I’m responding to a sports injury, paged as a broken arm. Upon arrival we quickly triangulate the patient’s location from the screams.
I assume patient care. The probie who would normally be interfacing with the patient has a sort of glassy look that says. “OMFG a real injured person!” Had I allowed him to begin his assessment, it would have quickly deteriorated into “um…do you have any allergies?” without having even touched the patient.
… but napping is keeping it on life support.
As a university student, EMT, and someone who has worked in technical theatre professionally for almost 10 years, I am intimately familiar with exhaustion and sleep deprivation. I share with those who may stumble across this, my intimate knowledge of napping.
Napping is awesome for increasing your alertness, productivity, and cognitive function. It combats sleepiness, which can be hazardous when providing patient care or operating a vehicle.
Last night I went to an annual Christmas after-party at a close friend’s house. He’s graduating from vet school this year, so naturally our conversation turned to medicine. I was particularly interested in comparing the emergency care of animals and humans. Several things had plagued me on the windy drive up to his house.
Yes, they really did plague me. My nickname is “Nerd Alert” for a good reason.
Tones drop for a male with a bleeding disorder that cut his finger.
Band-aid brigade to the rescue!
We arrive to find our patient loosely holding a paper towel over the injury. That’s less than helpful, but I’ll give you a B for effort.
I grab his finger with a 4×4 (hey, it was handy), elevate, and squeeze hard enough to turn the distal segment white.
We get to talking – OPQRST and all that.
Ever wish you could visit the cadaver lab in your spare minutes between classes? Or even during a boring class (cough dramatic literature cough).
There’s an app for that.Short-partner told me about an iPhone app a long while ago that sounded pretty cool… but because I was frequently dropped on my head as a child, I never got around to looking it up. Then it was featured on my new favourite blog Street Anatomy.
Part of the reason I did so well in anatomy was because I developed a deep love for the human body and the beauty of it’s construction. It goes along with the whole “nerd” persona. I stumbled across a new blog the other day, and it is a sort of anatomy “nerdvana.”
Street Anatomy features all sorts of beautiful uses of anatomy in medicine, art, and design. I particularly enjoy their “Anatomic Fashion Friday” feature.
Tones drop.
EMS respond on a mid 20’s male having an asthma attack. Patient does not have their inhaler. First though: This could be lejit. Second though: But probably not. Off to the scene we scream in the gutless wonder. When we arrive on scene I talk to the officer who is already there. “Um…so when I reported asthma… I meant asthma.
I don’t like people who brag, and I don’t like being one of them. Sometimes, though, events call for celebration.
Last year I decided to really start pursuing emergency medicine as a career over technical theatre. As such, I took Human Anatomy this semester. I sat in on the lectures for a semester before I took it to see what I was getting into. I was afraid. Very afraid.
Rule #1: Any correlation between the dispatch and the actual call is strictly a coincidental.
Dispatcher: Band-aid brigade, copy medical. Swimming accident at the local pool. At least one patient. Lifeguards have backboarded the first patient. Groan. Clear across our response area for a stubbed toe? There are a number of assumed facts here that could easily be wrong. We go en route. Our supervisor beats us to the scene by just a minute or so.
One of the reasons I like EMS is because it can be intellectually challenging. I had a call recently that I thought was going to turn into an episode of House.
I was paged to an elderly female who had fainted. BFD. Geriatric DFO. I let the probie take patient care while I sat back with my “I’m-trying-to-look-cool-and-get-a-date-from-being-in-uniform” shades on.
Probie: Hey m’am we’re the band-aid brigaid. What seems to be going on today?