Hi people,
Thanks for the answers, I appreciate all the advice.
Apparently I am a mandated reported, something I somehow forgot after four years of never having anything to report. I suppose that means I'll be contacting DSHS as soon as I can.
I just don't know what it is. I can't really put a finger on what first got me thinking. Maybe it was just everything together and suddenly it clicked, something isn't right here.
The reason I started with the NPA approach is because that is one thing that bothered me most. She is obviously already scared of something and here I am, strapping her to a backboard and cramming a rubber tube down her nose. Yea....like I would trust me after that.
The thing that bothered me the most though was that I appeared to be the first person to get the feeling something was up. Each time a crew would pick her up before, they would come back in joking about it and ridiculing her for being such a drama queen and attention grabber. I dreaded having to finally get the call to pick her up, and so when I found out who it was on scene, I was like...Oh groan! But like I said, I decided to treat her like I should, and that is what got me going. (I always attempt to push the "frequent flier mindset" away, even if it is the 20th time I have picked someone up.) In the past, the service has usually picked her up for unresponsiveness and minor seizure like activity, during the day, at school, or right before the bus was supposed to come, at her neighbors house. The ER staff usually did almost nothing for her, chalking it up to her trying to get out of school or something. They would play around for a while, then release her to her parents.
But she has been picked up over and over. For the same type of things. And I don't know why no one felt like I did.
To be frank, I don't know why I felt that way. As to what firetender said, (and yes I am a guy.) I guess I did forget I had a heart in there somewhere. I don't know what it was about seeing a tear run down a little girls face that set me off. I have seen plenty of people cry (I hate it every time.) But I guess there is one call sooner or later that will just get you. And I found mine the other night. I don't know how I can go and see people who have been absolutely squished by farm equipment, or torn open by flying glass and steel from an MVA or full of bullets, all of them dead. Yet here a little girl with no physical problem really, who needs (in my opinion) someone to just love her, bugs me like this! As a care provider I should be showing “love” to her by actually caring for her needs, not according to a cookbook, but to what is actually going on. And it should not take 50 minutes of transport time for me to figure that out.
What good really are we in EMS doing if all we care about, and complain about, is (what was it firetender said?) Pay, calls, shifts, and system abusers? Maybe we should all start caring about the people we run on. I did before, I always have to a certain extent. But I saw it differently before. I don’t really know how I saw it, it was just different. I realize that no matter how trivial the problem, that person in my ambulance believes they have a legitimate need for an ambulance. And regardless of whether or not I agree, that is the person that fate has put in my path and I am the caregiver that fate has handed them. (Yes I agree there are system abusers, who use the ambulance because they think they won’t have to wait in line at the ER. Or who are too lazy to take their sick friend to the ER, but will gladly tailgate you right into the ambulance entrance.) But sometimes granny is truly lonely and despondent, and while no, there isn’t really a medical problem she needs someone to talk to for five minutes. If our job really was about caring, like the #1 Core Value of virtually every agency out there, we would not complain that another crew was getting an MVA while we get to go visit Grandma Fran again for the 10th time this quarter. If people truly cared, someone should have noticed my patient’s problems long ago, last year when she first started being a patient of ours.
I am sure there are times to be a simple flesh mechanic, an ambulance monkey, (no offense Chimpie). Sometimes that is what it takes. If you are bleeding out four different holes and struggling to breathe, I am not going to take the time to sit and talk with you about your 53 cats, (If you really would want to, who knows), I am going to be in automatic mode, trying to multitask (yes girls, I said trying. might not work…but oh well.) But that call the other night, I found myself, right up till almost the end, doing just that. Auto pilot was on. It never should have been.
And maybe that is why I felt terrible, why I kept my poor partner in the dayroom for an extra hour talking, why I went home and cried. I treated that poor child by the book and by the book only, when all she needed from me the whole time was for me to brush the hair out of her eyes and start talking to her.
So that is that for now. I am sure in an hour I could say just as much on an entirely different aspect of the call, but for now I’ll leave it at that. Thanks again everyone. I’ll jeep reading what you people have to say. I hope you don’t mind if I do keep spouting for a while. I think I still need it. :sad:
