The solution to and cause of all our problems...

The other night I met my first regular.
me: “How much have you had to drink today?”
regular: “A lot!”

Later we had a call come out as an ‘asthma attack.’ When we arrived the pt. was lying on the street writhing around like a fish out of water with her friend all up in her business trying to calm her down. We quickly popped her into the ambulance and I set about getting her to chill long enough to listen to her breath sounds. This proved impossible, so I decided to giver her a neb anyway, if she thinks she’s having an attack, whether she is or not, it’ll help her chillax. That lasted about 2 minutes before she threw it off, and continued to writhe around and breath heavily and loudly. "Hmm," thought I. A quick consult with the friend, revealed she only had three drinks and nothing else. Everything else appearing normal, we set off toward the hospital. Gradually, she calmed down replacing the dramatic breathing with shouting expletives at nothing in particular. "Only three drinks?" thought I. The friend continued to shout encouraging words from the front seat, only to have the patient reply loudly with some very unfriendly things about her. "I would resent those blonde comments, if they weren't so entertaining," thought I. I could barely contain my amusement.

The friend, who was initially terrified at thinking her friend couldn’t breathe, began to see the hilarity of the situation, and that her friend was merely hopelessly intoxicated. Around the crescendo of the patients’ angry, drunken tirade, the friend said incredulously to us, “I can’t believe you guys do this every day!”
On the way back to the station, my partner and I concluded that those kind of calls were worth getting woken up for.

The rest of the evening/night/morning was filled with an hour extrication from a house, our rig taken apart and put back together, some sleeping, a possibly drunk person; who definitely drove into another car, and finally, 15 min before the end of shift, a treatable patient.

Comments

Anonymous said…
Sometimes I just love drunk people. They are so funny and amusing, but there are those that are just terrible and mean and really try my patience. There are times when I myself can't belive that we do this everyday.

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