STEMI

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I survived my first day at work as a cleared ALS provider. It was a little weird, but felt great. We had 6 calls in 12 hours, two were BLS. I had my first ‘superstat’ which means that it’s a critical patient that needs to be transferred ASAP. It’s pretty much the only time we get to go lights and sirens in the private ambo service. Our patient was having severe chest pain and was on several drip medications. Once we got her packaged and loaded it only took us 4 min to get to the receiving hospital. In that time the patient gained 1.5 cm of ST elevation in lead 1. We took her straight into a cardiac cath lab where they discovered she had nearly 100% occlusion of the left main, wow! (basically, the patient was having "the big one" (a bad heart attack) and was within minutes of being beyond help.)
Everything happened so quickly that the patient wasn’t even registered at the hospital before her cath was underway. When we went back out to the ambulance we were accosted by her daughter, who I think would have thrashed us if we hadn’t told her what was going on.

Also, yesterday I had a group presentation and had my final final, making the semester officially over! I’m going to try to get another state police clinical, but I already have the grade for the class, so it’s mostly an exercise in taking advantage of my situation.

Search term of the week (now that I have site meter, I can find all of the funny things that people googled that lead them to this blog):
“Glucagon Jokes” (because glucagon is possibly the funniest drug on the market. It does stand up for all of the insulin stores in the liver (wow, I made my own nerdar go off with that one.))

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