Life, and death, go on.

What a whirlwind week. As the world got to know Bryan Stow, I got back to work. While little old ladies walked up to me sitting in an ambulance and asked, "If I give you this check for Bryan, will you make sure his family gets it?", I had to take are of running the calls that keep coming.

Workwise, this week sucked. In a workweek of four 12 hour shifts, I pronounced seven people dead. As a much senior paramedic told me yesterday, "All your doing is punching their ticket as they cross over!" Thanks Rick!

Every single one of the pronouncements was ugly. I could smell the death on one of them before the front door was opened with a Halligan tool. On another code I had to deal with three separate equipment failures. The last one was the worst:

I pride myself on my airway skills, but this one pissed me off. We had a very large male of about 400 pounds. I knew this was gonna be a difficult one. I took airway as the code commenced. I readied an 8.0 ET tube and the rest of the gear. There was lots of emesis, and it seemed like the suctioning seemed endless. The airway was mercilessly anterior, but a firefighter grabbed both arms, lifted, and the cords smiled vertically at me! Sweet! I advanced the tube, watched the black band disappear, pulled out the stylet, and proclaimed, "23 at the teeth, hook it up." Right then, emesis came up the tube. WTF? I know this was a good tube! So I took it out. The other firefighter threw me the bag with the King tube in it, and I dropped a size 4. Same thing, emesis and too much of it to do anything about.

About that time I heard, through the rest of the scene noise, the word, "stoma" come out of a family member's mouth. You have got to be kidding me! I extend the patients head, pull flat the layers of fat, and there it is. Staring me in the face is a nice little stoma. I hold out my hand and say, "Gimme a 6.0 please!" No more airway issues.

No matter though. Never came out of asystole. The Grim Reaper was my ride along this week, and he didn't even bring coffee.

Scott


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