bbbrammer

Our response time from tones to enroute is 3min. Which means if you stay at home you have to be doggone quick. At first it feels weird to get paid while you are hanging around at home, but the difference is that we only run about 30-35 calls a month and will often go several days w/o a call. We also don't get paid very much at all ($80/24hr) and to be considered full time you have to work 96hrs a week. So the trade off is that you can stay at home when you are working.

Guess work at its best!

In my rural system, we do 24hr shifts, and if you live within 2mi of the station then you don't have to stay at the station when you are on call. Besides running around town, we can stay at home (even overnight) and just respond when we get a call. It is alot like volunteer fire, only we are scheduled to be on and get paid for it. I was wondering if some other EMS services have that kind of an arrangement.

Congratulations.

In our rural system we often don't have all the new gadgets and equipment that alot of city services do, so I was wondering how creatively some of you have had to use the equipment that you do have on the truck to fit certain situations and certain patients. For example, we worked a two vehicle rollover on the turnpike that had four pts-3 adults and one child. We only had 3 LSB's on the truck so they needed to go on the adults. In order to c-spine the kid (3yom), I had to use the KED to immobilize him because that was the only thing I had left on my truck to do it with. A little outside of specs, but not too far. And it did effectively immobilize him. Another time I had an MVA pt who was having an MI. Because of the MI and the 30mi to the hospital, I couldn't lay her down on the cot on a LSB since it compramised her breathing. But she REALLY needed to be c-spined. So I figured that if the KED immobilized someone well enough to get them out of the vehicle, why not use it to immobilize at a 45degree angle on the way to the hospital? It immobilized her entire spine from butt to head, but allowed her to sit up enough to breath. Again not quite the specs on usage, but a creative enough solution to the problem. What are some other ways that you have had to modify the use of your equipment to fit the problem?

Thank you tox. I am glad someone here finally got back to the original point of the thread.

We have capnography, and I almost never remember to use it. However when I do use it I don't change my treatment approach because most of the time capnography gives you a better idea of what is going on with the pt., but it usually isn't anything that is directly treated on the truck. For example, if you think your pt. is having an asthma attack, and the capnography confirms it, you will still be treating them with oxygen and nebulizer medications, even if the capnography didn't confirm it. The treatment doesn't really differ, just the understanding that you have aquiered one more piece to the puzzle.

Paramedic pay and respect differs between place to place. I would say that you should choose whichever proffession you are more comfortable with and then look for the kind of service that you want to work for. As far as pay, some places pay medics more, some pay firefighters more. Some places have firefighter/paramedic combos that work out of the fire deptartment that get to do both jobs. People do tend to respect firefighters more than paramedics, I think mostly because firefighters have been around alot longer than paramedics. But trying to balence the amount of respect bewteen the two is not a good idea. The best thing to remember is that in most places, BOTH proffessions are respected.

I am glad someone finally did. We don't have any company patches, so I don't have any to put there. I may be able to find my old ones from my old service. Let me look around...

Believe it or not we havn't made fun of them. We have several people out here who are 500+ lbs. The only thing that I feel about picking up these people is distress simply because our cot is only rated to 500lbs and we usually have to call in another service to take care of them because of that. Don't take offense, this thread is not to make fun of people. I am a decent sized person myself, especially because I am short. My question was more of a fact finding mission or general census (if you will) than any kind of mocking. I just put it in this forum because most people do find this kind of stuff funny, as well as it being a very popular forum for responses. Thats all.

What is the biggest pt you have ever had to move and how many people did it take? So far I am up to a 678lb woman and we had 6 people.

Proof of job security. As long as stupid people do stupid things, we have a job.

I think you did the right thing. People underestimate the amount of blood you can loose through a nosebleed, especially if it has been going on for awhile. Not to mention the risk of aspiration while he is sleeping. I would say that since he had been bleeding for that long, working in the heat, and being pale were all indicaters that he was probably volume depleted to some degree. I would hazard that his pulse was a little rapid, and he may have failed a tilt test. I can't say for sure, but just from what you are saying I would have tried my darndest to get him checked out. Course some people really can't be convinced, and from there you just have to 'threaten' them to at least try to drink as much as possible. The medics shouldn't be giving you a hard time about what you did. I ran on an epitaxis a couple of weeks ago and when I got there I found a 52yoM who had a hx of nosebleeds and had been bleeding for awile. The reason they called us is because he had blood coming from his left eye like tears and that had never happened before. We took him in and they discovered that he had an aneurysm behind his sinuses that was slowly bleeding out. Everything with him pretty much checked out normal too. Just like your guy. So you never know what may be going on, but since you are not a doctor, if you don't know for sure what is going on, then turn it over to someone who might.

I don't think of it in success or failure terms. We are on this earth with all the meds we have found, we have done as much training as possible to fix a human body that may not be fixable. I don't get elated with the 'successful' ones or depressed at the 'failures'. I just look at it as doing the best job I can with the best tools I have in my armorment, after that it is up to something or someone else to take it from there. No matter what I do on a code, if the patient wants to live then my interactions gives them a chance at that. If the patient wants to die, no matter what I do will make a difference. Is that a 'failure'? I don't think so. I did the same thing for them as I did for the one who walked out of the hospital. I did my job. It was up to the patient and/or a higher power that decided whether it was a 'success' or a 'failure'.

We have a few of those out here. The fun part is confusing dispatch. Dispatch out here tends to over-react. It took a while to get them to stop flying the chopper for almost every MVA that came in, now they just automatically call them and put them on standby. So when we get onscene and find one of these, I like to radio dispatch and tell them they can cancel the chopper, oh, and by the way, we aren't transporting. They usually come back with "Can you 10-21?" (call them on the phone). They are panicking thinking that we have lost our minds trying to kill the 'full arrest' we were running on that was breathing until we got there. They just miss the part that they never actually stopped breathing, or lost a pulse. Poor Dispatch.

I agree.

I don't think everyone should be paramedics simply because not everyone is cut out to be one. I have met alot of people who were basics that were extremely good at their job, but even if they had the desire to go to medic they would have been mediocre at best. I should think the more relavant question would be "What licensing level should I be at that I can be the very best at my job?". Not everyone is cut out to do ALS. Not everyone is cut out to be only BLS either. It just depends on the individual.

I have seen stuff like this on some charts. It really makes you go back and look at some of your own PCR's and see if you have anything like this written down. I know I have done some stuff like this in the past. (And knowing me I can look forward to it in the future.)

I had 56sec the first try, but it does take a couple of times to figure out what you are doing. I kept trying to click on the numbers instead of just getting the mouse on them.

Where did you find those? I thought they were great. I had to share them with everyone here.

Couldn't have said it better. I laughed all the way through it.

So very true. Are we a predictable lot or what?

At least I was married. Not frowned upon as much. Known about, but not really acknowledged in the open.

You know I don't really like it that much either, but the thread of the topic is sayings having to do with EMT's vs Medics. The point is to share information, whether it is something you believe in or not.