Firday night I had ambulance duty, and I drew as my partner my bud Tollie, who is also a classmate of mine for –I certification.
Tollie works in Norfolk, so he has an even longer commute than I do, and he doesn’t have the luxury of flexing his schedule, so he’s consistently late for the start of a shift. There’s not a problem with this, everyone who cares knows about it and we adjust. The only point to make is when we finally got paired up and went foraging, it was later than I like and I was ravenous.
We headed off to one of the 4 restaurants in the county (for real), and VWife came to join us as usual on shift nights. We sat down, tossed a few 3 three way joke barbs, picked on the good sport waitress, and ordered dinner.
duuuuh DEEEEE BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP… The call was for a 15 year old kid that had turned his ankle and did a face plant to the floor. He did a bit of damage too, because his ankle was roughly grapefruit sized. Mom was waaay bent out of shape because he had broken the same ankle the year before playing football and he still had orthopedic pins in it. Fine, we’ll take him to Suffolk for you. A fast job splinting his foot, and we loaded him up. It was an uneventful transport.
When we got paged, I threw a pile of money at my wife to cover our tabs, and our catfish plates awaited us back at the station. The assistant chief said he was going to meet us at the Hooterville VFD Haunted House with our dinners, which would have been a good thing, 'cuz, dayum, we were HON-GU-REE.
When we got to Hooterville after the run, no assistant chief, and no catfish. 
Oh well. I wanted to take the tour, minus the haunted hayride (in case we got paged), and I bellied up to the ticket table, where Brassy Deb the EMT was working. As it is every year:
“How much are tickets?”
“I know you, so nuttin’”.
“OK, you can send me through for free. But you also know who the poor kids are around here; send 2 of them through on my treat.” I gave her my last $20, and I was now busted for the night.
I waited around a few minutes for the groups ahead of me to make it through, and just as I was supposed to join a tour group on the trip through the house, you guessed it, another page. This must not have been my night for eating or entertainment on duty. The call was for a 71 year old woman who was vomiting.
My weakness is fainting when I’m hurt, but I have no problems when it’s other people; Tollie’s is not handling vomiting or diarrhea from anyone, including himself. I drove the ankle kid, and Tollie was going to drive for this one. On the way, there was quite the number of gallows humor remarks about old people and bodily functions.
When we got to the scene, our patient was definitely an old lady, but she was also in the end stages of something terminal (I never caught what), and had many signs of nasty things we’d covered in class like congestive heart failure. She was to the point she had a Do Not Resuscitate order, and she was bringing up digested blood. Tollie and I both felt like we were 3 inches tall for all the wisecracks made along the way.
We loaded her up to go to Betsytown, and the assistant chief who never showed up with our dinners joined us for the ride because she needed IVs and the like. Her trip also was uneventful.
We got her situated in the ER, and did the usual post run activities. Tollie and I were now grumpy from hunger and fatigue, so we stopped at a Burger King. Since I wound up stuck with the cost of the dinners never touched, Tollie covered my Whopper. The level of grumpiness went down significantly, but did not reach zero.
We were still east of the Dismal Swamp when the third page went off. A 30 year old guy put his arm through a storm door, and had arterial bleeding. Oh. Shit. We were about 15 miles from the scene, and the only active crew.
Fortunately for us, Bubba and Eddie both answered from home, and got the guy calmed down and got some pressure on his arm about 5 minutes before we arrived. This was another scene where there was blood everywhere. Yuck.
My job was simple: grab hold of the dish towels on his arm, and hold on for dear life (his). We got him in the ambulance; he was combative the entire time, and only relented when we got his wife in back to calm him down.
Eddie and Colin the assistant chief got the IV started, then we had to look at the arm and rewrap it. The cut was an inch wide, about 3 inches long, and went to the bone. It was situated about two inches above his elbow on the underside of his forearm.
We rewrapped it with some sterile pads, and bound the whole thing tight. He had lost enough blood that he was cold, and kept passing out on us, just like the gut-shot cowboys in the movies. Tollie did an excellent job applying the pedal to the metal, and got us to Suffolk.
The situation was typical; a bunch of drunks, an argument, and the hand through the glass. I assisted one of the nurses in registering our patient because I wrote all of the notes, and I have very bad handwriting. After going through the usual patient ID and condition stuff, I added, “There’s a significant amount of ETOH (meaning alcohol) involved.”
[sarcastic inflection]“No kidding?” [/sarcastic inflection]
We got back to the station about 1:30 AM, and I’ll bet we both took about a minute to get to sleep. Fortunately, we were done for the night, because the cases were getting progressively worse, and #4 would have probably been a fatality.
Sunday was Lab Day for our EMT class. Four of us from the station are involved: myself, Tollie, Bubba, and Heavy-thumbed Harry the dispatcher. I gave him that name for his habit of clogging the Fire/Rescue channel with unnecessary paging tones.
Anyway, the day got off to a roaring start. Harry had to work Saturday night, so we were supposed to meet at the courthouse for the carpool at 0515, when his relief was supposed to arrive. She came flouncing in at 0615, and we were late for class. The instructor nearly threw us out. Good start to the day…
Tollie and I skewered each other, trying to start IVs. Neither of us got it going.
The high(low) light of the day was ET intubation. We learned it last time, and I was pretty good with this fiber-optic blade used to place the tube. This time, I got the process down with the older style blades that we actually carry on our trucks.
After placing the tube 3 times well within the allotted 30 seconds, even on the harder practice dummy, the instructor whipped out the fiber-optic blade, handed it to me, and said, “Use this on that dummy.” He pointed to the harder one.
Remembering how easy it was the first time I did it, I muttered, “Oh. Piece of cake.”
That little flash of hubris was my downfall. I successfully got the tube past the vocal chords on the fifth attempt, with the instructor laughing at my expense the entire time. I stuck my big ol’ foot in my mouth…
For the rest of the day, I endured the indignity of being addressed as ‘Cupcake’. I was in good company. One other student expressed similar cheek, and was called ‘Bubbles’ after she could not get all of the air out of the injection she drew up.
I’m thinking of making some stuffed cabbage, but without the mushrooms. I may never get out of the kitchen!!!
