THE_DITCH_DOCTOR

Nah, that happens in rural Indiana and Illinois too Medic64

I'm not in the Air Force anymore, haven't been since 2003. I was talking about my VFD uniform. Sorry for any confusion.

On our volunteer fire department we have three uniforms: Class C- EMT Tech pants and a blue fire department T-shirt Class B- Black dress pants, dress uniform shirt (sky blue for line firefighters, white for officers....which is kind of redundant; there's 11 of us on the department plus 4 juniors...I think everyone knows who the officers are), badge, tie (optional) Class A- Class B plus a dress uniform coat and a uniform hat. And we wear any award ribbons that we have earned. There's only 3 of us who have the full Class A uniform because we have to pay for them out of our own pockets if we want them and the only time we wear them is to go to funerals pretty much or some conferences. I will be wearing it at the wedding of a friend of mine....all the other guys are going to be in uniform (Army, Marines and Air Force respectively) so my friend has asked to have me wear my FD unifrom. I keep joking that I'm going to get married in mine. I figure I shelled out a lot of money for the getup, I might as well get to wear it. Not sure how well the fiancee would take that one though.

Thanks Dixie.....that's good to know.

I've found that sitting in the woods, surrounded by all the beauty of nature is the most soothing thing ever. Too bad it took the worst day of my life to make me realize this. In 2000, I worked the wreck that killed three of my friends including my best friend since third grade and his wife....I was best man at their wedding a month before they died. To top it all off I was supposed to have been in the truck with them. If I had not stayed over at work to cover for another EMT I would be dead right now. There were times that I wish I had died along with them, things would have been so much simpler. The events of that afternoon ruined me as a provider and as a man for quite a long time. It also ruined my faith in God, which I have just recently began to regain. My service forced me to take three weeks off of work and I found great solace in sitting alone in the woods just enjoying the silence. The silence forced me to deal with the flood of emotions that I had pent up over the preceding 3 1/2 years as an first responder and EMT. In three weeks I sorted through (if anyone ever really could sort out such things) not only . all the guilt, stress and pain from losing my friends but also all the other times I had seen death, misery and suffering and had simply shrugged it off. My advice to everyone: don't shrug off any death, you do not know when something will happen that transforms the guilt of a patient lost into the unbearable, insufferable torment of some assumed grotesque failure. I cry after many bad calls, not afraid of my shortcomings, not afraid of anything that others might think of me, simply because I know the catharsis that comes from letting the tears and your emotions flow. But I have learned to cope and to channel my emotions into something practical and useful. My friends did not die in vain: losing them, in some strange way, has made me a better patient care provider. I strive to be more skilled, quicker, more thorough and better educated than anyone else out there. I've lost the arrogance about my abilities that I held prior to all of this and now I'm just trying to make the most of what gifts I was given. I could have chosen to leave health care so as to never have to stare death in the face so intimately or frequently again, but then I would have failed not only my patients, but my friends and also myself. I still have my problems stemming from that day. I was diagnosed with PTSD and I still suffer night terrors as a result of it. Luckily I have the most understanding fiancee in the world who is willing to comfort me when I need her most- the quiet hours of the night when all my demons come flooding back like some sort of Mongol horde from the nether regions of my psyche causing me to wake up screaming for the fourth night in a row. The flashbacks are not so much replays of the events anymore but rather they take the form of some faceless, shapeless, all-consuming malfeasance from which I can not escape. I believe Jennifer (my fiancee) is the reason I was not in that truck that afternoon nearly 5 years ago. Our first child is due at the end of August and the happiness I feel because of that fact and because Jennifer loves me unconditionally (strange mental hangups and all), makes me glad I didn't die with my friends. Sorry...I know this got way off topic....I just started typing and it all sort of spilled out.

I went through the US Air Force's Critical Care Air Transport Team (CCATT) course. The agencies I work with as a civilian doesn't offer any specialized training for CCT.

Had a partner damn near get the both of us killed in a bar because of her opinions on a certain racial group (whom happened to comprise everyone in the bar except me, her, and the bar tender....oh and our patient!) Apparently what started all this was some dumba-- good ol' boy decided he didn't like the fact that this very large black guy had said "excuse me, miss" to his girlfriend. Well he deposited his girl at the local white trash bar and proceeded to trot his butt down the street to the other bar in town where all of the Mexicans and black guys who worked at the local refinery hung out at. According to the witnesses, the idiot marches in like he owns the place, straight up to where this black guy is sitting at the bar and hollers "Hey you stupid n-----. I'm going to teach you some respect." Wrong thing to say when you are grossly outnumbered. Oh, and the guy he said this to well, let's just say that he was the biggest dude I had ever seen. Easily 6'7" 300lbs easy, with fists as big as my head.....our victim (um, I mean patient) well he was lucky if he was 5'8" and maybe 175 soaking wet. He hauls off and punches the black guy in the gut, and the black guy threw one punch (just one), but hit our patient in the face with enough force to break his mandible in four places, inflict various other fractures of the facial bones (including I do believe a Lefort II/III fracture). The guy, of course, was knocked out and someone called for an ambulance. The cops and deputies were outside the bar when me and my partner showed up. "Have fun guys" was all they said to us. I went in and started working on the guy and asked what had happened. Well one of the guys told me and my partner what had happened and my partner proceeds to look straight at me and goes "We should get out of here before these n-----s do the same thing to us!" in a voice that could easily be heard by everyone within a few feet. I looked straight at her and told her to get out of there now. I then looked at the guys standing around us and said "You all should realize that just because she's a bigot and moron, doesn't mean I am one." The guy who had punched the patient looks at me and goes, "It's OK. Do what you need to do. No one will give you any problems". We got the patient to the hospital and then headed back to the station and I chewed my partner's posterior until we were inside the station and were greeted by the service coordinator, and her husband and the guy who had hit our patient. Our coordinator's husband was a coworker and friend of the gentleman who had called them to let them know what had happened. My partner was fired on the spot and I almost got fired if it had been for the guy going, "Oh no, he handled himself very well. He didn't say anything out of line. He's cool in my book." WHEW I don't have a problem with anyone, regardless of ethnicity, race, religion, color, creed, sexual orientation.....

If you've ever hit a deer with the ambulance and then had a fund raising venison dinner for the service.

It takes 20 minutes flight time just to get the helicopter to the hospital we normally go to (not counting the time it takes to get the bird off the ground). If they were to come to the scene it would take them another 15 to get there. That coupled with the fact that helicopters have been proved to have no effect on survival rates in unbiased studies, we don't bother with the helicopter except in the most extreme of circumstances (and you can guarantee that our medical director will rake us over the coals for calling for the helicopter even then.) Of course now we have this crappy medevac service a couple of counties over that is selling subscriptions to everyone and their brother, but we've been explicitly banned by our medical director from calling them EVER. Their quality of care and safety record is so poor that our MD said that if we have to call for a bird, that it had better be from Indy or Urbana or we should just hand over our certs as soon as we get to the ER cause if we call for the "other service" (not naming names) he'll nail us to the wall for violating protocol.

Back when I was a paid EMT-I, our average transport time anywhere from 15 minutes on the eastern side of the county to 45 minutes if you got down in the backwoods of the southern part of the county (the roads wouldn't allow you to go more than 25 MPH, they were so poorly maintained). Oh, and most of the time, no medics until the last 5-10 minutes of the transport (boy that makes so much difference :roll: )