Blinded By the Light...

Wrapped up like a douche. Dressed up like a dude. Wrecked up like Medusa. Knocked up like a douchebag.

Okay, so misheard lyrics don't have much to do with anything here, but since I blatantly stole the song's title for this post, there ya go.

Anyway, we get sent to a cardiac arrest in the world's tiniest apartment.  We arrive at scene and climb the three flights of stairs (of course) to access the patient's residence.  I walk in to find two beat cops working the patient up in the smallest kitchen in the history of humanity.  Seriously, this thing is so narrow we can't get an 18" backboard in to the patient.  The cop controlling the patient's airway is squatting and grimacing like a catcher that should have left home plate 3 or 4 innings ago, but he mans up and volunteers to stay there while we move the patient from the patient to the outside breezeway, which is the only place we can work without claustrophobia and/or furniture and walls getting in our way.

The cop doing compressions gets out of the way to help us make access and take over treatment. I straddle the patient to take over compressions while we evaluate the quickest and easiest way to move our patient.  Due to the close quarters and our inability to get the backboard to the patient, we decide to just drag the patient outside.  With the plan made, I feel like things should finally start to move a little more smoothly.

That's when the kitchen light burns out and we are plunged into darkness. 

Awesome. 

I decide to stand up and stop compressions for a moment to pull out a flashlight. The cop behind me had the same idea at the same time, though, and, believing that I was still straddling the patient and doing compressions, pulled out his 6 cell Maglite. He snapped it toward his partner like he was deploying an ASP (watch this video if you're not sure what that means) just as I stood up.

I heard the thud as the light crashed into my skull. My vision dimmed, the stars came out, and I almost fell over. BAD times.

So the cop apologizes profusely, I attempt to clear my head, and we finish running the call. 

Our patient, an elderly frequent flier with an extensive medical history, died in the ICU the next morning without ever regaining consciousness. If he had one of those Hollywood style out of body experiences while we worked the arrest, hopefully he got a chuckle at me getting clobbered by the Maglite as he walked toward his own light.

A couple of Excedrin later and I felt like myself again. Oh, and as a huge bonus, the cop brought me a hard hat and a quart of cookie dough ice cream. I'm sure we'll be laughing about the incident for a long time. He even drew me (on a napkin, no less) a cruder version of this:

 Good times.

Rites of Initiation, Part 1

After reading Motorcop's post on Supreme Court Double Dog Dares, I was inspired to write this...

As George Bernard Shaw once said, "youth is wasted on the young."  While Mr. Shaw probably wasn't talking about new public servants, I think the idea carries over to our new guys, many of whom are likely to start puberty within the next 6 months.

Everybody knows the new guy.  We all call them something different - rookie, rook, boot, probie, new guy, FNG (F'n new guy), greenhorn, etc - but they're all talking about the same guy.  He's probably young and thinks he knows everything.  He probably takes himself WAY too seriously.  And your newest pair of boots is probably older than him.

While many of our "new guys" are actually not guys at all, some of our new men and women have a highly charming combination of entitlement, arrogance and self-importance.

To be fair, most of our probationary employees are good employees, but there are always folks that aren't yet living up to their full potential.  This post, however, isn't about them specifically.  Instead, it's about the rites of initiation we can put them through.

Now, don't mistake me here.  There have been many high-profile incidents in the media over the last few years that make us all look terrible.  Hazing and all other kinds of bullying are serious problems, and there's no place for it.  Hazing and bullying can cause all kinds of physical, psychological or mental harm to the victim, and expose the tormentors and their agencies/employers to serious civil and criminal liabilities.  If you're hazing someone, stop reading this blog and figure out where you screwed up in life.  Many of the hazers out there were hazed themselves and feel the need to perpetuate this vicious cycle, and this is decidedly not okay.  If you're jeopardizing anyone's health and safety, wasting department resources, delaying emergency response or in any other way acting unprofessionally, you're doing it wrong.

I'm talking about team building exercises that help the rookie learn to take themselves less seriously and quicken their transition into public safety.  I'm talking about station pranks.

Shenanigans.

To paraphrase, shenanigans are cheeky and fun.  If your shenanigans are cruel and tragic, you're probably Farva, and you're probably hazing someone.

Proper shenanigans help the rookie relax a little and, ideally, help them learn.  One of the easiest (and most common) things to do is to send them on a fool's errand.

Done right, this involves the rookie wandering all over the station, often for quite some time, looking for something.  Aside from entertaining the rest of the house, it teaches the rookie to ask questions and clarify orders.  Some of the typical tasks include finding:

#7 Fallopian tubes
Strobe rotator grease
Ladder stretchers
Sky hooks
Electrode chargers
Helicopter landing gear
Neck tourniquets
Tubes of elbow grease
Water hammers

They can also be sent to rotate the air in the tires of the backup rig, shake all the IV bags to preserve freshness, replace the squad's spark plugs or even sent to fill out the ID-10T (idiot) form.

While rookies are fun to tease, the whole point here is to bring them into the family.  If you're making them feel like an outsider, you're screwin' up.  So make sure that the rookie isn't singled out.  The shenanigans should extend to the other members of the crew, too.  You've also gotta make sure that your timing is appropriate, and that the victim's got a good sense of humor.  Also, if you aren't able to take it, you better not dish it.

A can't-miss crowd pleaser is to switch the victim's mattress and box spring and remake the bed like nothing has happened.  The great thing about this one is that it won't typically be discovered until bed time.

Another good one is to buy a universal remote and program it to work on the station's TV.  If you select your victim carefully and only use your remote sparingly, you can torture him for months.  If you can pass the remote around to other crews, he won't know who to suspect, and if it only happens every week or so he'll slowly go crazy as the channels randomly change on him.

If your rig is equipped with a field programmable keyless entry (most Fords), pick a spare one up off eBay.  Program it to work on the vehicle, and if you do it right you can convince the new guy that the doors are voice activated and programmed by saying a specific (and embarrassingly goofy) phrase.  When he speaks the phrase, you lock or unlock the doors.  When it stops working, have him fill out the proper equipment repair forms.  Works even better if the Chief is in on it, and best if the 'programming phrase' is insulting to the Chief -- but only if he's in on it...

Unable To Locate...?

It's the middle of the night, and I'm fast asleep when the alarm rudely jolts me awake.  The dispatcher sends us off on what sounds like a wild goose chase.

Non-specific location + "possible" traffic collision +  3rd party caller that didn't bother to check on the occupants + 3 in the morning = wild goose chase (at least 99.2% of the time)

So we drive the whole 5 mile stretch of roadway that our ever-so-helpful reporting party thought the wreck might've been near without finding a single thing.  My partner keys up the mic to tell the dispatchers that we've driven the freeway and can't find the wreck when I happen to see that there's a darker patch of black against the night sky than there's supposed to be.  It's another mile north of us, and completely outside our jurisdiction, but we decide to check it out just to be on the safe side.

We round a bend a minute later and see a fully engulfed vehicle burning furiously on the shoulder on the southbound side of the expressway.  There are no agencies on scene, and we're the only emergency crew in sight, so we advise dispatch of the situation and our intentions.  We approach the carbeque and prepare to pass it, separated by just a couple of lanes and the center wall.  There doesn't appear to be any significant damage to the vehicle, and I attempt to update dispatch with the exact location and absence of obvious damage as we pass the car.

At that moment, however, the vehicle decided to explode.

Like full on, Jerry Bruckheimer-Michael Bay-Bruce Willis EXPLODE.  The driver's door blew off the frame of the car, the hood went flying, and I'm pretty sure both my partner and I needed fresh underwear.

I think the radio traffic went like this:

"Medic 31, this incident will be southbound, just north of HOLY BLEEP! (from me) BLEEP ME!" (from the partner)

We beat feet to reaccess the southbound lanes, hoping and praying that the car is unoccupied.  As we prepare to turn left on to the onramp, a state trooper flies by us.  We arrive on scene and the trooper gives us the all clear signal.  We make a quick face-to-face, and he informs us that this was a mechanical issue that resulted in a vehicle fire.  The occupant of the vehicle was safely off the roadway at an all-night diner, where he had called the police.  Somehow we never got the message that it was a simple vehicle fire, but oh well.

We decided to hang out and roast marshmallows (I kid, I kid) til the engine company got on scene, then get back to bed.  If it hadn't been the middle of the night, our outbursts probably would've gotten us a quick trip to the chief's office to explain ourselves,  but fortunately it was, and it didn't.  We did have a good laugh about it with him the next morning, though...

Happy Mother's Day?

It's Saturday night, the day before Mother's Day.  We're getting ready to go grab some dinner when the radio goes off.


Sigh.


We get dispatched to a residential address in south Fairview for convulsions.  After an uneventful response, we arrive on scene.  The engine company that should have beat us is nowhere in sight.  A family member frantically waves and yells for us to hurry.  Now this isn't the typical panicked and overly dramatic waving that I've become so accustomed to over the years -- this is a distinguished looking Latino gentleman in his mid-60s in a soaking wet suit and tie.  Different to say the least.


We walk in to a small but very well kept home and find the living room packed with misty-eyed adults and scared children.  Our waver escorts us to the bathroom, where we find a woman trying to console our patient, a woman in her early 60s who is laying on the floor in a puddle of water and covered with a towel and a robe.  The patient is altered and postictal, and keeps saying "My eye!" over and over.  We ask the woman to move out of the way so we can assess the patient, and the horror of the situation becomes evident.  Her left eye has been ripped from its socket and rests upon her cheek, and the trauma to the eyeball itself is devastating.


My partner and I share a silent "Holy bleep!" look and start to ask questions.  The patient's daughter and husband tell us that the family was going out for an early Mother's Day dinner, and the patient was taking a shower.  They heard a crash, and hurried into the bathroom to find that the patient had apparently had a seizure and fallen out the shower.  As she fell out of the shower, she fell into the empty toilet paper holder, which looked a lot like this:

Unfortunately, as she fell her face hit the fixture, and the hook caught her eye, causing the horrific damage. The damage itself would be a relatively easy injury to manage, at least in the prehospital setting, but her altered mental status complicated matters quite a bit.  

Due to the fall, we have to place the patient in full spinal precautions, and while her altered level of consciousness is probably a result of the seizure, it could very well be masking a further head injury from her fall.  She also kept trying to hold her eye and put it back in place, and we obviously couldn't have that.

Did I mention that this is all taking place in the smallest bathroom EVER?  Or that the engine company is STILL not on scene?

Just for reference, the bathroom layout was somewhat similar to this one:

The shower would be where the window is in this picture, and the bathroom door opened directly to a single sink vanity, but you get the idea.  The patient was laying between the toilet and the vanity, under the toilet paper holder.

With a lot of help from the family, we were able to c-spine the patient and gently restrain her hands.  We covered the left eye with a moist sterile dressing and covered the right eye as well, which seemed to calm the patient somewhat.  

We carried the backboarded patient out to the living room and put her on the gurney.  Between the oxygen and the passage of time, her mental status had improved to normal, aside from no memory of our arrival.  She knew where she was, and knew that she had hurt her eye, and she just wanted to say goodbye to her grandkids, who were all very scared.  As we loaded her into the ambulance, the engine company FINALLY showed up.  Apparently they had been tied up with a small kitchen fire.  Sigh.


We took off for U-Med, and after transporting across the city in light Saturday evening traffic left her in their very capable hands.  They already had an ophthalmologist on the way for a consultation, and, while they don't expect to be able to save the eye, I'm confident she's in the best place possible for her injury. 

A Refreshing Change of Pace

So I walked into the station today, greeted by the delicious aromas of omelettes, bacon and hash browns.  The off-going crew made us breakfast!

The station was in tip-top shape, and the squad was freshly detailed and fully stocked.  It even smelled like orange blossoms.

The Chief was in a great mood, and handed me a gift-wrapped plate of his wife's world famous fudge.

The Partner was early to work, and even remembered to polish his boots.

Our first run didn't come in til breakfast was eaten and the kitchen cleaned up, and it was for the sweetest little old lady ever. Her blood sugar crashed, and when we woke her up with a little D50 she gave me & The partner the biggest hugs ever.  She even made sure we took a plate of fresh cookies with us to the hospital to share with the nurses.

After that we got back in to quarters in time for a Kindergarten class to do a tour.  The kids were polite and well-behaved, and listened with wide eyes as we told them about the job and demonstrated the equipment.

As the kids left the station, we caught another run at an extended care facility.  We walked into the spotless and pleasant smelling facility, where the nurse obviously cared a lot for her patient and gave us a perfect and intelligent report.  The patient was obviously well taken care of by the staff, and we were able to transport to an uncrowded ER filled with smiling, happy nurses who were still eating cookies.

We didn't wait at all for a bed, and stopped at a Stop & Rob to pick up some iced tea and ice cream to take back to the station.  On a whim I grabbed a lottery ticket, and won $2,500 bucks on a scratcher.

Got back to the station in time to take a little nap, and woke up in time to catch the opening pitch.  Dempster pitched a perfect game, and Blake DeWitt shocked the Pirates with 2 grand slams in the first inning.

All in all today was a perfect day!

Urban Legends

Hang out around the public safety field long enough, and you're bound to hear endless stories that may, over time, seem to be all the same.  Whether you're telling 'em, your partner is telling 'em, the new guy is telling 'em or the charge nurse is telling 'em, storytelling is a great way to bond and build camaraderie and friendships.

But...

You'll also find out that a lot of us are full of it, and urban legends are prevalent.

Here are a few of the most common I've run across:

1. Sem-antics
      Somebody claims that, while in an A&P (anatomy and physiology) or Bio lecture, a fellow classmate embarrasses herself.  While discussing the composition of semen, the instructor talks about the sugar content of the fluid, leading a (usually reported to be both very attractive and pretty dumb) student to inquire why it "tastes so salty"  See also http://www.snopes.com/college/risque/salty.asp


2. Your name is what?
     While obtaining patient information for a run report or medical chart, the provider asks for the patient's name.  The patient says what sounds like "Limmonjuloh," so the medic asks for the spelling.  The patient says, "L-E-M.  O-N.  J-E. L-L-O."  The medic says, "Lemon Jello?!?" and the patient indignantly replies that, "It's pronounced Limmonjuloh!"

The same story goes around about Orangejello and "Sha-theed," which is always spelled Shithead.

3. Hyphen hijinks
     In the same vein, there's the medic that asks for the patient's ID, and sees the name "Le-a."  The medic calls the woman "Leah" and gets chewed out by the patient, who says that "No, no, no! It's LaDasha!  The dash ain't silent!"

4. Language barriers
     Then there's the guy that swears he transported a young Latina woman in labor.  On the way to the hospital, she gives birth to a bouncing (the rig is always doing warp speed, and the pun NEVER gets old. Sigh.) baby girl.  Not knowing any Spanish, he cleans the baby up, wraps her in a blanket and tells mom, "Fuhmolly" - his assumed Spanish pronunciation of Female.  The mom, being young, naive and unfamiliar with American law, assumes that in the US the practitioner that delivers the baby names the baby, and ends up naming the little girl "Female."  Other terrible and unfortunate names that your partner SWEARS he's seen can be found here: http://www.snopes.com/racial/language/names.asp

5. The big uh-O
     Many a medic also claims to have responded to a residence for a woman in her late teens or early twenties complaining of shortness of breath and flushed skin.  The patient is found in a bedroom with her boyfriend or husband holding her hand and trying to calm her down.  After describing her symptoms, the medic asks what she was doing when this started.  After a few moments of embarrassed evasion, she relays that she had been intimate with her boyfriend or husband when her body started to tingle and she got flush and short of breath.  The medic then laughingly congratulates the young lovers and informs the woman that she's just had her first orgasm.

6. The Star-Spangled Bummer
     Let's not forget the yahoo that responds to the call of a man bleeding and arrives to find a couple cops and/or firefighters caring for a Hispanic man named Jose that was brutally assaulted.  His face is a mess, with multiple lacerations and contusions, a misshapen nose and two swollen-shut eyes.  The medic pulls out a pen light to assess the patient's pupils and unthinkingly asks, "Jose, can you see?" and is promptly humiliated by the other responders humming and singing (usually off key, sometimes even into a radio) the rest of the first verse of the Star-Spangled Banner.

7. Why'd you call 911?
     This one is semi-unique in that I've heard it from both responders and dispatchers.  Either at call time with a dispatcher or upon scene arrival of the crew, a frantic family member hysterically relates, "Chicken breath!  Chicken breath!  Hurry, hurry, chicken breath!"  The perplexed crew makes patient contact and discovers a woman in extreme respiratory distress, and quickly figures out that "Chicken breath!" is what "She can't breathe!" sounds like in the family member's heavily accented English.

These are just a couple of the most common I've run across.  I've heard them time and time again, and while I can believe that SOMEBODY out there has had one of these happen to them during their career, I find it really hard to buy that the 21 year old probie has run across all of them.

I may have been born at night, ladies and gentlemen, but it wasn't LAST night.

Good grief.

Not Your Typical Delivery

So it's a typical morning, and I'm eating an omelette for breakfast.  The radio jolts the fun out of breakfast, though, when we get dispatched to a psychiatric problem.

There are many factors taken into account when we respond to one of these calls, including: Call location, call time (day or night, weekend or weekday), patient description (age & sex), our proximity to the scene, if other agencies are already on scene, and the threat the patient poses to us, themselves and others.  All these factors come into play when we decide whether or not to stage in a safe location until the scene is safer (or at least safer...)

In this case, the call was at a liquor store right across the street from where we were eating. Wonderful.

Guess we can't really stage on this one.

As we walk outside, the patient can be heard screaming unintelligibly at passersby and customers.  He appears to be a middle-aged man of average build in a Planet Express delivery service uniform.  He has no obvious weapons or injuries.  A large gentleman (I'm talking John Coffey from The Green Mile huge) is trying to talk some sense into the man, but failing miserably.  The patient appears to be in a drug induced state of excited delirium.

Due to his erratic and threatening behavior toward our Samaritan and others in the area, we decide to attempt to restrain the patient.  While he seemed to listen and comply with requests to stay out of the store, he's otherwise non-compliant and unpredictable.  While my partner and I discuss our options, PD's sirens are rapidly approaching the scene.  That's good news, but help is still about 30 seconds away.  Mr. Coffey, though, takes matters into his own hands.

Literally.

He asks if we want his help, and before we can respond he picks the patient up and carefully but forcefully places him on to the gurney and pins him down while we apply restraints. As we finish securing the restraints, PD arrives and augments our soft restraints with flexcuffs.  With the seat belts applied, the man isn't going anywhere.  Hopefully...

We thank the Samaritan for his help, and load the patient into the squad.  The cop jumps into the rig, and we take off toward FMH.  As I obtain vitals and attach the patient to the cardiac monitor, I notice that we have a bit of a problem.  The patient appears to be in V-Tach at a rate of 280.

For those of you not in the know, Ventricular Tachycardia is a cardiac rhythm that is generally incompatible with life.  It needs to be resolved ASAP, as it frequently leads to death very quickly if untreated.  This patient is officially FUNDY - F'ed Up, Not Dead Yet.  

Before the patient can be cardioverted, the rhythm converts on its own, to Sinus Tach at a rate of ~140.  With the IV established, I make base contact and advise FMH of our situation.  The patient decides to make a liar out of me by dropping his rate further to 80 beats per minute, with multifocal PVCs just for fun.  He loses consciousness as we pull in to FMH's parking lot, the heart rate drops further to 30, and it looks suspiciously like something agonal and idioventricular.

My partner parks the bus as the patient officially codes.  I glance at the monitor - now showing v-fib.  Ventricular Fibrillation is basically quivering of the heart muscle, and is always fatal if not corrected.  I deliver a quick precordial thump - a sharp blow to the chest - with no effect.  We haul ass into the ER and get him into a bed.  Multiple defibrillations and a few minutes later, the resuscitation efforts are terminated.

We pack our stuff up and go outside to the ambulance bay.  As we stand there BSing with the officer that rode in with us, his partner rolls up in their squad car.  He was able to get the whole story out of witnesses, and the patient's friend, who sits in the backseat of the patrol car.

Apparently the patient had been smuggling drugs through Planet Express's system for an unspecified but short amount of time.  He worked for Planet Express as a ramp employee at Fairview International, and had just opened a package of narcotics when an Airport Police officer approached the plane he was unloading on a routine patrol check.  Since the Air cops typically drive slowly and safely around the aircraft, especially while on patrol, this knucklehead had plenty of time to swallow the balloons from the package he'd already opened.

The officer moved on and, with the crisis averted, he clocked out for an early lunch.  His best idea was to drink something to make himself throw up the balloons that (GASP!) contained some pretty potent cocaine.  His friend - who knew nothing about the small time smuggling - asked to carpool to lunch, which our genius reluctantly agreed to. The patient asked apparently debated between sardines (which he hated) tequila (which he also hated) and vinegar (which he didn't hate as much as sardines or tequila) to make himself puke.  Figuring that he didn't want to smell like fish or booze, he chose the vinegar.

This turned out to be an extremely poor choice, as the vinegar dissolved the balloons, dumping a metric shit-ton of coke into his system.  This, of course, resulted in his psychotic delirium and the subsequent explosion of his heart.  Thank God our Samaritan was there to help, because otherwise the cops would've likely deployed the Taser, and excited delirium + Taser deployment sometimes = dead suspect.  In this case, though, the death was clearly a result of the patient's cocaine ingestion.

So to recap: Drug smuggling patient died, nobody else was hurt (physically, anyway - the patient's friend took it pretty hard) and exactly 0 cops were taken off the street for a use of force investigation.  This all means that drugs are bad, kids.

Not to mention that Professor Farnsworth has clear policies forbidding drug use by Planet Express employees.  Dr. Zoidberg, a leading authority on nothing in particular, has long advised his patients to avoid ingesting vinegar unless it's with fish and chips.  So there you go...

Nailed It!

So it's Saturday night, sometime past oh-drunk-thirty.  The tones go off, and I stumble out to the squad.  I take down the info for an aggravated assault call, and we head out to the scene.

We pull up and there're a couple of FPD officers interviewing an assault victim holding a bandage on his head.  He states that he was hit upside the head with a 2x4, but he doesn't really want to go the hospital.  His scalp is pretty bloody, and he's obviously under the influence so I whip out my best drunkenese to convince him to come along with us peacefully.

He doesn't want to waste our time -- ironically, though, he's happy to argue about refusal forever on scene -- and he just wants to go home.  He finally agrees to let us bandage his head, but he still refuses to go the hospital.  Strictly speaking, he's altered, so the cops can put him in protective custody and force transport on him, but I prefer to spend a few minutes with the honey approach before pulling out the vinegar.

As I explain the c-spine procedure to him, an FPD sergeant comes up to us with a bloody 2x4.  A quick inspection of the weapon reveals a bloody nail, complete with a piece of material that looks a lot like bone and a chunk of suspicious grey-colored tissue.

The semi-routine assault call has suddenly become a pretty big deal.  The patient finally uses his head and decides a quick run to the trauma center with us might set his mind at ease.  The cops snap some quick pictures of the nail and tissue, and we head off to UMC.

We drop the patient off, and he thanks us for helping him out.  The FPD sergeant walks into the ER as we walk out, and he just might have been whistling If I Only Had a Brain as he brought the camera in to give the docs a piece of his mind.  Or something like that...

Try Before You Pry

It's 5am, and I'm getting ready to clear Fairview Memorial.  I put the final touches on my run report when I hear the call go out:

"Engine 2, pin-in response for a vehicle rollover.  Northbound lanes of Interstate 1 at Highway 34.  Following units to respond..."

Well, that puts the call in map grid A3.  Which, if you're paying attention, is pretty close to FMH.  Sigh.

I advise that we can handle the call, which lets a crew stay in their station, and we take off toward the freeway.  As we approach the scene, I'm amazed at how much damage there is to the car.  Picture this exit without the safety barrels:

 

Now picture a car sliding sideways into the point where the two guardrails meet.  The car is center punched at the passenger door by the point, which flips the car and sends it roof first into a bridge abutment.  

Based solely upon the wicked passenger space intrusion, I figure this'll be a bad one.  Fire and SHP are nowhere in sight, and we're completely alone on scene.

My partner doesn't initially see the wreckage of the car, and nearly drives by the scene.  We stop, he says a choice 4 letter word, and we get out of the rig.  I approach the car and assess the damage.  The roof has been smashed to the point that it's level with the doors, and the car is upside down.  I bust some leftover shards of glass out of the rear window frame, get down on my belly, and look into the car. 

To my surprise, a well dressed young woman waves and says she needs some help getting out of the car.  She doesn't have a scratch on her.

Huh.

So I crawl through the broken glass and make patient contact.  She states that she lost control and wrecked over an hour ago, but SHP had been unable to find her.  She had an older non-GPS enabled cell phone, so it took some time to find her.  She knew where she was within about a 5 mile stretch of road, but since she said she wasn't hurt and was out of the roadway SHP handled higher priority calls first. After waiting, trapped in the cold, dark car for almost 45 minutes, she finally called 911 again.  They were finally able to get an approximate location based on how loud the sirens were, and that's when we were dispatched.

Aside from being a little bit cold, she has no complaints.  Her short height (5 foot nothin'), her seatbelt use and the solid construction of her little Honda combined to keep her safe.  The only reason she was still in the car was all the broken glass -- she didn't want to cut herself up.  SHP shows up, and the Trooper grabs a blanket while my partner gets a board.

So my partner slides the backboard into the car, and I have her lay on the board and cover her up with the blanket.  We slide her out of the car, I clear C-Spine (again, completely unhurt) and we have her sit in the back of the squad with the heater going to warm her up.  The Trooper and I climb into the back of the squad and ask her a million questions about what happened.

This whole process took less than 5 minutes, so we're sitting back there when fire shows up. 

The fire crew looks at the car and begins to unload all the extrication equipment.  As one of the firefighters pulls the begins to set up his stuff (the Jaws), my partner approaches him.  He waves my partner away impatiently.  So my partner walks up to the lieutenant, who turns and looks at the ambulance.  He shakes his head and laughs, and goes to tell his probie that we've got the patient extricated already.

We ended up transporting the young lady for an evaluation.  While she had no injuries, she was very cold and had no quick way to get off the side of the road.  The ER staff got the glass out of her hair, gave her some warm food and coffee, and called her dad came to pick her up.  She was in and out of the ER in less than an hour.

All in all a very simple run, but it reinforces the old saying... "Try before you pry" -- the rookie firefighter never even assessed the situation before assuming that he'd need to use rescue tools.  There are many times where doors are fully operational, and forcing entry or using rescue tools is completely unnecessary.  This was one of them.  The door edges were buried in the dirt, but accessing the patient was very easy with bunker gear on.  He also completely blew off a seasoned coworker who tried to advise him that the patient was out of the car.

He's a good kid, though... He bought us Cold Stone on the next shift.

Sorry...

With the holidays I let a little time slip by without posting.  I'm still here, though, and now that the chaos of Christmas has wound down (no more Christmas tree at Casa de FM) I should be able to invest a little more time here.

I pulled a marathon shift over Christmas and a shorter one for New Year's Eve, so I'll pull out a little nugget of joy from one of those shifts when it's not so late (early?)

Until then...