Drive

This morning, I drove the ambulance on a call for the first time. I didn’t want to. The PRESSURE! Not just one life to be responsible for, but three! The patient’s, my partner’s, and mine. And everyone else on the road, for that matter. And the rig is huge ~ it’s an off-road, 4WD, mountain ambulance. I sat straight up in the driver’s seat, clenching my abs so that the rest of me - mind and body - would not be so tense.

Five minutes in, I was loving it. Lights flashing, I sped by two highway patrol. Cars, trucks, and semis slowed and parted in deference. I didn’t even have to wait at the wretched construction zone ~ the flaggers waved me through, and the pilot car, midway through a one-lane-only stretch, pulled his string of vehicles over to the shoulder as I zipped by unhindered. This, I thought, is what it must be like to be Mick Jagger.

Driving back from the hospital, I was relegated to “normal person” status: no patient, no lights flashing. I was alone - my partner stayed in town to go linoleum shopping with her husband - and while I was sitting, waiting, waitingggg at the construction zone, I found a camera in a side pocket of the ambulance. And I took pictures. And then I fixed the date. It hasn’t been 2010 for a while.

And when I got back to the ambulance barn, I backed that baby in. She’s just a tiny bit crooked.

Yee Haw

Worked the ambulance during the rodeo this weekend.
These guys didn’t want our help.
But I had a nice view.

Wearing A New Hat

A crappy picture because I’m feeling crappy today.
Last night was our last EMT class. Final exams for seven hours. I’m an EMT now.

Finals weren’t crappy. I actually loved every second of that.

But today I’m kind of a wreck. The only thing making me feel better is Chris Cornell’s voice (hard proof I was a teenager in Seattle in the early ’90s) and I have spent the last several hours lying on my floor with a dumb DVD in my laptop, surrounded by a pathetic array of chips and salsa, lemon haagen daaz, kombucha, greek yogurt, and popcorn. Think of all the GMOs I’m eating today.

I’m like the girl in the bad romcom - but it’s not a guy at the root of this, and I know I’m not the only one feeling this way today. When we were done last night, one guy chirped up from the back of the room with, “But we’re still gonna meet every Tuesday and Thursday night, right?” It’s the ending of the class that has governed our lives for the past five months. When I wrote about why I decided to do this training, “because I thought I’d like it” was not one of my reasons.
I never imagined I’d love it so much.

Once I finish wallowing I’ll have new posts for you ~ more about the kitten family, the tomato garden, vespa vagabond, and some other big stuff. You didn’t think I’d just sit around without another adventure on the horizon, did you?

And… thanks for your patience and support these last several months.

This Is Only A Test

My EMT class convenes, early Saturday morning, at a wrecking yard. We are joined by the Fire Department dressed in bunker gear. We’re here to practice extrication: safely removing people from vehicles be they stable, mangled, or flipped (the vehicle, that is ~ we always assume the patient is mangled).

While the Fire Dept practices stabilizing automobiles, we practice moving patients out from various cars and trucks and onto a backboard. I play ‘patient’ at one point and am awed at how smoothly, thanks to proper knowledge and teamwork, I am transferred from wrecked truck to backboard to ambulance.

We join up with the Fire crew to learn about the fearsome tools they use to take apart a vehicle. We watch them in action.

Removing a door:

Goodbye, door:

Cutting the A-beams for roof removal:

The top of a truck is folded forward:

After a morning of practice in 30ºF weather with unrelenting 20-mph wind,
“Just like the real thing,” one instructor sadistically cackles, we are corralled in the ambulance as our instructors set up a crash: two vehicles, one on its side, with four moulaged patients trapped inside. Moulage: gory makeup that simulates all sorts of wounds and injury.

My classmates and I, and the Fire rookies, are then called to the scene to assess, extricate and transport these patients, while also tending to the additional patient care that takes place during each stage. The patient I am responsible for is in the backseat of a Bronco, the upright vehicle in the crash.

I have a fireman break the back window of the Bronco for me and I crawl in to manually stabilize my patient in the backseat. I discern his status, talk with him; sometimes, as he drifts out of consciousness, I simply talk to him. I stay with him while others cover us with a tarp, and then I hear all the windows being broken in quick succession. The glass patters against the tarp; gleaming bits bounce under the hem where I kneel. Once the windows are broken, firemen work to cut away the roof.

Forced into blindness to all that is going on beyond the tarp I am under, the world becomes momentarily muted, then punctured by din as massive tools held by those I cannot see snap through steel just inches away from my patient and I. Others, recognizable by voice, shout questions to me, instructions to each other.

A pool of fear spreads inside me as my range of sight shrinks. I cannot see the rookies, wielding their bone crushing tools; I cannot participate, or even prepare myself for what might go on beyond this blue cocoon. I give myself a mental shake, and let go of everything I cannot see and give myself to the one thing I can: the patient I am with.

It comes down to trust.
Sometimes, that is all we have.

I give my trust to those who move unseen on the other side of the tarp,
so that my patient might trust in me.