talk about jinxing myself.

I royally jinxed myself with that last post.
From the weatherman perspective, not only was it freezing cold all day, it started to warm up (to mid 20's)
and then started raining. And we all know from grade school that when water comes into contact with a surface below 32 degrees, you get ice. I was reminded of this today when i was getting out of my car after work and almost fell flat on my ass on the driveway. Then looking at the forecast it is supposed to warm up and start raining heavily, to the tune 1.5 inches of rain by tomorrow afternoon, along with winds of up to 40 mph. lovely. New York is driving me nuts this "Winter".

Now to the jinx part.
Remember when i said how quiet it's been for me on the ambulance lately? Yeaaah. that was an Oops.
Sunday night about 22:09 we got hit for a male pt. unresponsive and not breathing. Nuts.
Beat feet for the station, follow the squad and the blue-light brigade to the scene, watch people run around in circles for a minute while they try to find out which house it was, get bitched at by our driver as i'm standing there with the stretcher waiting to find out where the house is before i take off... thats long winded.

Lets break it down step by step.

1. Beat feet for the station. We did very well this time around. En route in 3 minutes, which is excellent with everyone responding from home.

2. Follow the squad and blue-light brigade to the scene. Actually, it was more in this order: Squad, Meat Wagon, Blue light brigade. I've been on calls that have had 40 POV's on scene. and the scene was about 1/4 mile from the fire station. Figure that out. Anyway, in this case it was welcome. The more the merrier, when it comes to codes. Usually.

3. Running around in circles and pissy driver.
Squad calls on scene with us right behind them (If you're keeping time, this is another 2 minutes, so we're still at the tail end of the BLS link in the chain of survival) . I'm in the back of the rig getting equipment together, we stop, my driver and medic jump out, medic grabs some equipment, asks me to get the ET kit and follow him in. I dig around, find the ET kit, jump out of the rig... I take a look around. I see 3 houses, all either dimly or not lit up, and not a single person. No one doing the steal second sign, no rescue personnel loitering around, nothin. So i pick the nearest house, head toward it with the ET kit, when out of the shadows come about 12 people from rescue. Everyone has that confused, Bugs Bunny style "Which way did he go, George?" look on their faces, and they were asking questions like "Which house is it? Do you know what house it is? Cuz it isnt this house!"

So i do an about-face and look at the other 2 houses, still no sign of my medic or driver. Now I figure it would be safe to get the stretcher out of the rig since we've ruled out the house on one side of the road.

I threw the ET kit on the stretcher, pulled the stretcher halfway out when I heard the same round of questions; "Which house is it?! There's no one out here! There's no lights on! Is this even the right f-ckin address? WTF?!"


FINALLY someone comes to a window or something and signals that we were at the right house. I mean, people were about 1 second from splitting up and knocking on doors. (some people around here do not like marking their houses/mailboxes.)

I hear the calls of "It's this house!!!" so i start pulling the stretcher out the rest of the way, when one of the many things on the stretcher starts to topple off.

Here i am, by myself because everyone else is running toward the house, trying to hold up the stretcher with one hand while trying to reposition equipment with the other hand, when Mr. Driver comes around the corner, starts to shut the back door of the rig, sees me there, offers no help, grabs the front of the stretcher, shoves it (and me) backwards, and says "Get this f-ckin thing out of my way so i can move the rig into the driveway! Jeez!"

My thoughts at the moment? "Whyyyy i oughtta......"

So i grabbed the stretcher, started wrestling it and all the equipment that is on it across the nice, rutted, heavily sloped driveway toward the house.

Finally got some help about 15 feet from the door. The overflow effect was starting to kick in (where you have too many people inside so a few get sent out), and they told me they'd take care of getting the stretcher in, so i grabbed the equipment we needed and went in.

CPR in progress, asystole or fine PEA (Didnt get much of a look at the monitor), Paramedic from rescue drops the tube, IV's get flowing, Epi goes in, get the pt on the board, on the stretcher, in the rig.
Pick up a few ppl from rescue to assist with the code, and off we go.

Halfway to the hospital, it struck: The dreaded case of code cramps. I'm not the only one who's had it, right?
You're bouncing down the road at a high rate of speed, assisting with a code, when your stomache says
"Mwah ha ha ha haahhhhhh. Shouldn't have eaten THAT earlier, eh pal?"

We got him to the ER, got him into a room, and i did the 15 yard dash to the bathroom once the staff took over.
As I was walking out of the bathroom, i heard someone say "He's got a rhythm". A few minutes after that, "He has peripheral pulses", then "His pressure is dropping" then (Doc)"So give him some Dopamine."

When we left, he was holding his own. Haven't heard if he's gonna be pulling out of it or not. Didn't look too promising, but we did get to him in time, so depending on the reason for him coding, he may have a chance.
The medic doesn't think he'll make it out of the hospital, but we'll see.

So that was that.
And now it is dinnertime, followed by study time.
Cya