Tales From The Nightshift

So, TINS©, TIWFDASL© one night in The Maternal State, years and years and years ago. My father had taken ill, and of the three of us boys (the attorney, the contractor, and me, the nurse), it seemed that I was the best fit for the job of helping Mom take care of our Dad.

Well, that, and I was the one who did not have a family.

So, in order to keep my house and my vehicle, my creditors agreed that it would be nice if I were to continue receiving a paycheck, while I was 800 miles from home, and taking a voluntary leave of absence from my employment. So, I became a travel nurse!

This one night, I was working midnights at Some Suburban Megalopolis Hospital’s ED. It was way, way late, and we had cleared all the souls from our beds, and were engaging in my favorite slack time occupation, Story Hour.

So, one nurse was recounting how her boyfriend was failing to meet performance/behavioral expectations in one way or another. The other nurses (all women) responded, in a sort of choir, with murmurs of affirmation for the reporter. Except for one particular nurse.

This woman’s speech was rich with the cadence and harmonies of Da Islands, with a Caribbean note permeating her pronouncements.

“Aw, naw, ghurl! Ya no haveta put up with dem shenanigans! He gotta go, out de doah!”

The chorus affirmed this pronouncement.

The protagonist in our little Greek tragedy continued with her lamentations of Mr. Unworthy’s misdeeds, and our Caribbean Correspondent again provided her assessment: “Out de doah!”

Again, the call of more misdeeds, again the response from the congregation: “Oh, naw! Out De Doah!”

It devolved into a documentary of The Misdeeds Of Men, and along about that time, I found something I ought to be doing. At the other end of the department.

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Two more snippets

FICKLE CATS::

When I am in bed, they snuggle up against me: likely due to the warmth from my electric blanket. I can pet them, and they do not beat feet, alarmed, at my approach. They purr, and roll into my petting. On the table in the cat room, similarly, I can pet them, and they purr like miniature motorcycles.

Elsewhere in the house, I approach them, and they elope as if I were the Cat Attacking Golem, or something. Of course, when they are on the counter, or the dining room table while we are eating, I do chastise them: “Are you on MY counter? Bad Cat!” accompanied with a sort of interpretive dance, which most closely resembles an effort to shoo away angry, invisible, hornets.

ANOTHE STORY FROM THE STREET

So, TINS, TIWFDASL….well, no. I was at home, long ago and far away, when The Plaintiff (aka TDW-Mark 1) and I were still in wedded bliss. In the very rural county in which we lived, EMS was provided by a sort of tiered response: in the event of an emergency, dispatch would alert the sheriff’s deputies on patrol, and tone out the nearest fire department to send their rescue. The ambulance would depart from the hospital in The County Seat, and the crew would make their way to the scene. There, the three agencies would address the problem, and then, response complete, resume whatever they had been previously been doing.

I volunteered for the local rescue, since, I figured, I would want SOMEONE to respond when/if we had our own emergency, therefore it seemed reasonable to carry a pager and respond when some neighbor had THEIR emergency.

Let me interject that I had a scanner at home, and so I (and TDW-Mark 1) could monitor the goings on in the Fire/Police/EMS world. Or, our corner thereof.

So, one evening I was home. The pager went off, and I responded to the fire hall. Another firefighter arrived, and we were off.

We arrived to find a sedan crumpled amongst the trees lining the side of County Road Whatever. The deputies had already triaged the scene, and pointed out one soul who was not making much sense. As I approached, my differential diagnosis expanded from head injury, to head injury, or intoxicated, or combinations of the above. This was elicited by the prominent odors of ethanol emanating from my subject.

Well, when you have a soul who was involved in a collision, as this guy had been, who is not able to navigate or articulate, as this fellow was not, one must wonder if the collision had cracked his coconut (not, strictly speaking, a medical term, you know…), and that was why he had his articulation and locomotion difficulties, or was he intoxicated into dystaxia/dyarthria, or (perhaps worst of all potential scenarios) was the intoxication obscuring his intracranial bleed, or something similarly dire?

I, paramedic and RN that I was at the time, was elected to ride in the back as Mr. Ethanol Odor was transported to hospital assessment and management. Of course, he was spine boarded. Of course, he disapproved. Of course, he protested, loudly and profanely, about our handling of him, as well as the fact that he desired to depart our company and be on about his business (not an exact quote).

I recall providing report by radio, his soliloquy in the background. He was describing my character flaws, and errors in my upbringing, at volume. As an exact quote, he suggested the my shortcomings included, “Assholes! M@74erf&25ers! Dickheads!” (I suppose he included my partners in this assessment, come to think about it.)

I unkeyed for a moment, prior to concluding my report, and, rekeying the radio, observed, as he renewed his Short Course On Character Disorders, “As you can tell, patient in no evident respiratory distress!”

I arrived home to find TDW-Mark 1, chuckling. “No distress, huh? Have you told your mother hello for him?”

Material From “An Away Game”

From Eaton Rapids Joe’s eponymous blog, a thought for all of us sick folks out and about:

Sunday, January 8, 2023

Strep Throat

Anecdotal evidence suggests that there is a lot of Strep Throat locally right now.

Strep Throat often follows colds and other viral infections. It is primarily an opportunistic infection that takes advantage of the fact that frequent coughing and throat clearing irritates the throat and removes some of the protective layer of mucous.

If you read “symptoms” on the internet you will find countless repetitions of the words “…the back of the throat looks beefy…” While this may be totally clear to medical students it was not clear to me. I am made of meat. All of my inside parts look “beefy”.

After way too much digging, what they mean is that the normal, whitish, filmy covering over the back of your tongue, upper mouth and throat is gone. The Strep bacteria displaced it.

Strep is nothing to screw around with if it doesn’t clear up in a day or two. It can infect your heart valves and/or kidneys.

Posted by Eaton Rapids Joe at 8:12 AM

MY COMMENT:

Simply to make things more interesting, technically, the strep does not, itself, “infect” kidneys or heart. Some varieties of strep B produce a toxin that elicits a sort of autoimmune response, “rheumatic fever”, which is readily prevented by antibiotics. Take note! The abx really do NOTHING for the sore throat (which, of course, is why we all see our doctors in the first place), rather, they protect us against a potential consequence of infection with certain varieties of Strep B which may trigger that response.

Should one develop rheumatic fever, (which itself may be life changing), that may be followed by rheumatic heart disease, which can be a BFD (Big Freaking Deal), with scarring of the valves, leading to narrowing thereof, and requiring increased effort from your heart to force blood through them, leading to heart failure. This, also, is generally prevented by antibiotics (abx).

Snippets VI

The following is a collection of tangents. Please, be tolerant.

I was talking with the midlevel student taking a rotation with me, and, it being her first rotation (…unfortunate soul, to be stuck with The Stretcher Ape as your first clinical!), and was waxing poetic about gestalt, quickie patient assessment, and binary EMS assessment.

I observed that a writer for JEMS magazine, decades ago, observed that there were stages to EMS patient assessment: initially, is the named patient “Big Sick”, or “Little Sick”?

If “Big Sick, particularly in the setting of basic life support services, probably you desired to load that patient, and go.

If “Little Sick”, you likely had time to assess the patient in greater detail, and either rethink your initial assessment that this soul was “Little Sick”, or reinforce that assessment, and then transport in a leisurely and deliberate manner as appropriate.

The application to our walk in clinic, is that should your, or your MA’s snap assessment be along the lines of “That dude don’t look right!” (immortalized as “DDLR”), perhaps you ought to look into expediting that soul’s transport to ED, perhaps via EMS. I told her that “DDLR” is probably The Primary Vital Sign.

Another Story

One night, we had cleaned out the ED, and done all our housework. This was long, long ago, and far, far away, back in my halcyon days in Da City. I was a staff nurse in our ED, and we had “story hour”, many a night when there were no patients, and nothing to clean or restock.

Somehow, the conversation turned to threatening patients. One nurse volunteered, “You know, I have something in my purse that might be a conversation starter with such a soul, with the conversation trending towards, “How do I get my ass out of here, before this crazy nurse kills my ass?”

Another offered, “Hmm. Such a sad sack might, or might not, find himself in a cross fire, not that I would know anything about that sort of thing, myself!”

Another thought out loud, “I wonder why it is that I always place my bookbag in the med room? Could it be that there might be something there that would trigger a reconsideration of life choices, in some bad actor?”

One of my buddies, still on the road, laughed when I told him that story. “Really? Don’t you realize we all on the street know your ED is the most heavily armed ED in Da City?”

A Thought Experiment

If you were married to Nancy Pelosi, and was faced with the choice of having sex with her, or finding a homeless psychotic gay guy, what would You do?

Recounted conversation:

Patient: “I don’t believe in covid!”

Me, responding to my partner who had just quoted said patient (faux-Russian accent) “Da, tovarisch, but, covid believe in YOU! (stifle your cough, and wear your damned mask!)

Bob Marley Tribute Band

Cletus and Jane-Bob came in the other day, accompanied by their spawn. The nominal adults smelled as if they had just sat in with a Bob Marley Tribute band. The children were clean and inquisitive, and engaged readily with me as I inquired about their symptoms.

The childrens’ ear infections were readily identified, instructions provided, and they were off and on their merry way.

With these poor life choices as their life exemplars, I wonder how long the children will remain clean, or inquisitive, or engaged with the world?

Another opportunity to bask in the wonderfulness of legalized, recreational, marijuana.

Apology

For those who have (for whatever reason) grown accustomed to reading my material on an every-Friday-Afternoon basis, I apologize. Between work, family, and general laziness (er, I mean, other distractions!), I have not committed any thoughts to metaphorical paper this past week. But, I have an installment tee’d up for this coming Friday!