Car Fire

So, before Mallory and I had begun to live together, I had one of my ex partners, let’s call him Adam, as my room mate. Mallory would come over from time to time, and the three of us would chat, or share dinner, or simply hangout.

One day, she came into the house, and asked us to hurry out and see what was wrong with her car. Now, this was her baby, one she had purchased because, as she termed it, “I look so good driving that car!” It had been her very first new vehicle, ever.

So, Adam and I threw on some shoes, and trotted out to see what was the matter. She had told us that it was smoking, and once we got outside, it became clear why. The smell of burning plastic emanating from beneath the hood told the tale.

Mallory was starting to get excited, hopping around and beseeching us, “Can’t you guys do something?”

Adam looked the vehicle over, and asked her, “Do you REALLY want us to do something? If we let it burn, or call the fire department, then it will be totaled, and you can get a brand new one. If we extinguish the fire, you are gonna have to get all that burned shit replaced, and it may never be altogether right, again.”

Mallory was nigh unto break dancing by now, and simply couldn’t bear to see “her baby” burn up. Adam asked her again, simply to be certain, “Are you REALLY REALLY sure you want us to do something?” Again, she pleaded with us to act. Adam looked at me, I looked at him, and we charged the garden hose, donned work gloves, and sprayed it down through the grill as well as we could. Once it had dampened down, I opened the hood, and stood aside, while he blasted it (or, at least, “blasted it” as much as one is likely to be able to, with a garden hose!). It was evidently sufficient to the task, for soon the smoke stopped, the smell abated, and we were unable to identify any further burning stuff after diligent search.

Mallory called her insurance company, they sent a wrecker, and she got a loaner.

Several weeks later, her car was returned to her. She subsequently had repeated complaints about this, that, or the other thing not performing properly. Soon, she turned to Adam, and admitted, “If I had listened to you, and let it burn, I’d be driving a new car by now!”

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Christmas Eve MVA

Christmas Eve MVA

This one time, at Band camp….no, wait: that doesn’t seem quite right….

Oh, yeah: TINS©, TIWFDASL©…(no, not altogether correct, either…). Well, I was NOT FDASL, rather I was visiting The Momette, in The Un-Named Maternal State, and, it being Christmas Season, I was shopping for Christmas presents for the family. Indeed, it was Christmas Eve (for am I not well prepared, and forward thinking? Well, no, not so much) when my brother, The Attorney, and I were attempting to find an open store for the Christmas Shopping, that I had not yet accomplished.

So, there I was, motoring down the highway, and my brother, a veritable fountain of trivia (as is his brother, come to think of it), observed, “They call this stretch of highway the Death Mile, because it narrows from 4 lanes to two, just ahead here, and there are a bunch of collisions right along here.”

How interesting. Just about that moment, I noted beacons in my rear view mirror, and moved to the right to allow a Maternal State Police Trooper to zoom past us at flank speed, siren wailing and beacons flashing. The Attorney commented, “He sure seems like he is in a hurry! Wonder why?”

A few seconds later, ANOTHER Maternal State Police Trooper zipped past us, at about Warp 8, similarly beaconing and sirening, and sped around the upcoming corner and off into the distance.

As we, ourselves, rounded the curve, I noted chaos, as one would normally find at the scene of a high speed collision. Indeed, it certainly appeared that there had been such a collision, with three cars scattered across several lanes, and the shoulders, of the roadway. I parked on the shoulder, clear of the debris, and alighted. Approaching one of the troopers, I introduced myself. “I’m an off duty medic from Da City, Can I help?”

The trooper looked over my shoulder, and pointed. “Yep. Talk to those guys, right there.”

I turned to see an ambulance stopping. I approached one of the medics, and repeated my spiel. He nodded toward one of the vehicles. “You take that car, my partner and I will take the other two.”

I whistled to get my brother’s attention, and directed him, “Get the medic bag in the back of my truck. It’s got that Medical Star on it. I’ll be over here.”

I approached the car, my brother running over and handing me my jump bag. I noted an adult male seated in the passenger seat, another adult male laid over, sideways from the driver’s seat, his head in the passenger seat occupant’s lap. He, the laid out guy, was not speaking. I saw the head sized divot in the windshield over the steering wheel, and supposed that might have something to do with that.

The guy seated in the passenger seat stated, “I don’t think he’s breathing!” I invited the passenger seat guy to move out of the vehicle, and assessed things myself. Yep, he was not breathing. Didn’t have a carotid pulse, either. I asked the recently moved passenger seat guy, “Do you know CPR?”

“Yep”

“Good. Get on his chest, I’ll ventilate him.”

My new friend set to chest compressing, and I dug my BVM (manual resuscitator) out of my bag, and began to ventilate our patient.

We resuscitated along for a good little while, until the arrival of a second ambulance heralded our relief. We continued CPR until the medics had cut off our patient’s coat (feathers everywhere!), initiated an IV, and began cardiac monitoring (VF, about as I had expected). Once all the technology was in place, we all four of us moved the patient onto their cot, and they took over from there.

I walked back to the truck, set my medic bag in the back, and approached one of the officers.

“Officer, do you need my contact information?”

He squinted at me. “Who are you?”

“I’m the medic from Da City, who worked that guy over there.”

He turned fully to me, and shook my hand. “Mister, gotta tell you, I’m really sorry I couldn’t talk to you before you left, because I really, really, want to tell you thank you for getting involved here, several states away from your home. Drive carefully, try to have a Merry Christmas!”

I was surprised, but said, “You’re welcome!”, and returned to my truck. I told my brother about my surprising conversation with the trooper. He looked at me, and finally asked, “You just don’t get it, do you?”

I had to admit that I didn’t.

“He just did you a tremendous favor. You just gotta know that, with a likely dead person in this collision, there is gonna be a huge trial, right?”

Uh-huh.

“And, you are a witness, right?”

Again, I “uh-huh’d” him.

“So, being a witness, you would be subpoenaed to testify, and would be required to comply with such an order of the court. Which means you would have to travel your happy ass across the country, and find accommodations, and then miss work while you were here, to testify. At no small expense, both directly as well as in lost income. Said subpoena cannot be served on ‘Sumdood, Da City, usedtabeamedic’, right?”

“Might be tough to serve.”

“Yep. That cop just thanked you, in certain and unmistakable terms, for your service to his community.”

He paused, and then looked at me as if he had never seen me before. “I watched you out there. You really, really looked like you knew what you were doing. I would have been totally lost, but you just stepped right up, and started working away. Pretty impressive!”

I shrugged, just a little embarrassed. “Not like I haven’t done the same thing like, I dunno, a couple of thousand times before, right?”

My Cardiac Cath Story

I once heard the aphorism that “a man who is his own attorney has a fool for a client”. It turns out that legal matters is not the only arena in which that insight is applicable. Let me tell you a story about that.

So, several years ago, The Darling Wife and I were vacationing in Georgia. There are multiple sites, preserving locations where significant battles of The War Between The States/The War of Northern Aggression (depending upon when and where you learned of such things) occurred. I wanted to walk one of the battlefields (Chickamauga), both to stretch my legs as well as to get a feel for the closeness of the opposing forces.

I was winded by the time I finished my rambling over one section of battlefield, considerably more so than I had expected. I chalked it up to “bronchitis”. (remember that thought!) This persisted as I wandered from site to site, and paused to read the explanatory tablets set here and there.

We finished our vacation, and returned home. There, my “bronchitis” persisted, until, eventually, my Long Suffering Wife asked me about my illness. I admitted that it had not improved, which was curious since I had been having this “bronchitis” for about a month by then.

“How’s your fever?”, she asked.

I did not have a fever.

“Is that common when you see a patient who has had bronchitis for several weeks?”

No, I admitted, it was not.

“So, get your shoes.”

“Why?”

“Because, if you do not, your feet will become muddy”

“Why would they get muddy?”

“When you walk to the car.”

“Why would I be walking to the car?”

“Because I’m not going to carry you there.”

“Why do I need to go to the car anyhow?”

“Because it is too far to walk.”

“Where is too far to walk?”

“Your doctor appointment.”

“I don’t have a doctor appointment!”

“Oh, yes you do! Your wife made one for you!”

“Why did you do that?”

“Because she (my PCP) is not going to come here to see you, that is why.”

“Why do I need to see her?”

“A couple of reasons. First, to get you to stop asking dumb questions. Secondly, because you are sick some kind of way, and your plan is not working. You are going to talk to your doctor, and listen to her plan. And, then, act on it.”

I went to my doctor (actually a Nurse Practitioner, with whom I had ER nursed), who did an EKG, “because you are old and all.” “Well”, she told me, “This looks pretty OK, but, your story is concerning. I’m gonna schedule you for a stress test.”

Cool story. So, I arrived the next day in my running shoes and running shorts, and proceeded to tank the stress test. I mean, I did not even finish the first stage before the physician administering the test stopped me, repeatedly took my vitals, and called cardiology.

Next week, I’m sitting in the cardiology office, and the cardiologist is admiring my EKG, and enjoying my Tale Of The Failed Stress Test. He told me, “My partner will be waiting for you, to do a cardiac cath, at 3:30 (it was now about noon).”

Okey-dokey! So, I went in to my cath, with The Darling Wife and her BFF waving me farewell.

When I awakened, it was like a family re-union. Darling Wife, her BFF, her niece, my second son, my third son, my daughter, and something like 4 or 5 other folks, family in one way or another, who I cannot recall off the top of my head. Once I had sobered up enough for The Darling Wife to brief me on the doctor’s report, her precis was sobering: “You had 95% of your main artery in your heart blocked, but they were able to open it with a balloon and a stent. The doctor said had you waited a few more days, you would have had a big, bad heart attack, and, where that blockage was located, you heart would have stopped. Missed it by That Much!”

Bad Diction

Back In The Day, as you may have surmised, I worked for Da City as a medic. In those misty days of yore, we were dispatched by voice, our dispatchers contacting us on FM radio channels, on the VHF High Band. (that means that there were these things like cell phones, only way, way larger and heavier, and they weren’t dialed. Instead, like one of the old fashioned telephones, there was only one “line” and that “line” connected us with dispatchers who would tell us about emergencies that they had learned about via their telephones. And, ours had no wires. These “radios”, for that was what we called these things, used radio waves similar to those in your parent’s cars, right around the sorts your parents use to listen to their old, old music.)

Now, the radiotelephone devices we used were, to be charitable, NOT “high fidelity”. Sometimes, it was listening to a conversation in a crowded and noisy room. In addition, not every one of our dispatchers were blessed with voices and diction that reflected well on the musical qualities of the English language. Indeed, some sounded as if they were practicing their Demosthenes Imitations, dispatching around mouths full of river pebbles.

So it came to pass that one dark and stormy night, my partner and I were dispatched to a run someplace in Da City, for a person with, and I swear to Crom that this is what I heard, “rectal breathing”.

Now, there was generally a random correlation between what we were told, and the actual nature of the run. Several occasions featured runs for “sick person”, who, it developed, had noticed that they were suffering from lead poisoning, likely right around the time that the last gunshot finished echoing. Another featured a run on a “shooting”, which, once we were on the scene, featured nobody shot. As soon as it was clear that the jackwagon complaining of “sinus problems” was the source of the call, we departed, telling the nominal patient, “Gotta go, somebody hereabouts got shot, and we gotta go find him!”

So, we chalked it up to extraordinarily bad diction and a low fidelity radio system, when we found our patient complaining of “rectal bleeding”.

Another Stoner

 

So TINS ©, TIWFDASL © in the clinic, sometime in the past year or two. Remember how happy, Happy, HAPPY! I have been about marijuana legalization? Yeah, about that: so, I was interviewing this happy go lucky soul, who detailed his allergies, his (physician prescribed) medications, and medical history. I asked him if he smoked, a common enough question particularly, among those with breathing difficulties or a history of asthma or COPD.

“Well, yeah, but I don’t smoke cigarettes!”

I pointed out that placing burning material into your face, particularly with the intent of inhaling the products of combustion so produced, was not a good health choice.

“But, it’s medicine! I have a medical marijuana card!”

I responded that the existence or non existence of his medical marijuana card did not change the fact that inhaling carbon monoxide, tar, complex cyclic hydrocarbons (such as are commonly found in smoke) is not smart, and does deleterious things to your lungs, at the very least.

Getting directly into the spirit of the conversation, and demonstrating a prompt grasp of my observations, he informed me, “But! I have a card! It is medicine!”

Side note: that linear thinking, clear insight, accountability for self, is why I simply LOVE dealing with marijuana users. Or, maybe not.

“Sir,” I told him, “every firefighter knows that inhaling products of combustion is very, very bad for you. That is why the city spends several thousand dollars, for each and every firefighter, to equip them with apparatus that prevents them from breathing in that crap. Since that has become the standard, firefighter deaths from heart disease, lung disease, and carbon monoxide poisoning have dropped to the point that they are almost uncommon. Now, you are telling me that the fact that you, yourself, have a medical marijuana card over rules all that accumulated hard earned experience, bought with firefighters’ lives, and that, due to the miracle of this card, it is healthful to inhale smoke from burning things. Cool story. You’re wrong. I do not care about whatever you tell yourself about marijuana and it’s use as a medication. Inhaling smoke from burning stuff is bad for you. If you want to bake brownies, bake cookies, use marijuana snuff, rub it onto your toenails, or brew a nice hot marijuana stew to bathe in, I do not care. You simply need to realize that smoke is bad, breathing smoke is bad, and your lungs do not care what paperwork you do, or do not have, when they turn brown and stop working. Now, do what you want. Good luck.”

So, yeah, that entire teaching moment went about as well as it sounded like it did.

The Great Chocolate Explosion Of 2018

So, TINS©, TIWFDASL©…. Well, alright: I wasn’t FDASL© in this story, I was in my kitchen, fixing to cook some fudge.

The women in my office (where I was a mid-level in an urgent care) had been teasing me about my domestic abilities, and so I had threatened them with offered them home cooked fudge.

The recipe I selected required that I melt baker’s chocolate and butter in a double boiler. Of course, I did not have a double boiler. Instead, I selected two pans, poured some water onto the one, and settled the other into the first, and turned on the range. I noted, in passing, that the fit seemed a bit tight, but, whatthehell, I did not act on this insight.

Remember that thought.

So, I arrayed my ingredients on the counter, and then checked on the progress of my chocolate melting. Experimentally, I wiggled the top pot. At that point I noted a seemingly tight friction fit, and told my wife, washing dishes behind me, that I was starting to be a bit concerned about that. My words were, prophetically enough, “Boy! I sure hope that this top pot doesn’t suddenly loosen from where it is stuck, here! That could be messy!”

My wife came over, gave it an experimental wiggle herself, and concurred with my assessment. “Yep, might want to turn the heat off!”

Of course, I did not. Bright idea, right there!

I diddled around in the kitchen for a few minutes, and then went back to my double boiler/pressure cooker (without release valve). I was explaining to my wife how I planned to safely extricate the top pot from the lower, when my explanation was interrupted. By the top pot ABRUPTLY separating from the lower. At speed. With force. And, with a considerable “BANG!”

The next thing I knew, I was holding the handle of the top pot, with molten chocolate running down my face. I turned from the stove, depositing the pot into the sink, and noted that more liquid was running down my face. Wiping it, I discovered that it was blood. Nice. I returned to the stove, and my wife saw the blood herself.

“Ohmigawd! You’re bleeding! You’re on blood thinners! We have to take you to ER!”

“Let’s turn off the stove, first, ok?”

She was fixated on my bleeding. “You have to go to urgent care! You’re bleeding!”

I was still sorting out what had happened, and what ought to be done, first, and then next, etc. “Honey? I sort of do this for a living, right? Let’s sort out what’s happening, and then decide what we indeed have to do, first, okay?”

“But, you’re bleeding!”

“I’ve already figured that much out, thank you. Now, let me take a second to see how badly I’m bleeding, and what else, if anything, is going on, before we panic. Once we know what’s happening, THEN we can panic, Okay?”

She hustled me into the bathroom, and handed me a towel. I sponged off the majority of the blood and chocolate, and saw a superficial appearing wound in the center of my forehead, approx 2 cm long. The blood appeared to be sluggishly dripping from it, and I did not see any other injury. Palpating, I did not feel anything suggesting a depressed skull fracture. My vision was at baseline, I had no numbness or tingling. My ears were sort of ringing (some of that was not new, some of that was readily attributable to the explosion). Otherwise, aside from chocolate EVERYWHERE, I appeared to be unscathed.

I applied some direct pressure, and the bleeding stopped after a couple of minutes.

The Darling Wife and I re entered the kitchen, and set to cleaning up the largest chunks.

A day or two later, my wife and her daughter in law were detail cleaning the kitchen, and discovered a large chocolate chunk behind the stove, and another on the top of the refrigerator. How the heck did they wind up there?

The Metric Calendar

So, TINS©, TIWFDASL© as a midlevel in an urgent care, when one of the medical assistants in my office announced that she was going to hit the coffee shop on her lunch break, and canvassed everybody to see if they wanted her to pick anything up.

I told her that the coffeeshop was closed, it was a federal holiday, St. Swithin’s Day.

She looked at me, and turned to her computer, tapping furiously. Minutes later, she emerged from her search, triumphant, announcing, “St. Swithin’s Day is July 15^th, this is October, and you are wrong!”

I smiled. “Well, St. Swithin’s day is a European holiday, and in Europe they use the metric calendar. On the metric calendar, it is July, and today is St. Swithin’s Day! You could look it up!”

She did. At length. Repeatedly. The NP who was my partner pulled me aside, grinning large, and whispered, “You rat! You know she is gullible, and you fed her that line of manure! What, you gonna carry on until she is spinning around, biting at her own tail?”

I assumed a faux-hurt look, and lied through my teeth. “Who, Me? I would never do such a thing! How can you accuse me of such a thing?”

She settled back on her heels, crossed her arms over her chest, and replied, “Oh, could it be because I have seen you in action? Multiple times? Just like this? Yeah, that would be it!”

Two weeks later, one of the other assistants teased her about the “metric calendar”, and my friend turned to me, “I blame you! You started all this idiocy about a metric calendar that does not exist!”