30 May 2006

Flood

We were rather busy today. Mostly BLS, mostly back to back. We did transfers and MRIs. Psychs too. One ALS call for low blood sugar. Our patient was babbling and quite confused. His sugar was 46. We gave him an amp of D50 and he was speaking normally within about a minute-his sugar was 133. He had a very irregular heart rate without a history too; varying from 40-90. When I took his pulse I got 48, but he was asymptomatic.

Another ALS (16 miles running hot) for abdominal pain at a clinic. The lady was fine. They had all the wrong history. They told me she had her gallbladder out 2 weeks ago-it was actually removed 2 years ago. Nice. She refused an IV, and I was in no mood to fight, so we went without one.

We were called to the psych facility to transport a patient ot the ER for an "evaluation." Neither my partner nor I could figure out why you would send a psych to the ER for an eval if they were already in the facility, but whatever. It turned out we were taking her because she had vaginal bleeding x2 weeks, was admitted from the ER yesterday, and didn't feel that it was necessary to tell them about it then. Oh well. She was taken back to the psych hospital just over an hour later.

Today was extremely hot. Polyester is not my friend. I think it got up to about 99 and it was extremely humid. It had to be 110 in some of the nursing homes. Even the toilet paper and kleenex felt damp. Yuck.

We also had some bad storms. We had severe thunderstorm warnings and flash flood warnings. They weren't lying! We were taking a psych to the hospital across town during the worst of the storm. I was doing paperwork and my patient said, "You guys sprung a leak!" Sure enough, I look up and water is coming down in sheets through the weather stripping in the rear doors. There was probably 1/2" of standing water in the rig. In the meantime, all you could see outside was water. There was about a half mile section where the water was so deep I was sure that we were going to stall. It was about 1 1/2 feet deep in the middle and 2-3 feet near the curb. Several smaller cars stalled. We were making waves.

I called my dispatcher and told him that we would need an ark-not an ambulance for any other calls. He was funny. He was like, "Why's that?" I told him that we were currently submerged in 2 feet of water and that cars were floating by. He said it was the same by him. I told him I already had my floaties and blow up giraffe on, so I was good to go. He said, "You plan on getting out of the rig?" I said, "nope- the rig is filling up with water...we sprung a leak." All he said was. "Oh...." then he was really quiet for about 30 seconds. Then he said, "well, tell your patient it is just a humidifier." My patient piped in, "tell your dispatcher that your patient can hear him." I thought it was funny. My patient was a 19 y/o kid-he thought the whole cluster was absolutely hilarious.

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

<< Home


Click headline for top content from Firehouse.Com
The Web's Community & Resource
for Fire, Rescue, EMS & Safety