Advocate

I was down in my rural EMS agency for 24 hours riding with their career paramedics yesterday. One of the career medics is also a lab instructor in my class, so I really enjoy the benefit of spending time on a unit with him.

We had one call from a nursing home for a man who had vomited 3 times 5 hours earlier in the day. No n/v/d on our arrival. We ran some fluid and took him in. He was pretty tachy, but I think he was just nervous for the ride.

Our second big call came out in the early evening for a teenager involved in a car-hit-tree accident. It was the first time I've seen real, full windshield, starring. The patient was originally entrapped, but sitting straight up when we got there. We packaged her very quickly and got on our way down south to a major Level I trauma center. She seemed pretty stable with A,B,C's intact - the two very concerning things were repetitive questioning and loss of memory and also an obviously broken and dislocated jaw. There was blood pooling out of her ear, something else I had never seen. The medic and I got things done well and very quickly in the back.

The most rewarding part of that call was when she could remember her Aunt's phone number (she couldn't remember her Mom's). I called and talked to both Aunt and then Mother on the phone while reassuring her the entire time. I felt like I was really doing something for this family in their time of need. The first question the mother asked me through repetitive sobbing was "Can my daughter breathe?" I assured her yes. When we were rolling her into the ER and then into the Trauma/Resuscitation Bay, I asked her if there was anything I could do for her. She said "Please just stay with me." I took her hand and didn't let go until the trauma docs forced my partner and I out of the room so they could do their jobs.

Nothing we did for that girl medically compared to the little comfort we were able to provide her and the conversation I had with her family members. It felt like I really did some good for a distressed patient.

I've been in and out of clinicals lately. I've seen some interesting things - a teenage burn patient, a no-PMH woman that was going into recurrent v-tach and felt "dizzy", a rapid A-Fib at a rate of over 200 (I initially misidentified it as SVT...always more to learn!), and a teenage knee dislocation. Lots more standard things too.

We took our fourth unit test on Wednesday, and I got a 94%. There are only six unit tests in class, plus the exams for ACLS, PALS, and ITLS and the final. We have 8 hours of cardiology lecture tomorrow.