I first became an EMT back in 1983. In 36 years things have changed a lot. Mostly for the better but then things also got a bit complicated. I attended class at San Jacinto College in Pasadena Texas. We had to take so many class hours and then we had to do clinical hours at different hospitals and ambulances. If you’re going to become a medic, take my advice, do the hospital hours first. Then you can enjoy the ambulance runs. If you do the ambulance runs first, then go to the hospital, it’s like driving a tricycle after driving a car.
I was sent to observe a doctor who was going to perform a procedure I needed to see. I followed this guy in a white lab coat into an exam room and oh boy, he was a proctologist. I know what the inside of a colon looks like and I’ll never get that image out of my head.
I was working one scene late one night. A guy from somewhere way south had run across a road and got hit by a station wagon that immediately sped away. I was working with two EMTs from the community. They were doing all the bandaging and splinting while I worked the vitals. I couldn’t get a blood pressure on either arm. The guy was talking to me. I asked him where he was from and he lied saying he lived right there in that house. It was a barn. I asked him what happened and he said he didn’t know. I checked his pulse. 100 at the neck but absent in all extremities. But he could move his arms and legs.
To check for a spinal injury you tell the patient to move their feet. Whether they move them or not you tell them it looked good. If their feet moved or not you made a note of it on the chart. You never told the patient their feet didn’t move.
We loaded the guy in the ambulance and he went off to the hospital dying enroute. He had completely bleed out in his trunk.
here are a few stories you probably have never heard before.