What would you do?

[medicgirl05]

It's a whole lot easier to not put ourselves in a place where where stupid drinking games or behaviors are taking place.

Pretend to be an adult once in a while.

Wow. In this instance I was just in the wrong place at the wrong time. It was a party, nobody was exceedingly drunk, and I had no idea they were going to play this game.

Are you saying you have never been at a party where people were drinking?

[island emt]

Not at all. In my younger days before I decided to grow up , I was a partier.

Then I turned 20 & decided to make something of my life and gave up that mentality.

No I don't drink other than an occasional glass of wine or a beer & my wife & I don't tend to socialize with the drinking crowd.

We been married almost 39 years and are still best friends by the way , since you asked .

My tolerance for drunks is very short after working for 20 years at a major motorsports venue and dealing with thousands , even tens of thousands of budweiser fueled morons intent on hurting themselves and others.

Saw more self inflicted trauma there than you can imagine , most of it caused by drinking to excess and stupid games.

[DwayneEMTP]

You know, I gave this a lot of thought during and after treating the lady on the plane for 14 hours...

I'd just been delivered a triple tequila in the hopes that I'd be able to sleep for part of the flight...I'd not touched it yet, but what if I had? Would I then have stood by while she was handcuffed, screaming, half the crew sitting on her while she pounded her face on the floor for the next, however many hours before she became exhausted?

I'm not sure. Would that have been safest? No question, but offering to help and sedate a patient while off duty already opened me up to significant risk. I've never possesed the skill that many seem to have of removing my humanity from being a medic. There is of course a significant internal risk/benefit discussion that goes on in such moments, but my scale is pretty creaky and lopsided.

It's an easy soapbox discussion to say, "Have a sip and you no longer do anything but put on bandaids", but watching someone choke to death because I wanted to cover my ass when I believed that I had realistic interventions to apply? Man, I can't imagine that happening, and hope that that always remains true. Doing a surgical cric? Yeah, also don't see that happening in that situation regardless of sobriety status.

I think that part of the issues here are that we talk about drinking like we talk about spanking. As if there's only sober, and drunk. One extreme or another. But in the real world there's a ton of gray in between.

I'm not pretending to know the right answer...just sort of thinking out loud I guess...

[uglyEMT]

Dwayne you bring up a good point. The grey area.

I know if I had a drink or two and it was a life or death situation more likely than not my instinct would kick in before my brain said hang on a sec. I do know it has happened to me in the past. Would I be playing with sharp instruments probably not but to render no care? I don't think I could. (yes I know in my previous post on this thread I said drink = off duty but I didn't think of the grey area just the drunk area)

I do have two examples from real life that I did use my skills even though I did have a drink. One was while on vacation I did the heimlich after a few glasses of wine. Don't think there was any harm there (treatment wise I mean). The second was a near drowning 5yr old that the parents were way in over their heads with. A rescue breath got the child coughing the water up (yes I checked the pulse first LOL) then told the parents to take the kid to the ER for follow up care because of the dry drowning potential. (no ambulance call due to zero cell service in the state park we were at). Again this one was after some beers with the family and friends at a BBQ.

Both instances it was more instinct then thinking. Did I open myself up, yes but I think I did do the right thing and I wasn't invasive with the patient.

If your two sheets to the wind stick to the band aids. You know yourself and how you feel at that moment.