I'm told that today was a pretty atypical sunday for Big Daddy Ems. plenty of trauma, a few respitory calls, a touch of the "dude, I'm bored. Let's call 911". There was even a guy in the back of a cop car after being tazed. I doubt that he said the classic "don't taze me, bro". But I can dream.
Things settled down and I was able to get three consecutive hours of rack time after midnight. Three hours is about long enough to have a trippy dream about lockers (?) That I would spend the balance of my 5am DIB call wondering about.
Right now I'm in a good place. I'm just recently back on the truck, well, a truck owned by a company in the business of pt care, and I can handle this very well. But I remember when I was working far too often (96-120 hour weeks) in zones that would reliably produce 15-18 calls a shift. I exhausted myself and in doing so, I did no favors for my patients. And despite the high hour count this week, +90, I'm rarely if ever going to see the ugly side of 76 hrs again. There is just too much on my plate right now. Family and school will save me from my old "oholism", work.
But the newness of this job will eventually rub off and I'm going to need more patience on nights like tonight where you walk into a house filled with cigarette smoke and the patient can't fathom why they can't breathe. God, teach me patience.
Hopefully as the next year of school wears on and in some cases wears out, I'll be able to keep my eye on patient care as its own value, something to be done well for the sake of doing it well. A good lesson to learn before getting into ems would be that even the jerks deserve a shot. Easy to forget when the jerk is on your stretcher and just being themselves. At 4am. And they are the 14th call. And dispatch is pushing you because they have a few more holding.
Some nights are like that. And some days the milk man and carpenter and executive have bad days too.
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