Stuff and Things

Haven't been around for a while--sorry about that. Lots to talk about though.

First: yesterday the grass fires were so nuts, half the sky above the city was smoke and it was raining ash in the north suburbs and near corporate. In fact, there was ash on my car when I went EOS last night. The fire moved into the next county and we had to begin mutual aid to assist with some nursing home evacuations. Several of our trucks are down today because so many of our people are volunteers in the areas the fire was burning, so they were either evacuating or fighting it all night. Boomer, who lives out there, went home early yesterday to evacuate his home and then spent most of the night fighting it with the service in his town. He's okay, so's his house and his stuff--and his guns, which we know are very important to him--and is hopefully sleeping soundly.

Luckily, last night, we got our first real storm of the season. It poured. At first the wind picked up and it started to drizzle enough that my apartment started to smell pretty strongly of smoke and I was worried, if it went on that way, in the piddly-little-useless-storm way, I'd have to get myself to corporate or to the hospital. Asthma and smoke = bad combination. Soon, though, it started to pour and wash it all away. I didn't die last night either. Yay.

From what I hear, the fire is out. We sent out two Strike Team trucks to stand by, but didn't need them in the end. Now we're looking at an empty board on this Sunday morning. Several people are out today, including my partner. It might be an interesting day on the streets, but I'm not going to get to see it. Most likely, I'll be at corporate all day and circulating around to the hospitals when people need new supplies. I supposed it isn't a bad way to spend the fifth day of six in a row. I could use a nap, though.

I tossed and turned most of last night. I didn't have nightmares, but my dreams were very unsettling. They left a bad taste in my mouth. Ugh.

So, things that happened since I've been gone.

The main reason I've been gone is simply because my iPhone is knackered. It won't pick up service anymore. WiFi still works, if I've got it, which I only do at about two hospitals. I don't even have it at home. But I can't get texts and I can't get calls. It sucks. Especially since they told me the only fix is to simply get a new phone. Wonderful.

I worked with the paramedic that I had the directional altercation with. She's all cleared and ready to work on her own, and guess who got to work with her on her first shift? It went really well. It seems it was a mutual learning experience. Now we're buddy-buddy, or whatever. She stopped me at the hospital yesterday and told me all about the first code she got to run on a nine-year-old. It went well and she was very happy. Good for her. Maybe she will survive after all. I guess she finally got her shit together.

Now--Three Stories about Urgent Care:

We get called out to a young lady who was feeling sick at church. When we arrive on scene, we find out that, in the rush to get to church, the eleven-year-old had eaten a hot yogurt. Nasty, girl. So, naturally, she was feeling icky. Wonder why. Her parents don't think she needs to go to the hospital, but they are clearly worried about their daughter, so when they refuse transport, they rush her over to the closest urgent care facility for treatment.

We finish our paperwork and go 10-8. En routed to 18, the tones sound, and the call drops for us to head emergent to aforementioned urgent care for an 11yof, lethargic, headache, unresponsive.

Both of us, at that point, were calling bullshit and were annoyed. Fingers crossed it wasn't our yogurt-eater, we arrived on scene and met the doc at the door. Lying on the bed getting stuck with a needle was our little girl, all sad and sickly. I hurriedly told him we knew the patient and had just run on her; he was very shocked by that, because apparently every time you call 911 a new crew just materializes. He told us, quite frankly, he was expecting her blood sugar to be in the 6-700s. A thin, otherwise healthy, no-history-of-diabetes eleven-year-old in DKA? It was 151. He basically told us that, because her sugar was okay, he didn't know what was wrong and he didn't have the time to run the labs, so please charge her parents $1300 for an ambulance ride, and much more for a hospital work-up, oh, and they totally paid to be refused treatment by this dick-head doc. She was perfectly alert, perfectly responsive, just felt sick. Wonder why....

We load her up, drive her over to the kiddie ER, where she promptly throws up the entire yogurt and is miraculously better. Good work, doc.

THEN, we get called to another urgent care, which happens to be right across the street from said kiddie ER. We walk in for a chest pain and meet a very funny, kind woman who would rather be swimming with friends. We chat with her for a long while and hear all about her history, her children, her life. When we get to the truck, she wonders if she really needs to go, because she knows the drill and would rather not spend all day at a certain hospital waiting around. We told her that at this time her EKG was undiagnostic. If she wanted to go, she was well within her right to refuse.

She asked us a little more about the work-up they do in the ER, so we told her what we knew, about the troponin test, and she sure did find that interesting, because the doctor in the urgent care told her there WASN'T a blood test to see if you've had a heart attack. She thought it was weird when he said it, because she SWORE she had been to the SAME place before and had the test run then AT THE URGENT CARE. So, how interesting that suddenly a test didn't even EXIST.

She was livid. She politely refused transport, spoke to our FOS, and promptly walked back inside to give that doc a piece of her mind. I hope she ripped him a new one. Knowing her, she totally could.

The very next day we get called to a south-side urgent care, where I haven't had the worst experiences. Usually, the doctors there are good, thoughtful, and behave intelligently. Not on this day.

Chest pain, 27yof. Okay, that's probably not a heart attack, but you never know. We arrive on scene to find an overweight patient who is very anxious and distraught over what she's been told. She finally agrees to take a nitro under her tongue, and had already chewed four baby aspirin. Her pain level was very low. Her stress level, however, was high. Mostly, because she came in for discomfort brought on by severe stress at work and at home and was told that the "bottom of your heart isn't beating properly" and "you're having an active MI."

We ran an EKG and looked at the one this little doctor ran, and neither me, nor my partner, nor anyone we ran into at the hospital, saw anything by NSR. NORMAL SINUS. And yet the doctor told her she was dying. Are you kidding me?

So, the patient calls her mom, who happens to be a medic in our system, and I am pretty sure her mom went down to that urgent care and kicked some stupid ass. I mean, my god, were you overwhelmed because you had more than one patient, doctor, or where you just being malicious?! Learn how to take care of people, because all you did was make a stressed out young woman 100 times worse. Luckily, my partner and I were able to be sensible and help her chill out. Poor girl.

Not cool, doctors; not cool.

Pretty much, my experience in the medical world has taught me how NOT to behave when I become a doctor. I'm definitely going to keep note and never forget that patients are people. And hey, I'm a person too, so let's all behave like it.

Ugh.

That's pretty much it. I worked six days last week, I'm working six this week. Next week I work five. The week after I start school and then it's up in the air what happens. They are talking about switching the schedules here very soon, and unfortunately, that isn't going to work out for me and my education. So, I'm going to have to work it out. But, I can't worry about that today. Today, I don't know when or how it is going to change for me. So, instead I am going to hang out, watch the Olympics, and enjoy a little down time in this system of non-stop emergencies. At least I can't get a late call today.

Hope everyone out there is safe and happy. I'll try not to be such a stranger...but I probably won't succeed.

The Shit Never Hits the Fan When You've got the Umbrella Open