Smoke was pouring out of the house. White smoke. But still, what the hell were we doing going in? Whatever. I grabbed the bags and stepped past several firemen. The fire was in the kitchen--some overdone casserole. The woman was in the back, on the floor of her bedroom. Two EMTs were doing CPR and a fireman was fiddling with an automatic defibrillator. Clothes and food wrappers littered the floor. My partner, the Old Man, setup the defibrillator. I pulled out the intubation kit.
No one had seen her for an hour. She was asystole on the monitor--the heart's electrical silence. Her head was in a corner with little room for me to lay down or sit. I instructed a fireman to drag her legs toward the door to give me some room. She was fat, and fat people always make for difficult intubations. It took four tries and someone shoving a pillow under her shoulders for me to actually intubate the woman. Her throat was a bloody mess by the time I was done with it.
It was impossible to figure out the woman's history as the smoke, now lightened by wafts of fresh air, and the clutter made finding anything impossible. After 3 rounds of Epi/Atropine and a round of Dextrose & Narcan, I was surprised to hear the Old Man suggest that we take the woman to the hospital. Normally, we don't transport dead people. And believe me, someone who's in asystole after 3 rounds of drugs is fucking dead. He figured that because of the fire there was a chance it was related, therefore maybe the hospital could do something we couldn't. Let me tell ya, they can't and they didn't.
But that doesn't mean we didn't have some fun zooming to the hospital. For the first time in a while, I got to perform CPR. Normally, that's someone else's job. But in the back to the bus, it was just me and the Old Man. He was busy pushing drugs and well, doing something, so it was up to me to do CPR. As we zipped through traffic, I did CPR with one hand and squeezed the BVM with another. Just in case this is confusing, a BVM is the thing that you use to blow air into a person's lungs. We call it "bagging."
In all the confusion, the EMTs drove past the nearest hospital and ended up going to a more distant one. "This is a long fucking five minutes," I shouted to the driver as my arms grew tired. He responded with a paniced mumble.
I shook my head.
At the ER, we all felt like stars. People were standing outside, mouth-open, gawking. An EMT hopped onto the stretcher and began performing CPR.
"Where's the camera's?" he laughed.
The ER staff was sitting casually at their desks, looking bored. We had achieved complete surprise.
"Is this a cardiac arrest?" asked a flabbergasted doctor.
"No," I said, holding onto the ET tube. "It's an ankle fracture, we're just doing this to get you riled."
The ER spun into motion. Doctors shouted orders. I called out my report: "75 year old female, Cardiac Arrest. Last seen an hour ago. We've got 5 Epi's, 3 Atropine's, 2 amps of BiCarb and Narcan-D50 on board. There was a small fire in her kitchen and she's been asystolic this whole time."
They hooked her into a variety of machines. The automated CPR machine was my favorite. It made a loud noise that filled the ER: Whapa, Whapa, Whapa. And thus the last sound of her legal life was the sound of people clucking and machines chattering. She was pronounced dead a few minutes later.
"Well, earned our money today, Old Man," I said, "didn't we?"
He nodded and we both laughed.
Where are ya? I keep checking back looking for new stuff. Hmmmm. Great blog! Don't quit!!
Posted by: radtec | June 22, 2006 at 11:58 PM