One of our Own, A repost from Bernice

For those that are in the field of EMS we often wonder where all the "good" people are. Stuck with partners that don't care or just don't get it, we dream every day for the elusive soul that is not only good at what they do, but you know they have your back no matter what. The same holds true for people not in EMS. When you find yourself dialing those three numbers for yourself, your mother, your friend, your child - you want someone there who can connect with you and earn your trust in seconds. So what are we to do when that person everyone wants to come running when they call 911 can't? What are we supposed to do? Well folks, this is your chance.

There is one such woman who puts her heart and soul into the job day in and day out. Her heart takes permanent residence on her sleeve while she cares for you physically and emotionally. This woman has worked her butt off to attend medic school. And wouldn't you know it has been faced with a barrier I hope we can all help her overcome. She is strong, passionate, loving and one of the coolest people I know. And she needs our help.

I know money is tight. I know we most of us don't "know" her, but I dare you to take five minutes and read through Epi's blog and tell me she doesn't deserve a chance to make her dream come true. She has worked so hard to get where she is today only to be stopped in her tracks.

I'm challenging all of you to three fives. Give five dollars, tell five friends and take five minutes to stop by Epi's blog and give her some words of encouragement.

I have put a donation button in the sidebar. Every last penny goes to Epi and getting her to medic school. I HATE asking for money but I can't think of anyone else that deserves this as much as she does.

Thank you all so much!

UPDATE: Epi gives a bit more of an explanation here. There have been several people wondering why I have been so vague as to why we are helping her out financially as well as with as much love and support we can muster and frankly as much as I would like to remove any doubt from your mind as to why she needs us, I don't want to cross lines of revealing more personal information than she is comfortable giving out. The bottom line is we have all been there at one point or another. When everything seems to fall apart and the one good thing you had your sights on gets taken away. If you have any more questions, please feel free to ask. But as I said before, I'm not sure how much I can truly share beyond what she has already.

Thank you for your understanding.

You can get to the donate link at http://callitasiseefit.blogspot.com/. Just look for the pay pal logo... JS

The puppy

Let me tell you a story. I was the lead instructor for a fire cadet program. The cadets were ages 13-18. I had a very promising cadet. She was full of life and had a strong desire to learn. I taught her everything I could about being a good firefighter. When she turned 18 she wanted to be hired by the fire department I was working for. The fire chief at the time didn't want to hire cadets because he felt they might be to young and not mature. It took a great deal of talking to the chief to get her hired, but she did get the job. I was proud of her. Next she went into her EMT class. When it came time to do clinical rotations, I pulled some strings and got her to be able to do her clinicals with me on my ambulance, I taught her everything I could about being an EMT. After being on the fire department for about 8 months she got into some trouble. I came to her defense and got her corrective action greatly reduced by talking to the chief for her (I was the union Steward at the time). Shortly before I left the department this very same person that I help get to where she was turned on me. She started spreading rumors about me, under minding my work with cadets and probationary firefighters, and looking for any reason to report me to the chief. This really upset me, and still does. I bring this up because I found out this person reads my blog, and a year after I moved to a different fire department, she is still talking about me. It is like loving and training a puppy, and when the puppy grows into a dog it bites you! I think this is very shady.... JS

Ever birthed the 2nd coming?

see more Fail Blog

Yes, like every "experienced" (Read: "old") Medic I've had someone look me straight in the eye and say "I can't be pregnant!" or "No, I'm NOT pregnant, I told you!" or some variation on that... while in active labor.

I can imagine that this resulted from something like that.

South African TV commercial

This is from a South African TV commercial for an OTC antacid. You can probably tell that it was written by someone who speaks English as a second language. Funny as heck it is, if a little blue.

Where do I sign up to sell antacids?

(click on the pic for a bigger version)

Yes, this kid is freaking out because his MOM cancelled his World of Warcraft Account.

Ok, so maybe in EMS we've learned not to sweat the small stuff. Maybe I'm cynical and don't think that this is a big enough deal for a suburban teenager to freak out about. Maybe I don't thrash around in my well-apportioned, freshly-cleaned-by-mom room in such a manner that I don't knock over the lighthouse when, oh I don't know, someone dies in front of me or something like that.

I hate overly emotional people. I hate drama kings, queens, and vice versa. FTLOG people!

With youth like this, EMS will always have work. Did you see him hitting himself with a SHOE and punching... the MATTRESS because he was mad? Yea, that's tough.

The Drunk Crackhead - Part 2

Let me tell you the rest of the crack story.

We are at the jail with our patient. He is getting fingerprinted from our cot. There is a small holding cell in the room where he is being printed. In this cell is a drunk. There are 2 officers trying to get the drunks property (wallet, keys, money) into a property bag. The property bag is about 8 inches by 8 inches, and seals like a zip-lock bag. The drunk refuses to give them his property until they let him go to the bathroom. The officer tell him that they will let him go to the bathroom after he has turned over his property. The drunk still refuses and says he is going to piss on them. The officers are kind of distracted at this time because we are telling them the story of the stolen crack. So the drunk finally agrees to put his stuff in the property bag. The officers hand him the bag through the bars. But the drunk does not put his property in the bag. Instead he decides to urinate in the bag.The drunk is now laughing. He then hands the sealed bag, 1/2 full with urine to the officers. That makes the officers very upset. So, one officer goes into the cell and "removes" his property. When he comes out of the cell, he starts to hand the other officer the drunks property. The other officer opens up the property bag 1/2 filled with urine and places the drunks wallet, money and keys in the bag to soak. Needless to say the drunk was not laughing anymore. Then they filed the property and boxed it up. When the drunk gets released from jail, he will have a well marinated wallet. So I guess the cops got the last laugh. JS

See more from JS at http://fatfireman.blogspot.com

He stole my crack! - Part 1

We get dispatched to an unknown medical involving PD in an urban area.

We pull up on scene to see the local police department laughing at a guy laying in the middle of the street, pulling himself around on the pavement by his arms. He is laying next to a beat up, old mini van with the drivers door open. My partner and I are a little confused. So we ask "whats going on?". That is when we are told this story.

The cops said that the man on the ground and his son had come over to this block to steal some crack from a dealer. The man on the ground is a paraplegic. He sent his son into the house to steal the crack while he waited in the drivers seat of the van. The crack dealer caught the son trying to steal the crack. The dealer was so strung out that she called the cops. The son then ran back to the van. As the van was pulling off the cops showed up and surrounded it. So the son jumps out and tries to run on foot. The father is high and also thinks this is a good idea. So he opens the door of the van, and jumps onto the pavement. Somehow he forgot that he was unable to walk and required a wheelchair. So he tried to make his escape by dragging himself by is arms, and that's when we showed up

By now my partner and I are laughing our asses off. So we ask, "what do you need us for?". They ask us to check out the man laying in the road and make sure he is ok. They also wanted to know if we could transport him to jail as it would be hard for them to do it with a police car. So we said ok. Then we took him to jail. Every time I think about this it makes me laugh. Hope you find it as funny as we did. JS

This and other stories posted at http://fatfireman.blogspot.com

Dude, Where's our rig?

So we pull up at the hospital with a priority 3 patient. This is a major urban hospital. I'm the attending tech on this run. So I am in the back of the ambulance with the patient. My partner shuts the truck off and comes to the back of the rig and opens the doors. We enter the hospital and proceed to the triage area. As we are getting our patient registered a medic from another agency comes in and says "some guy just stole your rig!". We said "what?". And then he repeated himself. So my partner ran out to see, and sure as shit our ambulance was gone. We transferred care of our patient, then called our dispatch. Let me tell you, that is not a call you want to make. So dispatch sent another crew to come pick us up and take us back to the base to get another rig. While we are waiting for the other crew, we had to go the the police detail in the hospital to make a report. It took us a while to convince the cops that this was not a joke. Really, who steals an ambulance? So we make the report and get laughed at. The other crew picks us up and can't stop poking fun at us. Just as we get back to the base dispatch calls and says the police recovered our rig. So now the other crew takes us to the police station to reclaim our rig. All our stuff was gone and the truck was trashed.

As it turns out my regular partner had the night off and I was working with a brand new EMT, it was like his second road shift. He didn't think to take the keys with him when he got out of the truck. And really who steals an ambulance? I'll tell you who. A patient who was just released from the ER! The ER staff refused to give him a cab voucher, so he decided stealing an ambulance was the next best thing. That's life in the big city. JS

Also posted at http://fatfireman.blogspot.com

Help Wanted

I'm looking for Co-Bloggers to assist me with this site. If you're interested in providing short bits of cool, funny, or well, "Awesome" content to this here blog page, let me know. All I want is the occasional funny picture, video, story, or what have you to put on here. Every thing you put on here can have a link back to your site to draw traffic.

So, if you are looking to drive traffic back to your site and have the occasional awesome thing about EMS to put here, e-mail me at proems1@yahoo.com and I'll add you as a co-blogger. You can also just put a comment on this post.

Thanks!

This link is amazing

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/30226391/

How did this guy do this? I won't spoil what he did... but the picture in the story is that of an ambulance bay. He must have recieved prehospital care... Wonder how the conversation went after shift?

On-Coming crew: "You guys busy last night?"

Off-Going Crew: "Not really, a few calls here and there"

On-Coming crew: "Anything good?"

Off-Going Crew: "A coupla falls, a stabbing, coupla heart attacks... a guy that bit the tip off his junk, and a back pain. Nothing really good"

On-coming crew: "WTF?? A back pain??"

Ya think that this was the store the guy was skateboarding in front of?

see more pwn and owned pictures

New Bariatric transport truck?

Ok so that's mean
see more pwn and owned pictures

Skateboard Fail

Oh where do I begin with this one. The first time I saw this I passed it around to the other guys at the station and we all laughed till we cried. You've just got to feel for this guy and hope that something similar never, ever happens to you.

Freakin ouch.

There's a few things that I notice here. First of all, I would doubt that the guy was wearing a cup. In fact, from a my perspective and I'm not a sk8r, I notice the complete lack of safety equipment on this guy. None at all. No helmet, no knee pads, no elbow pads, and probably no support hose. I wonder if this guy had put any forethought into this stunt, as obviously he thought enough about it to have someone film it, if he would have maybe thought that he was going to end up in terrible, terrible pain.

It looks like thi$s guy chose to jump from a height of about 5 feet onto sloping concrete. So obviously he bruised his heels. That's the first injury I see. Then, we see the momentary bit of horrific realization that this guy went through when he saw that he was rapidly approaching that guy wire. That was awesome. It could have went a lot of ways here. At that speed, if he would have hit the wire itself on say, his neck, he could have potentially lacerated the skin and the great vessels underneath. Not to mention the related head trauma and c-spine injury that he would have suffered when his head hit the pavement. Thank goodness that didn't happen. Then he could have still reproduced. At least now he probably won't be able to for a while.
When he does impact, look at the hang time he gets with the crotchal contact on the wire. Thankfully the electric company thought to put that metal guard on there; otherwise I'll bet that the wire itself would have been small enough to slice him up a bit. But I want you to pay attention to the hang time that he gets. It's almost a second where the energy from his impact is being transferred initially to the wire, then back to his junk, and then back to the wire, and so forth. That's a lot of energy that is being absorbed, enough to even knock off his shoes. It's difficult to say whether that provided a cushion for the kinetic energy or whether the retransmission of the energy back into his junk causes more injury. Definitely here one should look for distal circulatory compromise on the right leg, and possible closed laceration of the femoral artery and inferior vena cava. This guy could bleed out into his pelvic area. Also look for a hip dislocation or a femoral neck fracture.

That's not even to say what he did to his junk. If he was "hanging" down the right side, there could be a lot of trauma to the junk down there, enough to fracture the shaft. Hopefully (and Oh God, I don't wanna know) this guy wasn't um, angry when this happened. There's a good chance that he was though, judging from his age and the fact that this stunt was probably put forth in order to impress a chick.

Wonder how that worked out for him, don't you?

I would still immobilize this guy with the full LSB, C-Collar, and blocks. While I wouldn't think that there was spinal involvement from the contact with the wire, there was still a lot of energy transfer to the spinal column from the initial vertical impact on the ground and there is a possibility of occult injury to the spine with the wire as well.

Treatment Recommendations:

- Spinal Immobilization - C-Collar, LSB, CID, and Tape
- Immobilization of both lower extremities
- Oxygen - For the circulatory compromise and the nausea that this guy's gonna get
- Bilateral large bore IVs - One of them can be capped but if this guy has a vascular injury to the large vessels in that part of the body, he could bleed out rather quickly.
- Transport to a trauma center with capabilities to deeply assess and rapidly repair any vascular injuries and/or a pelvic/femoral neck fracture.
- A good talking to and a high five, cuz that was awesome

Ta. - Proems1@yahoo.com

Link to Cracked.com article

http://www.cracked.com/article_17251_10-coolest-foreign-words-english-language-needs.html

I posted this because I asked the author if I could steal some stuff from him. He agreed. I owe him a link.

I love that site

You have probably seen this

Ambulance Fail, or is it a pickup truck fail?

This has got to be from outside the US. Please tell me that it's from outside the US...

My favorite EMS website

Nope, this one's not mine. It IS awesome though.

www.EMSvillage.com

It's got the best EMS forums I've ever found. There's a lot of information there and a ton of people from around the world posting there.

Welcome to the Awesome EMS blog

Catchy name, right?

The Awesome EMS blog is my attempt to capture things about EMS that I think are awesome (See, "Freakin Sweet", "really cool", and "Whoa dude!"). It's all about the coolest things that I can find about the Emergency Medical Services. I pledge to scour the web and pull simply the coolest things that I can find and put them here.

Got something to ad? Cool, shoot me an e-mail at proems1@yahoo.com and I'll add it here.

Are you doing something cool with EMS? Did you make a video? Got cool (HIPPA Compliant) EMS Pics? Is there something awesome that happened at your service? Let me know and I'll post it for the world.

Oh, and check out my other blogs too:

http://proems.blogspot.com - Interesting EMS articles
http://emsprotocols.blogspot.com - The EMS protocol project
http://EMSnarrative.blogspot.com - The EMS narrative report blog

Sweet