finally get there and the patient was pretty loopy. He had taken a handful of drugs in attempt to commit suicide, attempting and failing. Call three is for a fall and the patient complained of shoulder pain from tripping and falling. We weren't too concerned with anything so we stabilize her arm and get her in the ambulance when we realize that her sats are lower than we like them and we ask if she is short of breathe she says no but we also heard wheezes and so we give her a breathing treatment and she then says that it is a lot easier for her to breathe now. Who knew? Call four  is for weakness and slight chest pain, but not cardiac pain like we first think. It was just slight respiratory. The last call  of the day comes in as chest pain for a young lady who has a history of cardiac. We check her out and we don't think it is cardiac related but maybe more respiratory pain. Either way we take her in and she gets checked out.

That was my first week pretty exciting stuff :) Sorry its so late. I am working on balancing things out. I had classes start that week as well and there is lots of busy work. I will try to get my second weeks adventures up soon.

People Still Die On Sunday...

I've had people ask me how is it that you go on an internship through BYU-Idaho and have to work on Sunday. Well to answer that question my job is always working 24/7/365 and they always need people working therefore I can't be choosy with what hours or days I work. I am just grateful this company will accommodate enough shifts for all of us. 

Well today was my first day on the ambulance. I was nervous because the big city which in reality the city itself is not that big. When I met my preceptor he asked if I had rode along anywhere and my answer was yes I have just had a small call amount of calls with nothing too spectacular of an event he continued to say that's a lot of it here too. It's true. Our calls today seemed more on the non emergent side of things and to just take them to the hospital. I did have a shooting, and well that was new to me. All in all it was a pretty good day and it starts all over again dark and early tomorrow! :o

Ok-A-Homa!

Well my new adventure is now in Oklahoma. Oklahoma you ask? So do I. I would not have chosen this on my own, but since it is for my Paramedic Internship, here I sit :) I am pretty excited to be here. When driving in it looked a lot different than I imagined. There is actually things here instead of just tumbleweeds. I have been here for almost a week and since I am one of the last ones in the class to actually start working I have done quite the exploring with Laura since she hadn't started work yet either. My dad drove me out here and stayed a night at my place since I barely had a bed to sleep on he had to sleep on a stack of blankets, poor guy. But he managed. The beginning of the week we just had boxes everywhere but our place is looking quite nice now. We have almost everything any other apt has just ghetto poor college kid style. Laura was able to bring a little card table with three fold up chairs which is perfect for us, I brought my very stylish older box tv. One of the first few days we knew having no internet would just suck, so we jumped on that real fast and now we have internet. It is awesome, basically completed my life here. We decided a couch was a necessity and that sitting on the floor to watch tv or anything just wasn't cutting it anymore. We looked up some yard sales and other free stuff on craigslist. Yesterday was our yard sale day. We brought Taja and her little guy Emmitt. Me and Laura we're not successful in finding a couch or anything we would benefit from, but Taja found a nice baby carrier. So at least someone got something out of it. We came home and we're all worn out from our yard saling so we took a nap and then we woke up found a house in Norman, OK (which means about as much to you as it does me. All I know is I live in OKC) with a free washer and couch sitting on the side of the road we weren't sure if it would even be there by the time we got there but we had nothing else to do so we jumped in the truck to go find it. After a 45 minute drive we get to the address and find nothing. Full of disappointment (seems to be our motto). We just start driving around and end up in some sketchy neighborhood and i spot a couch on the side of the road so we go and check it out. This is the beauty we found:

Because we are poor and desperate we don't judge. We were all about taking it! Laura had a canopy on her truck so we had to see if it fit in the truck. We start trying to shove this couch in the back of the truck and it just wasn't going to go in. Again full of disappointment. We had to leave the couch, but there was a vacuum sitting there too. So we at least got a free vacuum out it.

We get back on the road and drive by a goodwill so we stop. We have been looking for one since we got here. We go in and straight to the back looking for a couch and the only couch we see is listed at $59.99 we say not happening and we go to walk away and I spot a futon frame for $14.99 and we say no that is doable for a couch. We take the sticker to the front and pay and they didn't offer us help so we just go to the back and walk out with this frame and no one even said a thing to us so we kept going. We get it tied in the truck and start our 45 minute drive back home. On the way home it was dark and rainy, we passed a car accident on the other side of the highway and there were two EMSA ambulances on scene and we got excited for our shifts to start soon :) Once home we looked at the price for a futon mattress and it is not something for our budget right now so instead we took our extra blankets and claimed a spot on the futon  with our blankets and pillows to make it a little more comfortable. It works for us and we don't care what it looks like. 

I would have to say we have gotten pretty good at this. Our apt is looking pretty established. Every time Merritt comes home from her shift we have added something else to our apt. It is beginning to feel more homey with a couch ;)

Well tomorrow I start my internship on the ambulance. I am looking forward to it!! :)