CLUSTERFUCK 1
Last Saturday:This dude was 60 and totally out- speaking garbly gook like he might have a head bleed but the also kinda had that o.d. look to him. Or maybe his sugar dropped. The thing is, for a medic, the most useful skill we have is our ability to get the story. The best ones are like medical Sherlock Holmeses- can figure out the whole damn scenario from getting the history. New guys always gush about the skills: can u get an iv, how many tubes have you done, etc etc but bottom line is that if you don’t know what to do with that iv when you got it, it aint worth shit. But then there’s dudes like this, who can’t tell you what’s going on cuz they’re just going: Blarga blarga blarga and the cracked out middle age ladies who were with him were either clueless or withholding info.
All they would tell us is: he’s hopped up on p-funk.
What’s p-funk?
They didn’t know. His pressure wasn’t high enough to really look like a stroke and he didn’t respond when we put an amp of sugar in him, which he would’ve if he was hypoglycemic. He doesn’t look much like a standard narcotic OD either- pupils aren’t pinpoint and he’s not in respiratory depression, but he could have any number of things on board, so we push a judicious little squirt of narcan in him to see how it settles.
Full body seizure. Not even a fake one.
This’ll happens sometimes with addicts, because the narcan puts them into such immediate withdrawal their body rebels. But this wasn’t enough to do that and it seemed unlikely that he was that far in anyway. He came out of it on his own as we sped off to the hospital, where we found out from google that p-funk is a saucy mix of powdered heroin and crack-cocaine…. Which makes me think the seizure happened when the narcan zapped the heroin out of the equation and left him suddenly full of pure crack.
Sometimes all you can do is shake yer head and sigh…
CLUSTERFUCK #1
Yesyes, clusterfuck, but first, this:
It’s pouring rain in that weird semi-suburban part of East New York where the mafia used to put all their dead. We’re backing up a BLS unit on another nonsense DIFFBREATHER. You can tell it’s gonna be no big thing from the call description on the monitor: FEMALE, 48, UPSET, NO MED HIST, DIFFBRTHR… and the EMTs are already inside so I tell my partner to wait in the bus, I’ll just take a quick looksee. When I open the door to the little ramshackle house I find a lake in the living room. The water is easily knee deep. A little electric pump is at the entrance, frantically scooping water up, but it’s facing the wrong way so all the waters’ splashing back into the house. An old blind guy is sitting on a mattress that’s floating in the middle of the room. He’s propped up on his elbows, looking around curiously.
Uh- sir? I say.
Eh?
Sir? Someone called EMS for trouble breathing?
Eh?
I gingerly wade thru the domestic tide pool to a back room, where the EMTs are chatting with a crying lady.
What’s wrong?
She didn’t take her psych meds for three days, the EMT reports
She’s not upset about…, I nod my head towards the disaster area behind me.
The EMT shrugs and the lady sobs.
Any chest pain, ma?
She shakes her head.
Any medical problems besides the psych stuff?
Another shake.
I make my “you good?” face at the EMTs and they nod (because EDPs get EMTs). I slosh back out into the living room, past the little floating old guy who says “eh” and out into the rainy Brooklyn night.
Ok now the story, and this people, is 1 of the ones that comes to mind when people go 'Oh what's the most fucked up shit you been in on the job?':
Big T was grumpy that night, which usually meant that any little thing could ignite a rambling curseladen monologue that would eventually lead back to his wife. Always amusing, once you got past the fear that he might stab you up. But still- one of my all time favorite partners.
You can tell a shot is gonna be legit when it comes in a whole bunch of times in a whole bunch of different ways. This job came in on three different corners, once or twice as a shooting, once a stab. It’s not because there’s so many patients (usually), but more a hint of the clusterfuck that awaits us: shit is so chaotic and everyone is going batshit so everyone calls 911 with a different batshit story. As we start heading in the job becomes a CARDIAC ARREST, which doesn’t even mean he’s dead, just means more insanity. Now an arrest by its very nature requires two units, an ALS and a BLS, so the EMTs can do CPR while we start the ivs and intubate and shock and all that. But tonight, all the east new york EMTs were busy taking stuffy noses and stubbed toes to the hospital, so they had to send a unit from Crown Heights to back us up.
The night was thick with chaos. Even before we get to the job someone’s trying to flag us down cuz he’s getting his ass kicked over some petty robbery shit. Cops are flying around in all directions like dogs chasing their tails. It’s hot as shit out. We have to park at the top of the block because the whole thing is covered covered covered in people who spilled out of a houseparty whn the shooting went down. Everyone already wants to kick our assses the second we get there, and the only back up we have is a bunch of surly Long Island firefighters, who aren’t world renowned for easing the community’s aggression. They do help us cleave a path through the crowd though, and we finally get to our man.
BUT- there’s a chick clinging to him. They’re both covered in blood, who knows whose, and she’s screaming for us to help him but won’t get the f out of the way.
We erupt into a chorus of: lady, you gotta get off the dude so we can help him, lady, miss, seriously, now, lady, get off the dude NOW RIGHT NOW YOU’RE NOT HELPING.
And she’s screaming: HELP HIM MY GOD PLEASE OH HELP HIM PLEASE…
And believe me people, I wanted to physically detach her myself but i already had a large angry crowd looking for a reason to whup my ass and touching the screaming lady was not about to 2 be that reason. Meanwhile, we still have no BLS to back us up and the Fire dudes are looking pretty iffy about the whole thing.
Lady: HELP HIM! SAVE HIM! PLEASE!
Us: Get…OFF…THE SHOT DUDE…NOW!
And the guys barely moving at all.
It takes FD, PD and us to convincer her to get the f off him AND THEN: (and i don’t even like using capital letter but if i was telling u this in person I would be raising voice plenty, because although this happened a few years back when i was a new medic, the trauma of the night lingers. In a healthy way) Aaaaanyway: AND THEN: it turns out the lady didn’t even know our guy. Did…not…even…know…the dude….Damn. Just rolled up on the scene and jumped right into the action. Covered herself in his blood, delayed his medical care- which in any other circumstance would land yer ass in central booking, and he a total stranger. Well…sometimes you just have to move on.
EMTs showed up and I swear I’ve never been so happy to see them. Situations like this- you need as many hands as you can get. When we get him on the bus they get a blood pressure and cut off his clothes while i set up an iv and my partner does a full body super fast assessment. He’s got one thru the hand, one in the left chest and one in the gut. The chest one turns out to be a problem because it’s pierced his lung, collapsing it- that’s why he’s not talking. This is the most pressing issue he’s got, will kill him quickest. Second most pressing is the gut shot, because you can easily bleed out and/or later on, toxify your system from that. Those are eerie because you may not even see a drop of blood, but it’s all gathering in the abdomen somewhere and then they’ll suddenly have no blood pressure and crash, just like that.
For his bleeding out gut, we have a big bag of saline, attached through a drip set which is attached to HUGE ASS IV that I stick into his arm. The collapsed lung is more complicated: I pass my partner an equally hugeass needle, which he inserts into the third intercostals space, meaning between the second and third rib. With the needle removed, the open catheter allows the extra air that’s built up in the chest cavity to escape so that the lung can reinflate. It did and the guy started talking and looking a little more alive as we rolled into the er bay.
Unfortunately, that’s when things started getting really ugly.
We musta caught em off guard, cuz it was a hosp i’ve seen work miracles in some f’ed up situations. We definitely told the dispatcher to let them know what we were coming in with, but maybe they never got the message. Either way, they weren’t ready for us, which led to chaos: nurses and doctors running around, paging trauma teams, screaming back and forth. You know things aren’t going well when you have to repeat the presentation like five times to different people. In the midst of this, homeboy’s lung recollapsed right in front of me, so I re-decompressed him, using my partner’s needle hole as a marker. Then someone pulled out that fat iv i’d worked so hard to get, and a scramble commenced to get another. Then suddenly everyone disappeared for a haunted few seconds, but not for an x-ray, maybe just to huddle and try a new approach, cuz then they were all back with renewed chaos. I should’ve known just to do my job and back away, but like i said, i was new, and we’d worked so damn hard on this guy, i wanted to see what happened. He could see things weren’t going well, was yelling and screaming for them to help him and then finally, out of breathless and hopeless, just looked at me, dead in the eye actually, and said goodbye. Then he dropped his head back on the stretcher. They tubed him but didn’t have a oxygen ready to push into the tube, and by the time they got it his pressure was bottoming out and they whisked him away to surgery, where he died.