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"You really are clueless, an embarrassment to the name. Hope you're adopted." -- June Dever
"this guy is right about conserving a clue. he hasn't one and that leaves more for the rest of us." -- Jim Lovell
"Your e-mail addy... should be 'dever@getalife.net.'" -- Sponge
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| I took this job for the glamour... |
| Posted by: dever on Wednesday, May 21, 2008 - 10:26 PM |
So my partner and I had the bariatric cot on the squad we were assigned to Monday night. Lucky us… got a discharge from a west side nursing home for a guy (we'll call him "John") with some obvious MR/DD issues who is on the wrong side of 600lbs. The squad assigned to provide us a lift assist is already waiting for us when we arrive. We get inside and learn that my partner knows John from when he was working at a hospital ER some years ago. Apparently, John used to be a very bad boy. One night Cleveland EMS brought him in the ER high on "wet" aggressive and badly delusional. Somehow, through the use of a small army of police and EMS, they had managed to restrain him on a backboard and haul him in. Once in the ED, they secured the backboard to a hospital gurney. John decided he didn't want to stay at the hospital and started rocking his weight until he got the gurney upright and proceeded to start duck walking out the EMS entrance – with the gurney and backboard still strapped to his back. He's not going to be walking anywhere on us now that years of uncontrolled diabetes has taken his feet from him. Nonetheless, I'm happy when he tells us with a smile, "I'm reformed now."
John is going home to a house a ghetto and we hit our first snag of the night when he describes the house to us. For the bariatric cot, there's an aluminum board that folds out and bolts to the top of the cot to make it wider to accommodate large patients. Unfortunately, that plate doesn't fit through the narrow doorways of most of the circa 1920 duplexes in that neighborhood, so we're going to have to take him without it which is going to be rather uncomfortable to him. The alternative is going to be to put a tarp under him and when we get to the house, slide him through the door on the tarp instead of the cot, which is rather humiliating. He informs us he'll tolerate the narrow cot for the trip. The nursing home uses a hoyer lift to put him on the cot, and the four of us secure him with extension straps – so far so good. The bariatric cot is capable of holding 1500lbs according to the manufacturer, so we're in good shape. The four of us load him my squad, I hop in the back with him and we head out.
We arrive on-scene and get a look at the front of the house and realize that we're going to need additional manpower to lift him up the steps. (Note to self - A "few" steps is a relative term.) My partner calls for a 3rd squad while the patient's guardian informs me that the bed isn't quite ready yet for him, that the medical supply guy they're using had the wrong parts and he'll be back in about 20 minutes. Meanwhile the 3rd squad gets the dispatch and assumes that since we're calling for a lift assist from a residence that we're stuck on an emergency run and can't get the patient out of the house and runs hot to our location. As they come down the street with lights on and sirens blaring, two thoughts cross my mind: 1) I'm glad that if I was in a jam, my brothers are going to get there to have my back just as I would theirs. 2) I wish they hadn't just drawn the additional attention to us that they had. Its 22:00, we're standing around in the ghetto, now the entire neighborhood is now outside watching us and there's still no sign of the guy with the parts for the bed. The teenage boys start doing their crypt walk up and down the middle of the street next to us. One woman starts throwing her trash bags off her 2nd floor porch on to the lawn next to one of the squads and asks us to take them to the street. We decline.
More importantly, my patient is starting to get very uncomfortable on that cot. A half hour goes by, and we walk over to his guardian who has been sitting in her car the entire time with her kid sitting next to her, smoking her cigarettes and talking on her cell phone, and ask her to call the guy back. He says he's on the way. After an hour I'm less that thrilled with the entire situation. First of all, this patient's family is absolutely worthless and apathetic and I'm appalled that not once did any of them bother to walk over and see how he is doing. Secondly, he's now miserable on the cot to the point of having tears in his eyes. I don't care how big the guy is or what he did to get in to that condition, I didn't take this job to make people suffer – I took this job to help alleviate suffering. Finally, we have three squads sitting out of service waiting around that could be doing other things. I walk back to "Mary's" car and tell her, "Look, he's in a lot of pain in there, call this guy back again and find out if he's actually coming out here."
Around 23:30 the guy from the medical supply company is back and the bed is ready for us. We open the front door to make sure we have a clear path to bring him in. When the door opens, it startles some cockroaches that scurry up the wall while grandpa/dad sleeps on the couch and a little girl plays on the floor. A toilet sits against the wall in the middle of the living room next to the front window. Even under the worst conditions, a nursing home has to be better than this…
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