Saturday night saw one of the pinnacle achievements of my life.  Twelve months before, while attending a Harlem Globetrotters game with my daughter, I announced that I was going to learn how to expertly spin a basketball on my finger just like the Globetrotters do.   Ever since then, I have carried a basketball in the […]

This is the third in a series of posts on common drug mistakes some EMS responders make during cardiac arrests. You find the fifty year old man supine on the floor with the fire department doing CPR. Their AED announces, “No shock advised. Continue CPR.” You set your monitor by the man’s head and connect […]

This is the second of three posts about common cardiac arrest drug mistakes some EMS personnel make on a routine basis. You have been working a cardiac arrest for a 54-year-old male with no prior medical history who collapsed after grabbing his chest.  You shocked him twice for fine vfib, but now he is in […]

You and another medic are on the scene of a cardiac arrest. You find the patient in ventricular fibrillation and immediately defibrillate him into a narrow complex rhythm. You have pulses back and while you take a blood pressure – 130/84, the other medic inserts an IV. The other medic then says to you, “Pass […]

A fellow paramedic here in Hartford, Greg Shovak runs a great educational program called EMS and PTSD – Learning from Combat Veterans to Understand PTSD.  I attended one of his sessions a few years ago and thought it was excellent.  I learned a lot of PTSD, and also had my first introduction to service dogs. […]

I attended a critical incident stress debriefing (CISD) a few years ago. I thought I had been invited to an informal get-together of folks from another service who I had been on a upsetting call with the day before. Had I known it was a formal CSID debrief, I wouldn’t have gone, as I had […]

Beautiful Boy, a father’s story of his son’s drug addiction, is now streaming on Amazon Prime. The movie, based on the real life stories of David and Nic Sheff, a father who witnesses his son’s addiction to methamphetamine and heroin, is forced to make artistic plot choices. I wondered how the movie director was going […]

When I first became an EMT, a friend asked me why I liked the job so much. When I come through the door, people look at me like I am an angel, I said. What is it like driving lights and sirens? Another friend asked. Awesome — I feel all powerful. I hit wail and […]

Twenty years ago when I was looking to buy my first house, my realtor didn’t understand why I did not like the home she was showing me that seemed to meet all my specifications: price, location, size. She did not understand that just two months before I had worked a cardiac arrest there. I could […]

I wrote a number of months ago about fentanyl induced chest wall rigidity in opioid overdoses. Chest Wall Rigidity Fentanyl induced chest wall rigidity is rare in the hospital setting, but it should not be surprising to find it is a factor in overdose outside the hospital given that the amounts of fentanyl being injected […]