an•thro•poph•a•gi — Pronunciation: (an”thru-pof’u-jī”, -gī”). *** She has beautiful blue eyes, a slender woman with long blonde hair who looks like at one time she was very pretty, but she has been sleeping on a mattress in a house that smells like urine. She says she has back pain and has been hurting too much […]

Guy goes to the paint store, buys some white paint. Driving back to his mother’s house in the north end of the city he is driving through a green light when bam. He gets slammed by a car being chased by the police. The other car rolls. A fire hydrant is hit. Water sprays everywhere. […]

A three year-old hits his head. The cops are questioning the mother when we get there. It looks like an accident. The kid just banged his head. He didn’t lose conciousness — he just hurts when he moves his head. His mother has to be six two and well over four hundred pounds — she […]

“Did you hear what happened to Art?” “No?” Art is my old partner. I am a little concerned by the urgency of the question. “He had an MI.” “What?” “He had an MI.” “Is he okay? What happened?” “He wasn’t feeling well. He and his partner were at the hospital. They’d just dropped a patient […]

Terry is a pisser. She’s a tiny little lady who’s almost sixty, looks almost fifty, and acts twenty-nine. Friday night is her night on the ambulance. She does the 23:00 to 8:00 shift with Alan and Ken. I come in at 6:00 to relieve Alan. She is having a friend and the friend’s boyfriend over […]

It’s been snowing all day — a blizzard. Eight or nine inches on the ground already. Now it’s night and I’m hungry, so we drive out through the snow to get a hot pizza. At the pizza shop, I notice a grey faced woman say hello to me as I go in the door, then […]

Last night one of our long-time members came in at ten to relieve the on duty crew. He has been an EMT for over twenty years and helps teach the EMT class here in the suburbs. He heard about the code we did yesterday and talked to the new kid about it. “I wanted to […]

The man is breathing like a fish cast up on land. He is quiet, then with all the effort of his chest, he gasps. He’s quiet, then he gasps again. His wife says he started losing conciousness an hour ago. He has terminal lung cancer. It has all been very quick. It started with back […]

I’m precepting a nice young man who is very on the ball. He knows his protocols better than I do. I ask him the dose for Cardizem. He rattles it out. .25mg/kg first dose. .35mg/kg second dose after fifteen minutes if the first dose didn’t work. Once the rate slows, you run a drip at […]

We’re called for a fall at a private home. When we pull up my partner says he’s been here before. He gets on the radio and cancels the district car. “What if she’s a big lady and we need a lift?” “She’s a little thing,” he says. We go to the front door. It’s locked. […]