The spice of life
We had a patient who had been huffing. ”Huffing?!” I thought, “who does that these days?” But indeed the patient had been doing it, and the mother produced the can to prove it.
a. you are much older than 16, the age where I thought huffing, if it were to happen, would happen.
b. it is not 1995, which is when I think the last reported case of huffing occurred.
A lady found a bump in the sidewalk that caused her to crash her motorized wheelchair. The second motor wheelchair wreck in my career, and in this one, the chair came off worse than the patient. She was refusing before we were over the threshold of the store she had stopped in. I wanted to slip the card of my favorite lawyer in her purse, but alas, he works out of state.
I think I had my first ‘sick person’ who actually turned out to be a sick person. Lots of calls come out as ‘sick person.’ It’s like the default category for calls where dispatch may or may not know what’s going on. Usually these calls turn out to be things like ‘fell in the bathroom’ ‘fainted’ or even ‘cardiac arrest’ but for some reason or another, the call is categorized as ‘sick person’ usually due to on the phone confusion.
But this guy was actually what I envision when I think of ‘sick.’ He’d been not feeling well in the tummy and threw up. That’s it. He didn’t seem into it, but his wife was insisting that he go to the hospital via ambulance while she’d follow us in the car. What?! It was like these people never lived life. I felt like saying “We are ambulance people, we come in peace. You are in a state which we call ‘sick’ which usually does not require any immediate medical attention. I prescribe…” looks at watch, “12 hours time, and you’ll feel much better.”
But instead we helped him to the ambulance and to the hospital where I’m afraid he spend most of those prescribed 12 hours being bored to tears in the ER.
At about 4am we had a chest pain call. I hate this general time of the day. I always feel disoriented if I’ve been sleeping. We arrived to find a guy sitting in his living room clutching his chest, sweating, and generally looking like crap (yes, that’s a technical term.) We got him in the ambulance and gave him the full ALS work up. His pain went from a 10 out of 10 to a three with a couple nitros, and the 12 lead was completely unremarkable. Whew! We set out toward the hospital and arrived without incident.
In addition: A teenager acting totally weird. Psych? Drugs? Simply being a teen? Who knows? A leg pain call that took less than 30 minutes start to finish, and a fainting that we couldn’t figure out so we did what we do best; went to the hospital.
a. you are much older than 16, the age where I thought huffing, if it were to happen, would happen.
b. it is not 1995, which is when I think the last reported case of huffing occurred.
A lady found a bump in the sidewalk that caused her to crash her motorized wheelchair. The second motor wheelchair wreck in my career, and in this one, the chair came off worse than the patient. She was refusing before we were over the threshold of the store she had stopped in. I wanted to slip the card of my favorite lawyer in her purse, but alas, he works out of state.
I think I had my first ‘sick person’ who actually turned out to be a sick person. Lots of calls come out as ‘sick person.’ It’s like the default category for calls where dispatch may or may not know what’s going on. Usually these calls turn out to be things like ‘fell in the bathroom’ ‘fainted’ or even ‘cardiac arrest’ but for some reason or another, the call is categorized as ‘sick person’ usually due to on the phone confusion.
But this guy was actually what I envision when I think of ‘sick.’ He’d been not feeling well in the tummy and threw up. That’s it. He didn’t seem into it, but his wife was insisting that he go to the hospital via ambulance while she’d follow us in the car. What?! It was like these people never lived life. I felt like saying “We are ambulance people, we come in peace. You are in a state which we call ‘sick’ which usually does not require any immediate medical attention. I prescribe…” looks at watch, “12 hours time, and you’ll feel much better.”
But instead we helped him to the ambulance and to the hospital where I’m afraid he spend most of those prescribed 12 hours being bored to tears in the ER.
At about 4am we had a chest pain call. I hate this general time of the day. I always feel disoriented if I’ve been sleeping. We arrived to find a guy sitting in his living room clutching his chest, sweating, and generally looking like crap (yes, that’s a technical term.) We got him in the ambulance and gave him the full ALS work up. His pain went from a 10 out of 10 to a three with a couple nitros, and the 12 lead was completely unremarkable. Whew! We set out toward the hospital and arrived without incident.
In addition: A teenager acting totally weird. Psych? Drugs? Simply being a teen? Who knows? A leg pain call that took less than 30 minutes start to finish, and a fainting that we couldn’t figure out so we did what we do best; went to the hospital.
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