My night started at 7pm. I only slept about 2 hours out of the last 24 and hadn't eaten in 12 hours or so.
Anyway, the first hour or so of my ride-along exists in my memory as a blur of signing forms ( basically"if anything happens to me on this ride, it is not the fault of ______ County EMS, and I can't sue."), meeting the guys I'd be riding with, and being shown all the equipment on the inside of the ambulance.
There's more to it than it seems.
It's a lot more spacious than I expected.
Anyway, after checking all the equipment in the ambulance, we left the main station and arrived at our first scene.
A gas station.
To get energy drinks!
Actually, I have no idea what those guys purchased.
The crew I was with (Let's call them Ewan and Neil, because they looked like Ewan McGregor and Neil Patrick Harris.) probably forgot I was in the back of the ambulance, because they just jumped out and left me back there, with no idea how to open the doors and get out.
I fought with the side door for about 2 minutes before I realized it was locked, opened it, and basically fell out into the parking lot.
Luckily there were no witnesses.
I bought Skittles and a Red Bull and hoped they'd be enough to keep me up for a few more hours, but then I started to fall asleep as soon as I got back in the ambulance.
As I was drifting, I had the following thoughts:
"No one warned me that it would be dark in here and that a speeding ambulance feels more like a gentle swaying when you're actually in a seat and not on a stretcher."
"Even these blinking lights are kind of soothing, like lights on a Christmas tree."
"Wait a second, why are we speeding?"
"...And what is that noise?"
It was a siren, you guys. I did not even notice the siren until we were actually on scene. :|
Btw, eating half a bag of Skittles in under 20 seconds won't do anything to wake you up. I was still pretty much a zombie during this call.
First Patient
We arrived on scene at what I assumed to be a pretty extravagant retirement facility, where an old man was waiting for us in the driveway. Why did I assume it was a retirement facility? I don't know. Maybe I sort of forget that people that the elderly are capable of living alone. But apparently they are, because that old guy lived there. (Not alone though, with his wife, who happened to be the patient.)
The first patient was a 77 year old woman, with tingling in her left arm. She said that it started last night, but then it went away and came back. She didn't have any pain, but she was nauseated, but she said it was probably because she was very nervous.
Neil and Ewan are really good when it comes to getting the SAMPLE history without making it obvious that they're doing it. It was just like a normal conversation, they even told a few jokes while attaching her to the heart monitor and fiddling with it. (I don't know how that thing works or how to read the results, so I didn't pay much attention.)
I wish I could apologize to these people for coming into their home and standing around awkwardly while real paramedics did everything. I mean, I could have attempted a blood pressure or something... :/
The patient didn't seem to mind my awkwardness, and she said my hair made her feel happy. I suppose she likes pink.
Her vitals and everything seemed pretty normal, but we transported her anyway.
____
I fell asleep after admitting the woman to the hospital, and woke up in an eerily lit garage.
Um, I still have no idea exactly where that was, but apparently it was a substation.
In the garage, I shivered and drank my Red Bull while the paramedics showed me and talked about the equipments on the outside of the ambulance, and cracked jokes about obese southerners.
There is this awesome device called The Thumper, which looks like a medieval torture device but is actually a CPR machine powered by compressed air that if used incorrectly could kill a person instead of saving them.
But that could be said about a lot of things.
I found out that they wouldn't be keeping me, because apparently they'd be at that substation all night and not much goes on around there, so a supervisor would pick me up and take me along with him to get all my calls as quickly as possible. And by the time they finished telling me that, so the supervisor showed up and I grabbed my charts and jumped in his humongous truck. Not an ambulance, an actual truck. First response vehicles can be whatever you want them to be, I suppose.
I'm probably wrong about that though.
Wow. I am suddenly too tired to finish this now, but I will later.
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