Pretty sure you are misremembering the name. It most likely was Librium, not ‘Libtrum’’.
Getting you to an ER, even by cab, was better than lots of families and friends do. I’m sorry it wasn’t done more kindly.
Yes, bad typo. My sister-in-law had the opinion you get addicted to that and her idiocy nearly killed me.
ETA: The stuff generally keeps the shakes and other side-effects of withdrawal away and is usually done with 30mg or three pills the first day or two, and each day after is less till - kinda like antibiotics - you’re done. No doctor is going to refill that.
ETA2: Your article seems to say the dose starts off a bit higher - 50mg and can go as high as 300mg which seems like a lot to me. I reckon the general guidelines is to keep the symptoms away.
Two way radios seems to be the answer to my question. I didn’t think most volunteers were issued radios and instead used pagers or mobile phones.
That’s exactly the bummer I was imagining. Do you really need multiple respondents racing to every shortness of breath call? Or perhaps no one at all responds? Especially if you have radios.
Having had six 911 calls about my shortness of breath because of my Myasthenia that was on the verge of becoming respiratory arrest in the back of the ambulance if they hadn’t gotten the NIPPV on me in time? YES!
Non-Invasive Positive Pressure Ventilation, basically, CPAP.
Would six ambulances each have helped? After one ambulance, more arriving aren’t helpful and potentially dangerous. And, besides, these aren’t ambulances but volunteers showing up in their cars from their homes or Walmart or hockey practice.
No, because, in many of my 911 calls, an ambulance with EMRs showed up and EMTs or MICPs were required for treatment during transport.
We do it very differently. Each EMS station calls their status into the county who then updates it in their computer, something like “1 BLS (EMTs) til midnight & 1 ALS (paramedic) until 6am”. When the morning shift comes in, they call again & update their status for the day. One can volunteer but one is at the station for their shift, whether paid or volunteer.
The EMS crew can either talk to county dispatch or press a button to update (some of the) statuses.
The tripsheet has times for
- Dispatch
- Enroute
- On-scene
- Patient contact (can be the same or a couple of mins apart; especially in something like a mall or a nursing home)
- Transport
- Arrive
- Available
We have to get on the radio for transport to let them know where we’re going, ETA, class, & whether we’ll do hospital notification or if we want them to, & then obviously what we want them to tell the hospital in just a sentence or two.
When a call comes into the county PSAP (911 center) the caller speaks to the 911 operator who is typing stuff into the computer (location, nature of call, condition of patient, etc.)
The dispatcher gets all this info with the magic of the CAD program & dispatches the appropriate ambulance. If it’s my town & we have an available bus on status, we get dispatched. If it’s my town & we have an available BLS bus but it’s an ALS call, we get dispatched, along with either an ALS ambulance or a medic responder (paramedic only, can either be an outfitted SUV that can’t do transit or just a medic in a full ambulance) to assist/enhance the BLS crew. If it’s my town & we don’t have an available ambulance on status they tone us out but also automatically dispatch a cover ambulance.
Covers/assists are all preprogrammed based upon availability & station location. We don’t but I know some cities dispatch based on ambulance GPS location.
It’s 100x easier to cancel inbound resources than pull them out of thin air when you need them.
We have full time folks plus volunteers. So an on duty paramedic unit will be enroute. Volunteers often beat career crews because with 40 of us scattered around it’s not horribly uncommon for things to happen near us. At the same time, there are only a few of us nearby for any given incident. The greatest number of volunteers I’ve ever seen. Show up for a medical related call was three. Fires OTOH it’s not uncommon for a dozen volunteers and 5-6 pieces of apparatus (4 water tenders, air supply/support, and sometimes an ambulance)
You won’t get six ambulances. Volunteers usually respond “POV” short for personally owned vehicles.
When responding POV we are required to obey all traffic laws. I have access to an ambulance but Im generally more useful getting there a few minutes faster with the equipment/supplies in my car.
The island I’m on, it’s an average of 13 minutes for the nearest full time crews to arrive. The furthest point is about 22. For me, that same area in my car. is 3-12 min. It’s not unusual for me to be there for 5-10 minutes and at least get started on some quick assessment/vitals before the ambulance arrives.
You have more completely and eloquently described what I was aiming for.
Different areas of the country have different terminology; where we are, a tanker is a 2500 or 3000 gal truck that brings water to a fire in a rural / non-hydrant area; whereas in CA, a tanker is a plane that drops water on a forest fire. Are your water tenders what we call tankers? What we call an air truck or cascade is a vehicle that can come to the scene & refill SCBA/SCUBA tanks/bottles where as air support would be a rescue helicopter or possible a drone team. Is your air supply refilling individual bottles?
Tenders = 2500 gallons of water on wheels
Tankers = Aircraft
Air Support = cascade system/SCBA refills. Yes they do individual tanks on scene.
Helicopters are usually referred to as medevac, there are several providers in the area so we ask dispatch for “first available medevac” and they check availability and eta to scene or designated LZ.
Out of the 40 volunteers here, I think around 18 have radios. Most are using phone apps or phone call into dispatch if there is a major issue they need to report prior to arrival of full time folks. All of us also have phone numbers for supervisory fire officers on duty.
To us, Medevac would be a helo to transport sick/injured; typically crewed with a pilot, flight medic & flight nurse. Air support would either be a drone SAR team or a USCG helo with a winch to rescue someone that is otherwise not easily reachable. In our case, that’s typically someone who got swept & is now clinging to a tree in the middle of a raging river in either a flash flood or some variant of a (post-)tropical depression/hurricane that surface-based rescuers can’t get to for some reason.
We have a splash drone that can drop a (relatively) small payload, whether that’s a PFD, a radio, or water to a person.
PFD - Pizza From Dominoes?
“Wait! I ordered pepperoni, not peppers!”
personal flotation device, the very first thing that Google returns.
In the UK you dial 999 wherever you are. This connects to an operator who asks you which service (Police,F&R, Ambulance). Ambulance control will ask "Is the patient breathing, followed by a series of questions to the caller and, if possible, to the patient. This allows them to assess how serious the problem is.
999 calls range from the trivial (stubbed toe) and malicious (hoax calls), to serious RTCs and situations involving the police or F&C like a major fire. The most frequent calls are to elderly people with a variety problems like breathing difficulties or falls.
Control have the unenviable task of rationing a scarce resource and patients are created from Cat 1 which gets an immediate blue light response down to Cat 3 which will only get action when there is a spare unit.
Apart from Double-Crewed Ambulances (DCAs), there are also a variety of specialist units. A recent innovation is to pair a Paramedic (usually with advanced training) with a cop in a car. This is helpful at RTCs when there may be injuries, traffic problems, etc. They frequently arrive first. Other teams are used (and trained and equipped) to recover casualties from difficult situations like cyclists with head injuries in woods or horse riders with broken bones in fields.
I followed all of that post, except … What is an RTC? Not an acronym used in the US’s benighted version of English.
I believe Road Traffic Collision.
Or an MVA/MVC in the US.
The number of TLAs each profession has boggles the mind.
QFT MF! 