A 24

Unfortunately, you don’t get a 3 day weekend for free around here. My traded shift landed me with a 24 hour shift yesterday. But, it turned out to be not so bad. The first half of the day was on a transfer truck. We had a long distance call that made me an hour late for my night shift. Too bad it didn’t count as overtime.

911 wise, we had a very good night. I got to miss a call for a lady who fell down and needed to be picked up. So, my first call was for a girl who was “unresponsive.” She did a very good job ignoring painful stimuli, failed the ‘you won’t drop your arm on your own face’ test, but when we asked her to stand up, she did, so I’ll admit I was a bit baffled.
We learned she had a history of eating disorders and the rest of her history was sketchy at best so we gave her the good ol’ coma cocktail. Well, her blood sugar was good so she didn’t need the D-50 and I don’t think she needed Narcan either, but last time we had an ‘unresponsive’ the nurse on the med radio asked if I’d given Narcan. “Um, pupils are equal and reactive and breathing rate is 16 with no evidence of IV drug use.” She insisted that I try it anyway, which I didn’t. But anyway, we tried it this time, (‘cause why not?) with no change. We also gave her thiamine, which was cool as I’d never done that before.
She was looking a bit better by the time we arrived at the hospital, and she was talking to me. She told me she hadn’t eaten in days.
I hope she gets the help she needs.

Later we had an interesting car accident involving a girl who was high running into a car full of guys who were drunk. My patient was lying in the back seat, confused, and drunk out of his mind. We got him all c-spined and what-not and he stopped asking what happened, and seemed to understand his situation which made me feel better about his chances of having a head injury. We got him into the ER and the nurse asked him his name, and he gave her a completely different name than he had given me. I stuck around for a minute only to hear him give a different address, social number, and birth date as well. I informed the nurse of this and hopefully they sorted out whether he hit his head too hard or those ‘few beers’ were clouding his memory.
After that I got to sleep for five hours. Hurrah!

Today I’m loving NH because I can’t believe it’s August and I’m happily enjoying a mug of hot cider, ah heaven.

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