Partner Willie in this tale was Bill, an EMT-I from Currituck County I met when we were both doing clinicals at Albemarle Hospital. After certification, Bill joined the Gates County Squad as an associate member so he could get extra experience. I ran with him a total of 3 times, and had as much fun with him as I do my regular partner Tollie. The rerun story below is the most memorable night I had out of the 3 shifts with Bill.
Bill committed suicide last night. Rest in peace. You were good people.
I hate winter, February 2010
It was Super Bowl weekend, and also the time of yet another east coast blizzard, which seem to be coming once a week as I type this. Another one comes tomorrow, FWIW.
I had an ambulance shift Friday night, and it was a doozy. We ran 10 and a half hours of the 12 hour shift, in driving rain and low level flooding. It seemed to me that I finally got dry at roughly 10 AM Saturday, after the shift was done.
Our first one was for a 13 year old boy having seizures. When we were called he already had 9 tonic/clonic episodes over about an hour; while we worked on him, he had 2 more. They were the darnedest thing I’ve seen; his eyes would roll back and his neck would arch, and he’d twitch a bit, which is quite routine for this type of seizure; the odd part is that it would end like someone turned off a light. Usually there’s a phase after a seizure where the patient is usually sleepy where the brain basically reboots, and this simply did not happen with him.
He was a tough one, because his seizures were getting longer and increasingly violent, and more frequent. He needed valium to break the cycle, and because my partner and I are not paramedics, we didn’t have any. We traded him off to Suffolk Fire and Rescue because they did have a paramedic who could give him what he needed. That happened in a quite vigorous downpour.
We stopped to eat, and the rain had let up a bit. Og must have been in a playful mood. We weren’t back at the station for half an hour before being paged again for an overturned truck in a ditch; the rain had reverted to downpour status.
The truck was on its side, with the bottom at roughly 60 degrees up from level. The patient was still buckled in to the driver’s seat, up in the air. The passenger side window, down on the ground, was open. I stuck my head in to talk to him, and my gawd, the alcohol fumes done slapped a knot on my head. I wouldn’t dare light a match within 10 feet of him even in the pouring rain.
The ditch he was in was deep and overflowing. He wasn’t going to drown or anything, but the rushing water made for a miserable scene. One deputy fell in trying to get across, and had to be pulled out.
The rescue went something like this:
**
Partner Willie:** “Sir, are you OK?”
Drunk driver: “Uh, yeah.”
PW: “Are you trapped?”
DD: “No.”
Wet Deputy: “Sir, unlock your door.”
DD: “No. I’m gonna stay right here until the tow truck comes.”
WD: “Unlock the door so we can get you out. I’m out here in the rain.”
DD: “Then you’re a damned fool.”
The wet deputy was already mad after falling into the ditch, and that set him off completely. I had already called for an equipment truck in case the door was jammed.
WD: “Unlock the f*cking door or I’ll have the roof cut off.”
DD: “You’re not touching my truck!”
WD: “The rescue truck is already on the way. You got 2 minutes to decide.”
The patient unlocked the door, and the patient was pulled out. When he was at the top of the hill, he took 2 steps and fell flat on his face into the mud. He got up and said, “My wife is gonna be pissed that I got mud on my pants.”
**
Different deputy**: “I think she’ll be pissed about more than that…”
We got him into the ambulance, checked him over, and found no injuries. We saw him last sitting in the car with the Highway Patrol officer taking the report before he saw the magistrate. I found out later he blew a .15 on the breathalyzer. Oooooops…
Our next call was another seizure, this time for a very sweet 19 year old girl with neurologic and developmental problems. She had one seizure, and came out of it before we arrived. Her vitals were normal, and we ended up with another refusal. What was fun with this call is that she thought I was a doctor, probably because I had my stethoscope around my neck, and she wanted a tour of the ambulance. We obliged her.
The front door of the house was under a corner of the roof, and there was no way to get out without getting drenched by the concentrated runoff. There was no way to step off the porch without getting into ankle deep water, either. The girl had a raincoat and rubber boots, but I didn’t. Oh well, that’s why I get the big bucks for this…
We got back to the station just before midnight, and after paperwork, we went to bed. Not for long…
Around 1 or so, we were paged for one of our frequent flyers, who was sick. We found him on the couch, gasping for air in short staccato breaths. This was classic advanced respiratory distress, and he was getting fatigued gasping for air. :eek: The very first thing we did was put him on the PulseOx, to get an idea of how much oxygen his blood was transporting: that showed 80%. For reference, a healthy person is 95-100%, and we get really excited when the reading is 90%. Our patient was dying right in front of us. :eek: :eek:
He went on oxygen right then and there, and he came back to 97% within a minute. That bullet was dodged. A young woman was there, and we asked her what happened. He was sick most of the day, and was increasingly unresponsive. He had a prescribed breathing treatment about 7 hours before, so that had worn off. The kicker was that he was supposed to use a bipap machine; she took it off of him because she thought it wasn’t helping. Gee, Toots, it was only keeping him from asphyxiating.
Willie and I independently thought she was either a dingbat, or acting maliciously and feigning stupidity. On second thought, I doubt she was smart enough to act stupid.
Willie drove for that run, and almost wrecked us. We were approaching the hospital and he hit water that had flooded the road. We got sideways, and he recovered nicely, but I was in the captain’s chair calling the hospital and the motion threw me out of it. The nurses bitched at me for letting slip with an “Oh, shit!” over the air, until they found out we nearly wrecked.
We got back with slightly less than two hours to go in the shift. We had run all night, had little sleep, and I wasn’t feeling dry until I was home for several hours. I hate winter.
I’m still learning and finding my niche, though: my blues numbers are well received, and this fall I plan to tackle some Jobim.
