A Work in Progress

I forget most calls by the next day.  Looking back on the old blog, I remember more from years ago because I actually wrote them down.  So, here's a few. A guy with bleeding ulcers that had been leaking for about a week or so.  Yeah, you have no blood left. A man whose dialysis shunt sprung a leak.  Yeah, you have no blood left. A house fire where I gave a cat oxygen.  EMS bucket list check. (Damn, no media coverage of that!) A benzodiazepine overdose. Ooh, drugs and unconsciousness. An unconscious stroke displaying Cushings triad. Let's intubate you and atropine you, and get you right down to the ER real quick like.

Someone recently asked how many of my calls were true "emergencies". I said 5%. 5% may even be an over-estimation Something I’ve come to realize and have to accept that we are not in the business of saving lives. We are in the business of solving problems. Boiled down, our job is to be the clear head in the situation where no one else can seem to get their shit together. Yes this is a great illusion. It is not why I got into this business or why anyone got into this business. Work has become like air travel, long periods of boredom punctuated by tiny moments of excitement. Like, when a meal arrives. But maybe this is a natural part of any job. Any job becomes routine. Maybe anyone with 10 years in any field would feel the same way. Maybe anyone would say that their job is at its zenith 5% of the time. Maybe I am lucky that I can. That, or we’ve convinced ourselves that public service is easy and rewarding which often it is not. There is no sense in dwellin...

As a paramedic, have to be a pretty good negotiator. Maybe you are surprised that negotiation is an important aspect of the job. Sometimes people call, and then when we get there and bring some calm, they get cold feet. I have to convince people to stay home as well. “You have the flu, please don’t come to the ER.” I usually say through a window using a bull horn. When hospitals get busy, I have to sell alternatives. When I want to start an IV, but the patient doesn’t trust me yet, I get that done. I have to coax kids into not crying, coax parents into not crying. I have to squeeze information from human turnips that just about drive me crazy. At the same time, I have to figure out if these people are drug addled, drunk, or just plain lying to me. All this talking to people, as an introverted extrovert, is exhausting, but sometimes a rewarding part of the job. The other night, I couldn’t make anyone do anything. We started with a lady who had a seizure and then fell and...

So, here I am bored at work and I wonder…what ever happened to that blog I used to write? Yeah, there was stuff about EMS or ambulances…something like that. Sometimes stuff about travel. Oh! And a whole month of just pictures. Weird. Then, I think that the job got boring, or sad, or both and the blog sort of stopped. Sure, maybe a few meager posts here and there, but nothing too exciting or deep, but thankfully, no sad poetry either. Perhaps the world is blessed by having one less blog. One less tangle of self obsessed prose. One less (pre) millennial bitching about how hard real life is. One less quarter life crisis immortalized with questionable grammar in ones and zeros. “Oh, my job is boring. I don’t get paid enough. I’m single. Everything sucks. Oh, I go on trips and rub them in everybody’s face. Oh, I’ve filled the internet with 1000 blog posts, look at me go. Oh, my pets are cute.” No one cares.  Then I remember. All those calls that I can’t actually rem...