#357 Like an Idiot

In sekirley's  journal, "Stories From My Ambulance", he says,
"In my opinion, there are two things that a paramedic student dreads when starting out on clinicals.  One would be the first cardiac arrest that we are expected to run.  And the other would be the first radio communication to the hospital that everyone in scanner land (and classmates) can hear.  (We don't want to sound like idiots.)"

Oh, I understand that part about sounding like an idiot!

In our ambulance, once the patient was loaded, we were to call the hospital and tell them the details of what we were bringing in, the vital signs, and the ETA.  We called on a radio.  There was a handheld microphone, and the speaker was in the ambulance wall.

About my third run on the ambulance, the crew chief told me to make the call.  "Me?  I don't know nuttin'!"  "Yeah, you.  Gotta learn sometime."

The patient, by the way, was sitting up and chatting with the other EMTs.

So I dialed the proper numbers and pushed the proper buttons, and put the microphone to my ear so I'd hear the ER when they answered.  Crew chief elbowed me , "Pssst!  That's the mike.  You talk into that.  The speaker is on the wall."

Yeah, I knew that!  Cripes!  Red face.  Titters throughout the ambulance.

When the ER came on, I told them (very professionally sounding, I thought), reading from the sheet where all the info had been recorded,  that we had a 68-year-old woman ... syncope (fainting), altered consciousness ... pulse rate ... blood pressure ... temperature ... skin color ... ETA - everything EXCEPT that where the respiration count should have been on the sheet, it had been left blank, so I skipped that. 

The ER nurse came back with "and respiration?"

And I answered, "None."

Oops.

She came screaming back with "NO respiration?  You should have mentioned that first!  Is the airway secured?  Did you bag her?  Is she entubated?  Is she DEAD?"  and at the same time I'm yelling "NO!  NO!  NO! She's breathing on her own!  I just mean nobody counted it I guess!"  Of course, with both of us yelling at the same time, neither of us could hear the other - especially not over all the laughter and rolling in the aisles going on in the ambulance, including the patient. And I suppose all over the countryside wherever anyone was listening on the scanners.

At the hospital, the nurses and doctors and everybody kept poking each other and glancing at me and giggling.

Now that's how to look like an idiot.  

~~Silk

Link in this entry:
http://journals.aol.com/sekirley/LifeSaver/entries/767

PS - If I got any details wrong, forgive me.  It was three years ago.