Note: I am double posting this on this blog and my capnography blog. When I was at a conference this past year one of the speakers said the data on prehospital intubation is so bad that if EMS had to go before the FDA to get approval to allow medics to intubate, it would be […]

Old woman has a syncopal episode at the dinning room table. No prior history. The family says she was out 1-2 minutes. Her eyes rolled back into her head and she vomited. Can’t determine whether she vomited and then passed out or passed out and vomited. She looks terrible, although she is alert. She says […]

Happy Thanksgiving everyone. This is the first Thursday since I have been in EMS that I have not had a regular shift scheduled on this day. When I started in 1989 at a small ambulance company, I worked every Thursday. When I went to work for the state, I rode with a volunteer ambulance every […]

Sirens in the Night

My left deltoid is killing me. I can hardly lift my arm up. I got a flu shot last night. Needles don’t bother me. I took the PPD like a pro. The little tuberculin syringe into the right forearm. I hardly felt it. Then the nurse pulled out the flu shot needle. I wasn’t even […]

Past midnight. A giant of a man stands by the open door of his twisted Buick blinded by the lights of the fire truck. He is bare-chested, blood streaming from his severely lacerated head. There is a hole in the windshield the size of a basketball. “I don’t need a collar,” he says, ripping off […]

Buy stock in ambulance companies. There is no way around it. There will always be ambulance transports. Talk all you want about treat and release. It’s not going to happen. Here are the problems. Liability. No body wants to take it. Plus people seem to like ambulance rides. There is a certain cachet about them. […]

It’s a cold rainy evening. We’ve been doing nothing but soaking wet drunks and third floor carry downs of heavy women. Dispatch pages us with a transfer from a local hospital to a town about thirty minutes away. I don’t like transfers except on cold rainy days. They beat doing MVAs in the rain, they […]

I have written in the recent past about my frustrations with Medical Priority Dispatch (MPD), as well as the recent research that has been published pointing out its failings. The posts include Troublesome, Unformed Idea, Fair Enough and Dispatchers. Bryan E. Bledsoe, DO, FACEP, who has made a name for himself debunking EMS myths in […]

People were out raking today or in many cases using their high-powered blowers to clear their lawns of the orange and red leaves still falling from the trees. They didn’t have those blowers when I was a kid. I’m lucky though, I have a small yard now and don’t get many leaves. The ones that […]