Fire tale time, kiddies.
I have lamented and whined hard about choking on the practical portion of the final for my EMT class. I was given the opportunity to re-test after the turn of the year, which I accepted and finally did on Firday. The alternatives would have been to retake the class, or remain a Basic. Neither was palatable to me, though I would have retaken the class had it been necessary.
What did me in originally was a whole lot of external stress I had very little control over, coupled with my own performance anxiety and a near phobia of (small) pediatric patients. I botched my adult trauma patient by missing her injuries completely, and I killed my 8 month old cardiac arrest patient with an overdose of epinephrine.
This time around, I had 3 scenarios to work through, and they were doozies. The first was a jaywalker hit by a pickup truck and thrown about 30 feet. That one was pretty straightforward, but the back-and-forth between me and the examiner got both of us side-tracked and frustrated. Spinal immobilization, 2 large-bore IVs, splints and dressings, and go like hell to the trauma center.
Scenario #2 was a corker: a diabetic patient with a loss of consciousness and fall. She had gangrene in both feet, and enough clues to strongly suggest drug addiction. She had in fact fallen, and had a broken pelvis and a spinal neck injury. I gave her dextrose for her low blood sugar, Narcan for the opiate overdose, and then had to do another spinal immobilization. I was ready to chew nails after that, because the back-and-forth was four times that of the first.
#3 was back to my nightmares: a pediatric cardiac arrest. This time, it was a 7 year old instead of an infant, which helped. I don’t have the anxiety problems with kids once they’re old enough to be in school. The rule of thumb, depending on 2 or 3 different situations, is that an 8 year or 12 year old is functionally an adult. Seven is a little small for that to apply, but it still helped calm me.
We went through the regular cardiac arrest protocol. This time, I gave the right amount of epi. Intubation of the dummy went well, and I didn’t break any teeth with the handle. There was a little bit of bickering between the examiner and myself, but not to the extent of 1 and 2.
In the end, she said I was disorganized regarding methodology, and I thought too much, but she passed me because I knew what I was doing. I’m registered for my certification exam on Friday the13th <snerk> of February.
Saturday and Sunday was spent in Fire School, where I took Ladders I & II. It was a snoozefest, and a lot of petty crap about doing things the proper way that is dictated by OSHA. I did learn a couple of new things, such as how to set up some rather large extension ladders single-handedly, how to bring victims down the ladder by myself, and how to bail out of a window headfirst and live to tell the tale.
The interesting part of this was that we had to rescue one of our own during the class.
We were learning a technique called a leg lock, which is used when working from the ladder to keep from falling off. You step up one rung above where you want to be, put a leg through, hook that foot behind the rung, then step down one rung with the other leg that was left outside. Once you do that, you ain’t goin’ nowhere unless the ladder goes first. Because of arthritis in my hips, I was kinda wary of doing it.
My buddy Bill is a big guy. Before I had sveltification done, I was as big as he was before he had a heart attack 2 years ago. He’s lost about 50 lbs., but is still ginormous. He decided that he was going to try a leg lock. It was only fair because it was a technique being taught.
Up the ladder he went, and he went into a leg lock about 6 feet up. He couldn’t get out of it. He didn’t have the upper strength to pull the outside leg up to the next higher rung, and he lacked the flexibility to do the same thing with his leg on its own. He tried for about 3 or 4 minutes to free himself before we set about getting him out. There were four of us on the ground, so we didn’t have a lot of options on how to do it.
“Bill, do you trust us?”
“Yeah, I suppose. I don’t have much choice in the matter.”
“We’re all behind you. Lean back into our hands, and slide your leg out when we pull you back.”
“OK.”
Bill leaned back onto us just like he was a girl at a concert crowd surfing, and we pulled back. Just as his foot came out of the ladder, there was a brrrrrrrrrrrraaaap. He had farted rather loudly, and was almost dropped because the 4 of us underneath him started laughing too hard to keep composure.
I was the last to go and had no problem, which surprised me. I’m glad we did this at 6 feet instead of 20…