First shift

Yesterday I worked my first ambulance shift since clearing my final eval, covering for one of my fellow paramedic students who couldn't make the first half of his sixteen-hour shift due to a clinical. The day was relatively smooth on the whole; we took two calls in eight hours, one nosebleed and one transfer from a primary-care clinic to the hospital. I got to "tech" (i.e. provide patient care, rather than just drive) the nosebleed call, which was fun, though there wasn't much to do once the bleeding was controlled.

The second patient was transported, at his request, to an area hospital that has a reputation for a glacially slow Emergency Department. I had never brought a patient there before, but I see now that that reputation is well-deserved. The ED was full, so the patient, my partner and I waited in the hallway for a bed to open up. Three hours later, I was fifteen minutes past the scheduled end of my shift, and the patient was still lying on the stretcher in the hallway. What's more, there were two more ambulance crews lined up behind us waiting to drop off patients.

We checked with the ED staff, and they said that it would be at least another hour before our patient got a bed. As luck would have it, another crew from our company was in the ED after bringing a patient to a different unit in the hospital. They graciously offered to stay with our patient so my partner and I could return to headquarters for crew change. We gladly accepted, and my first "road" shift (i.e., non-training) with the company drew to a close. Looking forward to the next one!

In other news, NBA Hall-of-Famer, Knick veteran and Dartmouth alumnus Dick Mcguire died yesterday at age eighty four. It seems that he and his brother Al are the only brothers in the basketball Hall of Fame. Who knew?