Zero to ohh crap.
It seems all I run, everyday, every shift, every week, on every street, in every abode is chest pain or shortness of breath. While all the other ambulance are waiting for cover on the suicidal party with a gun, or returning emergently back to the hospital with someone fighting the clammy, suffocating grip of near death, I sit in my ambulance waiting for one of the only two types of calls I ever run.
The seventies male with chest pain, the thirteen year girl old with shortness of breath, the thirty-one year old male with chest pain or the guy standing at a phone book in the 7-11 parking lot, in the rain, with a touch of both, are just samples on my recent playlist.
There I sat cramped in a fogging ambulance with rain and white clumps of snow melting on the heated front window. Claustrophobia, allowing the warm spring weather to tease me briefly, had returned with a vengeance. The small DVD player sat propped on the dash with a box of tissues under the right corner to compensate for the slant in the dash. Donnie Brasco was burying himself deeper in the underbelly of wise guys, teasing me with his excitement of being an undercover FBI agent.
On the ambulance radio, calls were being dispatched all throughout the city. Auto vs. pedestrian, rollover accident, cardiac arrest, uncontrollably violent suicidal party, and a car in a lake -parties trapped. I shuffled back and forth in my seat fighting with the growing aches in my restless legs.
They called me on the radio. I answered with my location and briefly, just briefly, hoped for something more than the usual. Maybe a shooting or a stabbing. I'd even take a status seizure or a multiple casualty car accident. Please lord, anything but chest pain or shortness of breath.
I was wrong.
Chest pain. A seventy-one year old male with chest pain. Again!
We zipped through the wet streets not breaking any land speed records. I complained about the nature of the call. "Chest pain, shortness of breath, chest pain, shortness of breath, that is ALL I ever go on!" I whined.
I started my report, knowing this would be like every other chest pain call I had run over the last month. Someone felt a tinge in their chest, got scared, and called 911. I would get there, talk to them and receive uneducated and evasive answers and quickly determine it wasn't worth continuing to question the patient. I would load them up, check their vitals -all of which would be fine, and hook them up to the heart monitor -again, all of which would be fine. A little O2, a little aspirin, and the obligatory nitro under the tongue would fill our time on the way to the ED. Another chest pain call under my belt. Another false alarm.
We walked into the apartment and the short man sat laughing and smiling with the fire department. He wasn't sweating and wasn't white as a sheet. He wasn't having any difficulty breathing and his anxiety level was less than mine. His knees were crossed and he nonchalantly complained about some nondescript pain in his chest.
"What does it feel like? Can you explain how it feels?" I questioned, going through my flowchart of cardiac questions.
A long pause, a smile at a fireman, and a wink to his toothless girlfriend shouting in the hall. "It just hurts."
Of course it does, I think to myself. "Well, lets get going then."
He takes two steps to my bed, the oxygen mask tethering him to the blue canvas bag holding the green oxygen cylinder. He sits and worries about everything else. My mind wanders and I shush the screaming woman in the hall. "We can here you just fine. There's no need to yell," I said.
The elevator lurches floor to floor and I take this opportunity to interview the patient more thoroughly. He doesn't really want to play this game. He'd rather talk about something else. I feel his heart pumping thick blood through his circulatory system with my two fingers on his flaky, white-skinned wrist.
We load him into the ambulance and the firemen return to the meal simmering on the stove. I shut the doors and cover him with a blanket. "Let's do it all," I said to my partner.
I go through the motions like a robot. Lean and grab the blood pressure cuff. Stand and open the clear cabinet holding all the IV's. He sits there chewing the aspirin I gave him in the elevator.
My partner hooks him up to the heart monitor and out of the corner of my eye I see an abnormality.
"Maybe we should do a 12-lead?" my partner says as the dieing tissue in the patient’s heart makes itself known.
My partner unbuttons his shirt as the short man declares he is feeling much better. Six white, square stickies are placed strategically along his chest. From his right nipple all the way around the left side of his chest, wires are dangling from his hairy chest. We beg him not to move so we can get a clear picture on the print out.
He's having a huge heart attack. The anterior and lateral aspects of his heart are dieing rapidly in front of me.
"How's your pain?" I ask with a little more urgency.
"It's down to about a zero," he laughs. "Why? Am I sick?"
I explain what is going on with and tell him things are going to move a little faster now. We are going to go lights and sirens to the hospital and I'm going to need to do a whole lot more. "You're going to need to answer all my questions the best you can," I shouted over the loud sirens.
And with that, my luck turned drastically. Sitting in front of me was the acutely ill person I had been hoping to help for the last few weeks.
The ambulance his sixty, in twenty seconds. And I went from zero, to ohh crap in half as many.
The seventies male with chest pain, the thirteen year girl old with shortness of breath, the thirty-one year old male with chest pain or the guy standing at a phone book in the 7-11 parking lot, in the rain, with a touch of both, are just samples on my recent playlist.
There I sat cramped in a fogging ambulance with rain and white clumps of snow melting on the heated front window. Claustrophobia, allowing the warm spring weather to tease me briefly, had returned with a vengeance. The small DVD player sat propped on the dash with a box of tissues under the right corner to compensate for the slant in the dash. Donnie Brasco was burying himself deeper in the underbelly of wise guys, teasing me with his excitement of being an undercover FBI agent.
On the ambulance radio, calls were being dispatched all throughout the city. Auto vs. pedestrian, rollover accident, cardiac arrest, uncontrollably violent suicidal party, and a car in a lake -parties trapped. I shuffled back and forth in my seat fighting with the growing aches in my restless legs.
They called me on the radio. I answered with my location and briefly, just briefly, hoped for something more than the usual. Maybe a shooting or a stabbing. I'd even take a status seizure or a multiple casualty car accident. Please lord, anything but chest pain or shortness of breath.
I was wrong.
Chest pain. A seventy-one year old male with chest pain. Again!
We zipped through the wet streets not breaking any land speed records. I complained about the nature of the call. "Chest pain, shortness of breath, chest pain, shortness of breath, that is ALL I ever go on!" I whined.
I started my report, knowing this would be like every other chest pain call I had run over the last month. Someone felt a tinge in their chest, got scared, and called 911. I would get there, talk to them and receive uneducated and evasive answers and quickly determine it wasn't worth continuing to question the patient. I would load them up, check their vitals -all of which would be fine, and hook them up to the heart monitor -again, all of which would be fine. A little O2, a little aspirin, and the obligatory nitro under the tongue would fill our time on the way to the ED. Another chest pain call under my belt. Another false alarm.
We walked into the apartment and the short man sat laughing and smiling with the fire department. He wasn't sweating and wasn't white as a sheet. He wasn't having any difficulty breathing and his anxiety level was less than mine. His knees were crossed and he nonchalantly complained about some nondescript pain in his chest.
"What does it feel like? Can you explain how it feels?" I questioned, going through my flowchart of cardiac questions.
A long pause, a smile at a fireman, and a wink to his toothless girlfriend shouting in the hall. "It just hurts."
Of course it does, I think to myself. "Well, lets get going then."
He takes two steps to my bed, the oxygen mask tethering him to the blue canvas bag holding the green oxygen cylinder. He sits and worries about everything else. My mind wanders and I shush the screaming woman in the hall. "We can here you just fine. There's no need to yell," I said.
The elevator lurches floor to floor and I take this opportunity to interview the patient more thoroughly. He doesn't really want to play this game. He'd rather talk about something else. I feel his heart pumping thick blood through his circulatory system with my two fingers on his flaky, white-skinned wrist.
We load him into the ambulance and the firemen return to the meal simmering on the stove. I shut the doors and cover him with a blanket. "Let's do it all," I said to my partner.
I go through the motions like a robot. Lean and grab the blood pressure cuff. Stand and open the clear cabinet holding all the IV's. He sits there chewing the aspirin I gave him in the elevator.
My partner hooks him up to the heart monitor and out of the corner of my eye I see an abnormality.
"Maybe we should do a 12-lead?" my partner says as the dieing tissue in the patient’s heart makes itself known.
My partner unbuttons his shirt as the short man declares he is feeling much better. Six white, square stickies are placed strategically along his chest. From his right nipple all the way around the left side of his chest, wires are dangling from his hairy chest. We beg him not to move so we can get a clear picture on the print out.
He's having a huge heart attack. The anterior and lateral aspects of his heart are dieing rapidly in front of me.
"How's your pain?" I ask with a little more urgency.
"It's down to about a zero," he laughs. "Why? Am I sick?"
I explain what is going on with and tell him things are going to move a little faster now. We are going to go lights and sirens to the hospital and I'm going to need to do a whole lot more. "You're going to need to answer all my questions the best you can," I shouted over the loud sirens.
And with that, my luck turned drastically. Sitting in front of me was the acutely ill person I had been hoping to help for the last few weeks.
The ambulance his sixty, in twenty seconds. And I went from zero, to ohh crap in half as many.
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