Eydawn

Why do you have a crew chief who is too young to drive? That's my first question. Just curious, but am I smelling some good 'ol boy "boss's daughter" stuff going on here? My second question is why a crew chief thought it was appropriate to interfere with an EMT who wanted to do a rapid exam on a patient who obviously needed to be backboarded. A fall from standing in an elderly patient is a cat of a different color than a fall from standing for a younger or middle aged person... a simple fall can trigger a huge number of problems for someone who is elderly. These would be the crux of the issue. If you're going to backboard someone you need to do a rapid exam first, so that you can document any changes that occur after backboarding. The problem now is to explore why this didn't happen, without casting "blame" or calling names. And chin up- you didn't withhold anything that resulted in patient death... so it could be very much worse. Go talk this call out with your EMS chief. Explain your perspective, and try to figure out why your crew chief decided that examination was not necessary. Don't shred the chief, just analytically approach the situation and explain why you felt certain things were necessary and why you didn't agree with your crew chief. INVOLVE THE CREW CHIEF in the conversation!! It's not a personal issue, it's an issue of call review to ensure that you are acting according to your protocols. You felt the call was not appropriately handled (PER PROTOCOL), and as a learning exercise for everyone it is important to make sure that you're all on the same page. That would be my suggestion. Yes, you have a lot to learn, but so do all of us... and there's a reason you're taught to follow protocols. If this was indeed a protocol breach, it needs to be figured out. Good luck to you! Wendy CO EMT-B

Grammar Nazi Engage!!!! *WOOOP! WOOOP!* Chaser, when you're going to chastise someone for their grammar and spelling, you should probably make sure your own post is error free first. Miss Interprit I'm sure is a nice lady, but you didn't provide her with any corrected spelling, so the chastisement I'm sure is a lost cause with this particular chiding. If you're going to quote the misspelled word, then include the correct one, lest someone MISINTERPRET what is going on. I initially thought YOU were the author of that word before I went back through the posts. ;-) just saying... First of all, this is really disjointed. A grammatically correct way of stating this would have been "Your use of 'to' was incorrect in your sentence, it should have been 'too.'" And I have only ever seen the word Grammer where it referred to Kelsey Grammer... the word you were searching for is "grammar." You know... that little thing that governs the English Language... I don't know what a sterotype is, but you're not helping any stereotypes here... people in glass houses and so forth... Thus endeth the Grammar Nazi Rant! Wendy CO EMT-B

First of all, they should never have allowed her to handle their weapons. That alone is probably a firing-worthy offense. Taking pictures of a half nekkid waitress with your car and putting them up somewhere public is absolutely going to be against department policy. It's stupid. It's not necessary. And I'm not going to be shocked if they're fired. If you take a picture of a nurse playing "nursie time" in the stockroom and put it up everywhere, the employer's gonna be pissed... same with holding defib paddles to a Hooters girl's hooters... I say again: it's stupid! Wendy CO EMT-B

Sorry, cos, I missed this thread earlier. I'll try to revive it for you. Where to start? There are many stories that have contributed their share in defining who I am. It's a really long story, even though I'm only 23! First of all, I was home-schooled prior to high school. This contributed greatly to my intellectual capabilities, as I was able to move forward at the pace that best suited me. My mother was a demanding and exacting teacher with very high standards, and public school only became an option when my mother realized that she couldn't teach herself calculus from an answer manual and thereby couldn't help teach it to me. I entered high school at the age of 13. (This is the short version. PM me if you want to know more about my earlier life.) Let me tell you something. Home-schooling didn't do a lot for my social development. While I realize that I am who I am because I was the odd-duck with a strong sense of self and simultaneous meandering ignorance with regard to mainstream social interaction, I would not repeat the experience. It took me several years to learn all of the subtleties of social interaction that most people acquire via osmosis. I still miss out on certain things, but I have learned to identify where my areas of weakness are. I also grew up as one of the only white girls in the middle of the ghetto. I lived next door to a liquor store, across the street from an inner city high school, with a public bus stop in front of my house. Literally, I have picked up bullets from inside my front yard and inside my house. I developed a very strong sense of situational awareness and body language- I had to. If you didn't know how to read a group conflict, you didn't know when to duck and run for cover. The 4th of July and New Year's Eve are occasions to hide in the innermost room of the house, sitting on the floor, hoping to avoid stray gunfire. I've known how to handle a handgun since the age of 8, in case I ever needed to defend myself. I wouldn't exist if my mother hadn't had a Colt 45 when she was 8 months pregnant... but that's another story. High school. This is where I developed premonitions. I won't go into detail here, as I think I have in other threads, but suffice it to say that having to tell your principal that you had a recurrent dream about a bomb threat on the morning that it actually happens is not the greatest of experiences... High school is also where my love of medicine developed. I became a member of the Boy Scouts of America through their Venturing program, and attained my First Responder with my crew. I began providing support at a variety of scouting events, and began to love medicine for all of its complexities. I was fortunate to have wonderful mentors, some closer to my age than others, who really taught me a lot about life. One of the hardest decisions I ever made was to leave my crew behind so I could attend college in Michigan for nearly 3 years. College. I would have to say that one of the hardest experiences in college was directly related to my experience with premonitions. I sat here and argued with myself for a few hours as to whether or not I really wanted to dive into this story again; I wrote about it in my creative non-fiction class, and I still struggle with it. This is something that will never leave me. I think I will just copy and paste what I wrote, as I think it will be easier than trying to re-tell the story. It also explains the premonitions in a way that I think is a lot more accessible than trying to explain it all over again. ‘Of all the horrid, hideous notes of woe, Sadder than owl-songs or the midnight blast; Is that portentous phrase, "I told you so."’ -George Gordon, Lord Byron Maybe for you it starts differently than it does for me—I can only hope so, for your sake. Maybe you are physically catapulted, in your mind, into that nebulous other dimension that we are all able to taste occasionally—whether it be through a touch of Déjà vu or a simple feeling of having been somewhere before, even though you know you haven’t. For me, it isn’t a clean break like that. Sometimes it’s almost like double vision, like blacking out with sound super-imposing itself in my perception over other, real sounds from the world around me. The cacophony is raucous, tinny, almost like driving full speed through a tunnel with your windows open and stereo blaring, echoes and sound-waves struggling to catch up with your belabored eardrums and never being quite sure which sound is which—which is real, there for others around you to hear, and which is coming through from somewhere else. Do you know where it comes from? Or what it really is? After all this time, I can’t answer this question. Maybe you will find the answer. Do your eyes water like mine do, causeless tears from nowhere streaming down your face? Do you get that tingly electric hair-on-the-back -of-your-neck-raised feeling that spreads outward in waves across your body from the bump that is your first thoracic vertebrae, poking out where your neck and the rest of your spine meet? Does that feeling wash over your entire conscious experience in a singular moment of now that absorbs all of your energy and focus? I hope it is gentler for you than it is for me—I hope your entry into these snippets of possible future is sweeter than mine, if it happens to you at all. Maybe one of you will see something familiar in the experiences I have to offer here. Most of you will probably think I’m crazy. It’s a risk I’m willing to take. I used to think I was alone, but as I have grown and loved and lived I have discovered others. Here and there throughout my life I have found them—the brother of a friend here, a passing acquaintance there, my future husband, and we have been so delighted to not be alone that we have shared bits of the intensity that is not-yet-come Déjà vu. But we do not always share the vulnerability and the guilt of the car wreck we heard before it happened, or the conversation we could have spoken in unison, verbatim, with the people who entered the room right after we did. I seldom share the more frightening, and thankfully rare visions that have shaken me with others. But I will share some of them with you, in case you struggle with a similar guilt, that we may eventually learn together to let go. The first premonitions that I can remember started in high school, when I was fourteen. One was particularly frightening, and it began as a series of dreams. The first night, I dreamt that I stood on the fourth floor of my high school. In the dream, I watched a man, face hidden in darkness, pour gasoline on the floors. He went running with the bright red can turned upside down, the splashing liquid spreading quickly across the marbled surface. I followed him, only to wake up just as he pulled a single match out of his pocket. Having been terrified of fire ever since I was a small girl, the dream disturbed me. ** Did I tell you why I’m afraid of fire? Come with me. My mother is at the bottom of the stairs, calling to me. I am in the bathtub. She yells something about fire. Frantic, running, naked and wet, I am scrambling for my clothes… running down the stairs and outside… and the fire is not ours. My neighbor’s house is on fire, and the children are climbing out of the second story window onto the porch roof. Smoke is pouring from the windows behind them, blackening their skin. Can you smell it? I can still smell the bitter smoke. ** The dream repeated itself, except this time I stayed asleep long enough to watch the match flare and hit the floor, creating an unearthly incendiary glow immediately hidden behind an acrid black cloud. The third night, instead of gasoline, I watched this same shadowed figure place something I knew to be a bomb into a cardboard box even though I couldn’t clearly see what the object was. He hastily shoved it underneath a tiny wrought-iron staircase that gave access to the roof. As he turned to move away from what he had done, I watched him throw a crumpled piece of paper into the box. The dreams seemed bizarre to me, but it was not the first time I had experienced a recurrent dream, so I paid it little mind after waking. Many times growing up I had dreamed the same dream several nights in a row. Some of the more embarrassing ones involved the classic hero-princess in distress motif in various thirteen-year old kid variations, with my current crush featured as the savior. This dream seemed odd, but felt no different to me than any other dream. ** Come to school with me. It is the morning after the last dream. Do you see what I see? There are cop cars surrounding the school. Lights flashing, they have blocked every vehicular access to the building. There are fire trucks parked out front, but the men are wandering outside the building without their jackets on. Walk with me around to the back where everyone seems to be and we can find out what’s going on. There’s Ms. Hinz… we can ask her what happened. “Bomb threat called in to the school.” Is she serious? She can’t be serious. I can barely breathe for a few seconds, fearing to say anything about what I might know in case they think I’ve done it, or worse, ridicule me for being childish. Most school administrators are paranoid because of what happened at Columbine, and anyone who seems to be involved with something unusual is automatically suspect. I am afraid, because it was just a dream and this shouldn’t be happening. Dreams aren’t real. Dreams don’t work like this. Reality doesn’t work like this. Cold chills and nerves shaking my frame, I tell Ms. Hinz about the dreams, prefacing it with “you know, this is going to sound really crazy. But on the off chance that it means something…” Instead of condemning me, or outright dismissing me as crazy (both sensible options as far as I was concerned) she brings me to the school administrators, to tell them what I have seen. ** Later, they would call me into the office after the building had been searched, to tell me that there had indeed been a box where I had seen one placed in my dream, and there had been a crumpled note in it from the person who had called in the bomb threat. I think they may have put me on the watch list after that, but I never did anything to rouse their suspicions. Fortunately, I was never forced to seek out psychological help. After this day, I started to wonder if something was wrong with me. Normal people didn’t dream about things before they happened, and while I had heard about people who claimed to be pre-cognitive or psychic, they always struck me in their TV interviews as being a few pickles short of a barrel. The last thing I wanted was to lose my sanity or be lumped into an even weirder category than I already inhabited in the minds of my peers and teachers. I tried to pass it off in my own mind as mere coincidence—but too many things kept happening that I couldn’t explain away. The premonitions began to seep over into waking moments. One minute I’d be sitting in class, looking at the clock and wondering why it was a half hour fast… the next, I’d be blinking furiously, trying to clear tears from my eyes as the clock reset itself to the proper time. This wouldn’t seem too weird, except I would hear the fire alarm go off as the clock hit the time I had first seen as I came into the classroom, and my spine would tingle. I began to hear car accidents before they happened. I’d see and hear small things happen around me, hear conversations in my head that wouldn’t actually happen until after lunch, know what was wrong at home before I got there… after a certain frequency, chance metamorphoses into something that cannot easily be dismissed as insignificant. The dreams became fewer and further between, but the waking moments increased in frequency. Sometimes, it felt like living two lives— one life in the present, and one in the future. It was terrifying and difficult to explain. Eventually, I learned to accept that the premonitions happened, as many of them, although not all, came to pass in front of me. Once I got to that point, I began to lose some of my fear. Most of them were fairly mundane, so the shock began to wear off slightly, even though the physical reaction remained the same. As a young woman navigating my development as a person, I simply tried to accept it as a part of myself. At the time, I had begun to develop a spiritual understanding of the world, so I accepted the premonitions as part of my religious heritage and began to wonder if God might have some plan for me. After all, weren’t there prophets in the Bible? Being given a foretaste of the future wasn’t completely unheard of, although it is not commonplace or widely accepted in our science-obsessed modern society. I couldn’t rationalize the premonitions without including my newly discovered religious beliefs. Simply being a freak of nature seemed too cold and less appealing than accepting myself as one of God’s different children, even as I researched to the extent of my ability to find an answer for why this was happening to me, to see if it could be explained scientifically. I learned very quickly not to share this part of myself with many people. Most I dared to share it with either dismissed it as another facet of my already weird, geeky persona, or attributed it to an overactive imagination. Since I was already viewed as enough of a freak in high school, the nerdy teacher’s pet with awkward social skills and coke-bottle glasses, I suppressed it and hid it from nearly everyone, only bringing it up when I felt it to be absolutely necessary. I hid it from my parents, not wanting to worry them. I graduated high school, still hiding inside the awkward shell, still searching for answers. I followed my first love to college, spending a delightful three days in a road trip to Michigan with him and both of our mothers. Both of us seemed to make friends quickly there, in the dorm; it was different from anything we’d ever experienced before. As we began to settle into a new life there, he began to acclimate to the humidity of Western Michigan—I found it much more difficult. The humidity and mold count exacerbated my asthma. And I discovered something new about my talent; it seemed that the more I had to use my rescue inhaler to combat the chest tightness, and the more caffeine I ingested the more frequent and pronounced the visions became. Since I was nearly always ill at that point from the change in climate and found myself caught in the cycle of college procrastination and late nights, my consumption of albuterol and coffee skyrocketed, sending my dreams and waking moments into places I could never have anticipated. Occasionally, the things I would see would scare me, but most of the time I managed to let it fade into the background, since I could never tell with accuracy which dreams were poised to come true. I began to slowly tell certain people about my dreams and visions and since many people were engaged in their own adventure to find the self, my idiosyncrasy seemed less threatening. Even so, some of the visions would shake me. I could never quite get used to the sudden violence of accidents, or waking in a cold sweat at having seen my friends be hurt in some way. I rarely told someone that I had seen something about them—even though people were more accepting of the fact that I had premonitions, nobody liked hearing about ones that they were involved in. It seemed to be a natural fear, to me, so I made sure that I was careful about who I talked to. For months, this remained the status quo. Bouncing from illness to illness and surviving at the mercy of a metered dose inhaler, I tried to maintain focus on my class work and the friends I had made. ** The status quo never lasts for long, does it? I guess we should go back to the day that will haunt me for as long as I can foresee… I owe it to him to let the story be told. Come with me. Let me show you my dorm, and what life was like for me back then. I lived in a dormitory that is segmented by gender; the girls’ wing that I live in is on the second floor of this brick and cinder-block structure. Directly beneath is the guys’ wing—full of jocks, mostly, with subwoofers that can vibrate nickels across my linoleum floor when they get frisky on the weekends. It’s pretty interesting, walking through their hallway to get to the stairwell; they have an interesting idea of what appropriate conversation should be like. I know most of the guys in this hall to some degree. There’s Tazar, the interminably sweet and terminally stupid drunk, and his Halo buddies—Alex, Eric, and the others. Often, the game of the day involves innocent passers-by avoiding the barrage of Airsoft pellets that click and bounce between their rooms. Sometimes there’s foul language as someone catches a pellet in a particularly sensitive area, and then the perpetrator gets chased out into the snow. And then there is Brandon. ** Even when I can’t remember Brandon’s face, I can still see his smile, and the guitar perched on his knee. ** Brandon loves his music, and the love he pours into playing his guitar fills our dormitory with a feeling that speaks to each of us in some way. Most of his close friends live up on the third floor, in the mixed wing. He is always smiling, laughing, teasing everyone. He is quieter than the other boys in his hall. He always has his door open, always ready to chat with whoever stops by. ** I still regret that I didn’t see the sadness in his eyes. ** I am waking in a cold sweat in the hot, cloistered dark, having watched one of the boys from the hall below me commit suicide. The next night, and the next, I wake again, watching each one of them hang himself, swallow pills and vodka, slash wrists into a red waterfall, lie down with a plastic bag balaclava. I am terrified, shaken…. I don’t have anything specific enough to go on, since the dreams haven’t focused on the same person every time. The memories of rejection and ridicule from high school prevent me from just walking down at three in the morning to wake everyone up and try to figure out who is so desperately alone. I am afraid to go down and speak to every guy in the hall, to ask them how they’re feeling or if they’ve been having problems lately. I am weak, and afraid of re-awakening that ridicule. Instead of confronting it, I pretend that I have seen and heard nothing. I try to convince myself that it is a fleeting and morbid fascination, with no basis in reality. Do I seem cowardly to you? When I go back to this place, I often feel ashamed. I feel ashamed, because I was wrong— and he paid the price because of my cowardice. It is February 9th, 2005. Dance practice has just ended, and it is time to go back to shower and change. Walk with me out into the cold evening towards my dorm— something feels different. Something doesn’t feel right. Look—there in the red square, next to the fountain—there is a police cruiser. I feel like we should walk faster. There’s the dorm, surrounded by police cars, our own campus security, and a few emergency response vehicles. Can you see my knees begin to shake with more than fatigue? Can you see the fear in my eyes as I fervently pray that my dreams are not involved with whatever is happening inside? We push the door open and stumble inside, blinded by cold. Turn with me to go down the guys’ hall—but the grim-faced security guard is pushing us back, telling me that we can’t go down that way. Look at the faces around us- do you know what their expressions mean? I do. I know what this means. I can’t believe this is happening. This can’t be real. Please, don’t let this be real. Not this time. In a panic, I leave the building, overwhelmed and unable to bear knowing who is dead. Who I have failed. Can you keep up with me? We are walking around the outside of the dorm, aimlessly. Who is that standing there, with his cell phone, frozen? It looks like Brandon’s old roommate, Quinn. I should introduce you to Quinn—always the first with a joke, always laughing, and never overly serious, Quinn is the master of humor. He is a manly man, interested in beer, sports, women, and rough-housing. Barely a day goes by without Quinn haranguing someone, gleefully chanting “Oh… he LOVES the cock! Yep. That’s our boy. Loves the cock!” in mock homophobia. Why is he standing here? I know it’s him, because I can see his leather jacket reflecting the walkway lamps. “Quinn?” I ask, trying to suppress my tears. “What’s going on?” Quinn answers in a voice I’ve never heard from him before. He is crying. Quinn is crying, tears dripping down his face from behind his glasses, his ball-cap almost ready to fall off the back of his head. “I think my roommate from last year just killed himself.” His voice breaks. “They… they’re telling me that Brandon is dead.” I think my knees are giving out. I can feel Quinn grabbing me, our friend Kyle coming up from somewhere, grabbing my other arm. I can feel them helping me inside, into a chair. At some point, between sobs, between waves of guilt, I tell them. ** There is no way to really describe the guilt that grabbed me that night. Shame, self-loathing, regret… none of these words says enough.. If I was meant to have some forewarning, why wouldn’t I have been able to see enough to save him? Why would a just God give me a gift that I couldn’t use? I was angry, and worse, I felt like I had failed Brandon and everyone who loved him. In that moment of extreme vulnerability, I told Quinn about my dreams—about the premonitions I’d had before, and the ones I had about someone committing suicide on Brandon’s floor. I was sure he would reject me. Instead, at Brandon’s open-microphone memorial in the chapel the next evening, Quinn sat next to me and put his arm around me. We cried together. To this day I am not completely sure how Quinn felt when I told him, since Quinn is fairly reticent with emotion. Quinn avoids the tough conversations, hiding behind humor and the macho façade. I know he believed me, and I don’t think he blamed me. I grieve for him more than anyone. I could have spared him that pain… I could have protected him, too. I could have. I should have. But fear made me weak, and my weakness hurt all of us. It took me a long time to begin to let go of the guilt. The college put up a lamp-post in front of our student center in Brandon’s memory, with his birth and death dates and our motto, “Lux esto.” Nearly every day I would stop, and stand in front of it and touch it. “Lux esto, Brandon… be light” I would whisper, choking back shame and grief. After months constantly blaming myself, and wanting nothing to do with the premonitions, I finally came to the realization that there was nothing I had missed, no vital piece that could have saved Brandon. I needed something specific to confront him with, to overcome my own fear, and there must have been a reason that it wasn’t given to me. Usually this reassures me. ** Maybe it’s not just the future, for you. It certainly isn’t just the future for me. I think the past manages to break through as well. Sometimes, when I walk through the quiet woods at night, listening and searching for a lost someone, I hear the heartbeat of the earth. It may be echoed through a loop of the past; it dances its way into my present. I hear chanting and drums, rituals and life and love from people no longer living in the woods I walk through, unmistakably alien tongues singing to my English ear. I know it is the past because its intrusion into my consciousness is not nearly so invasive or violent—it lacks that skin-crawling feeling of forbidden knowledge that no-one is supposed to have. It feels old, done, somewhat sad… as if it lives on its own somewhere, in a corner that no one can stumble into anymore. And yet, every so often, I seem to find the corner. But more frequently, I seem to trip over and into an errant loop of future that happens to be snaking its way around us, beneath our conscious notice. I have accepted my path. To honor Brandon, and to never forget him, I pay close attention to my dreams. I am no longer afraid of being labeled. The heartbeat of the earth reassures me, soothes me… and reminds me to be aware. ** But some days I still wake up, and whisper “Lux esto,” praying for forgiveness. The dreams still come.

Under dreaming-- I have no issues when I'm practicing wilderness EMS. The majority of my experience since acquiring my cert in 2005 has been in the wilderness setting... where I get to think things through and be in charge of how I want to run things. And I learn something new with every patient I encounter in that setting. I think the major problem for me was the urban service I was hired on with and their emphasis on speed before thought. My confidence in the urban setting is shot because I got turned six ways to Sunday trying to please several different preceptors, all of whom wanted to mold me into their own personal mini-me-EMT. I'm still good to go in the wilderness setting... I guess I need to just suck it up and give urban another try, but again, the dilemma of having enough education to be comfortable in that setting and to know when to assert myself against potentially harmful preceptors is what scares me a little bit. I'm also not just pursuing RN because I want the education to become a better EMS provider; I really like nursing ethics and the nursing approach to care. I hope to be able to do both sides- in hospital and pre-hospital. They're different kinds of care, and there are advantages and disadvantages to both. I love my current job in an assisted living facility as a care provider... and the nuances of continuing care are fascinating to me. Sorry if I derailed this thread... and sorry for whining. I'm still frustrated with the way things turned out with the service I was with... it looked great, the pay was great, and I got inside and found myself in the middle of a mess I had no prayer of changing. My biggest shame is that I shut my mouth and let these paramedics do stuff that I knew was wrong (both medically and ethically)... and I didn't speak up because I wanted to keep my job and not make waves until I had been there long enough to build some credit... and that didn't work either. This was supposed to be one of the better services... and seeing just how broken it really was bothered me. Again... sorry for any incidental rantage.... no offense was intended. Wendy CO EMT-B

Firefly: You haven't read many of my historical posts, I don't think.... I've had multiple posts over the years I've been here offering constructive solutions and discussing medicine in EMS. Hell, I came back from my honeymoon and posited the idea of an NP/medic hybrid as a solution for rural areas... take a look through my post history and see what I've had to say. Perhaps in your area nurses don't actually provide care... but I know nurses in my area who are currently employed, and they provide a LOT more care than most of the medics I also know. There may be some geographical discrepancy here. I've never had a problem with higher level health professionals (read: RN's, MD's, PA's, etc.) respecting me. I am very eager to learn, and gobble up knowledge whenever and wherever I get it. Do you know what that attitude got me when I actually had a position in paid EMS for four months? I got treated like dirt, because I actually wanted to think about the medicine and take a little bit of time to learn the EMS skill set in a way that made sense to me. It was bad that I wanted to learn things, instead of operating like a good little cookbook, racist, patient-abusing clone of my preceptors. I got burned by a bad service, and I am slightly bitter about it. I apologize for the bias this has caused in my posts lately. That experience taught me one thing-- that Kiwi is right. For most services, it doesn't matter how much education you've got. The problem is that you have to win the approval of the entrenched ignorant in order to survive, let alone have the work environment be tolerable, and I'm just not willing to kiss the ass of bad medics in order to work my way up the chain. I've seen far less of this in nursing than in EMS, which is why nursing appeals to me. I also like the scope of nursing and the potential to move higher up (get one's NP, for example) which doesn't really exist in EMS. I haven't given up on EMS. What has happened is that I've had my confidence shot by being jerked around, and by realizing how much I really don't know as a Basic.... but most programs have this asinine requirement of "1 year prehospital experience" to get in to get your paramedic degree. It is extraordinarily frustrating to be told that I have to think like a medic without having the full mental toolbox (drugs be damned, I want the pathophysiology) to do so. I hate flying blind. And I hate being forced to fly blind and to be discriminated against because of my intelligence. I know that I don't know everything. I'm acutely aware of that fact. Double-checking my actions and trying to talk through my thought process with my medic on what was going on with patients got me labeled as "covering up incompetence with intelligence" and "lack of confidence in abilities." Figure that one out for me... I've been trying for a few months now to sort through that one. It isn't that I can't stand EMS; it's that I lament the shambles that our system seems to be in. I hate that the good old boys, fire based or not, have a stranglehold on the system and are preventing us from raising educational standards so that all medics would be like YOU: well educated, and actually giving half a damn about patients. Most people go into EMS not to avoid the paperwork, but to avoid having to actually challenge themselves to learn. It's easy to coast in EMS, and that's what I can't stand. I want to help change EMS and raise the standards, because our patients deserve better. I just don't have the resilience right now to go back into the broken system. So I'm getting my RN, and probably re-entering the EMS field AFTER having acquired that education... Hope this clears things up for you. Wendy CO EMT-B

Where are you? I need to know what state you're in so I can contact my beekeeper friend to figure out who you really need to call. Please, PLEASE don't kill this healthy colony. I can find you a beekeeper to take it, I promise. I know there are beekeepers who would be willing to drive to collect that swarm. Wendy CO EMT-B

Where are you? I need to know what state you're in so I can contact my beekeeper friend to figure out who you really need to call. Please, PLEASE don't kill this healthy colony. I can find you a beekeeper to take it, I promise. I know there are beekeepers who would be willing to drive to collect that swarm. Wendy CO EMT-B

Fiz, that's the exact reason that I'm applying to nursing schools. On the waitlist for one, waiting to hear from a competitive entry accelerated BSN program. Isn't it sad that the M in EMS is neglected so much? I initially got into all of this for the medicine... only to discover very little medicine in the field. Oh well... at least my splinting skills are useful for SAR.... Wendy CO EMT-B

And this is why I think I might never come back to urban pre-hospital EMS. It's a "bad thing" for you to think. It's bad to have knowledge, to want to actually think through treatment modalities instead of "put an IV in it, splint it, get vitals, drive, wash your hands." I don't want to be a god damn taxi cab. I don't even *like* driving emergent. I want to treat my patients and be involved in their care! This is why we're stuck in the dark ages in EMS.... it's so bass ackwards it's not even funny anymore. Wendy CO EMT-B

Condolences to everyone involved. This just completely sucks for A: The family with the original coded patient- how traumatic is it to have your medic die while working your loved one?! B: The paramedic's family and C: The department this guy worked for. Wendy CO EMT-B

Not all private, small, liberal arts schools breed responsibility-duckers. My former classmates from Kalamazoo College are some of the more accomplished and self-reliant individuals within my age group... the folks from the bigger universities are much more likely to complain about "unfair" and piss and moan instead of acting to change things. Of course, this is only anecdotal experience, but the trend has held true so far. It all depends on the culture of the school. Kalamazoo College, while very insular during the undergraduate career, is all about teaching people that the work you put in is directly related to the benefits that you reap. Networking and global consciousness are highlighted skills... Other small schools just breed "I'm better than you simply because I went here" attitudes with a lack of self awareness. Just saying!! Wendy CO EMT-B

Way to go non-sequitir! First of all, I am not liberal. While I am actually much more conservative than most in my age group, I now classify myself as an independent. My views, much like the issues I ponder, are usually not simple and don't fall to "left" or "right"... Way to stereotype, and to completely miss the content of my post (again). How we've fought in Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq is only tangentially related to the original intent of this thread, which was to remind us all of the terrible and awesome power of nuclear technology, as well as the responsibilities that go along with wielding said power. Your contribution to the discussion began, let me remind you, with this: You started by calling names and jumping to the conclusion that we were all "afraid" of the bomb or weeping heart liberals who cry every day for the shadows burned into the ground at Hiroshima... which was not the content of the thread at all. People were merely discussing the power of nuclear bombs, and musing as to whether those who created them really understood the capacity of their creation... You, sir, I iterate again, are a FOOL. I am perfectly aware of our military history (and have probably studied it a bit more extensively than you have) and while I share your view that our assertions of power and dominance have been lacking in recent years, I disagree with those who would "nuke Mecca." I have a profound distaste for extremism, no matter which side of the line it falls on. Back to your regularly scheduled thread concerning the historical anniversary of the use of nuclear bombs... Wendy CO EMT-B

Crotchity, you are a fool. I don't understand what your malfunction is. I really don't. We all appreciate a world that has been shaped by the magnitude of this power. I don't think any of us decry something that we cannot possibly change; we can analyze it and understand it, and some will claim it an atrocity while others will view it as a political necessity that potentially saved more lives than were lost. We would be fools to not recognize the destructive capabilities and intense power associated with these historical events. And it is well to remember, rather than allowing ourselves to forget and our understanding to fade. Wendy CO EMT-B

Aw, shucks! You guys are too good to me. My husband spoiled me rotten today!!! It was a good birthday, up until the point where I had to come in to work an overnight shift, lol. But it's all good. Thanks folks!! --Wendy

If I could understand your post, I could give you more help. Are you looking to see if there are studies related to the impact that watching a patient die has on providers? I think that's what you were asking... but it was so jumbled, I couldn't quite figure it out. Wendy CO EMT-B

!!! Blue mice !!!! I want a blue mouse!!! I think it's really cool. Hopefully it goes well in clinical trials. It'll be cool to see what the human level dose will do. Wendy CO EMT-B

Mental Retardation is in fact a valid diagnosis. While I don't disagree that the terminology is somewhat behind the curve, I also take no offense at the term. I prefer Developmentally Disabled, personally... but if you get someone's med sheet and it has their diagnoses listed and mental retardation is one of them, you better reproduce it in your trip sheet, whether you like the term or not. And let's not forget that they go in and change what's "appropriate" about every 4 months in the DD field... "client" changes to "consumer" changes to "client" again... MR changes to DD back to MR... Wendy CO EMT-B

This is an easy one. The doodad that secures the monitor, or the O2 tanks, or the cot. It doesn't hold well enough, $h!t goes flying and folks get whacked with it, either during a hard stop or a wreck. That'd be my guess. Ooh! Someone want to guess how much I won in scratch tickets today? Never play- ever!! (Seemed just about as relevant..) Wendy CO EMT-B

If you know a diagnosis, list that. If you don't know a diagnosis, but family has told you that they are developmentally disabled or otherwise cognitively impaired, write "cognitive impairment (congenital or secondary to incident X years ago) per family." It can be really hard to know what is baseline and what is an exacerbation on someone with a developmental disability... since you don't know them and haven't seen them before this moment. Just do the best you can and describe things as well as you can. Wendy CO EMT-B

Ruh roh. Vent? The lack of grammar isn't like you. What's up? --Wendy

They caved. I would have kept wearing the shirt. With stunts like forced overtime and unequal wages, I'd say wearing a T-shirt but still coming to work is perfectly appropriate. Wendy CO EMT-B

Is it localized only to the face, or is it more global? Does it get better/worse with any kind of movement (aka, is it positional in any fashion)? Recent illnesses? Hx of any injuries, especially head/neck? Wendy CO EMT-B

Ah hah! So we need to create a new health care provider. Basically what many of you are saying is don't pigeonhole into a PA or NP, but create a Paramedic Practitioner instead... so that they are already familiar with the environment, but then educated to the level of a physician extender and therefore much better suited for a hybrid clinic/pre-hospital role. I think I need to eat breakfast, read over things, and come back and take another look. More to come. Wendy CO EMT-B

Congrats, Spenac, job well done! Just remember... the learning never ends... ;-) --Wendy