Wednesday, September 19, 2007

Testing a New Editor

Let's hope this works.... I installed ScribeFire, part of the Mozilla toolset on my laptop, and I'm testing it out with this blog entry. Let's hope this post is legible.

It's been nearly two weeks since I posted an entry. I've been extremely busy, between working, dealing with my kids and their problems, and preparing for CCEMT-P school. I've been doing everything possible to keep my sanity, but it is not easy. On top of that, I'm dealing with what I suspect is a cold, but I'm not sure. I don't think it's seasonal allergies; it has been cool enough over the past 5-7 days to keep a lot of the stuff that blows around down. Plus various members of my family have been sick over the past couple of weeks, and I'm tired (and worn down) enough that it only makes sense that I should become slightly under the weather myself. It was only a matter of time.

Last night I worked in Goffstown. Different partner, a woman named Gretchen. She's an EMT-Intermediate, and she's been one for quite a while, I suspect, but she made the same mistake I did and let her license lapse. We agree that getting it back is a difficult, time-consuming process which one should never let happen. Since we've both been there, we had something to talk about. Did two calls during the shift: the first was a 74 year-old female who had a syncopal episode. She lost consciousness for a fairly short time before we arrived on scene. However she was alert but really sluggish when we arrived. She'd vomited while we were there, became diaphoretic, and was generally pretty ill. I didn't want to waste a lot of time on scene, plus she and her husband live close to the Manchester limits and wanted to go to CMC, so that was easy enough. We also had one of the other folks on the department with us as he wanted to go on the call. That was fine with me - always nice to have another pair of hands.

The second call we did was just after 4:00AM today for a person having difficulty breathing - mutual aid to Weare, as they felt the need for a Paramedic on scene. When we arrived, not only did we have Weare on scene, but New Boston was there as well. Considering the location of the call was near the town line for both towns as well as near Goffstown, it seemed to make sense for both towns to respond. On the other hand, the responding unit that arrived first should have notified the other unit that they could return to their quarters. The reason I say that was in addition to the two other ambulances (and ours made 3) there were a number of responders who went direct to the scene. Their personal vehicles all had "whacker" lights, or light bars on their cars, all lit up. They had the patient, a 72 year-old female, packaged up and on a stair chair, outside. I got report from Weare's rescue captain, an EMT-Intermediate who's been around for quite a while but is, in my opinion, rather lazy. They could have packaged her in one of the ambulances on scene to keep her from getting cold or exacerbating her already compromised respiratory activity. That didn't happen, though. Neither did anyone there think of starting transport with us intercepting them on the way to the hospital. But we did what we were supposed to once we got on scene; she got two nebulizer treatments on the way to the hospital as well as a dose of Solu-Medrol. She was breathing better once we arrived at the hospital.

In any case, it will be interesting to see how this looks on the blog. I hope the software works....


Powered by ScribeFire.

No comments: