Quote History Quoted:
My favorite one wasn't a holiday, it was just an example of how people treat EMS. Keep in mind this happened in a lily-white suburban part of northern New Jersey. Also keep in mind that the phrase "party not feeling well" means something between a hangnail and a (successful) suicide. Also keep in mind that if any bodily fluids get in the ambulance, we have to clean it out. At the time, we had to swab the whole thing out with a bleach solution.
So we get the dreaded "party not feeling well" call. It's grandma and her middle aged daughter is waiting for us in the living room with her own daughter.
"She has to go to the hospital."
"Okay, what's the problem?"
"She doesn't feel well." One of my crew did a physical assessment. Normal pulse, respirations, no guarding, patient nods but doesn't verbally answer questions.
"What happened to her?"
"She doesn't feel well." A lot of people lose the ability to articulate the issue when a loved one has a crisis. So you keep asking until you get an answer. That way you don't tell grandma to stand up when she broke her leg and you give her high concentration oxygen when she has a heart attack.
"Does she have a heart condition or asthma or something like that?"
"She's nauseous."
This gets to the question I would have asked first if the dispatch told me to respond to the home of the local retard.
"What happened that makes her need to go to the hospital in an ambulance right now?"
"We didn't want her to vomit in the car."
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One of the guys I work with in the
hood City was on the same VFD in a $uburb as I was. One day they got a call for a kid with a cut finger.
Little Billy/Betsy/WTF was helping in the kitchen, and lac'd their finger pretty good. Our VFD runs EMT's as 1st responders that go to the scene, assess and start treatment then await the arrival of the MICU from the next town over.
So he shows up and here's Yerkel the Yuppie tending to little Billy/Betsy's cut finger.
My buddy looks at the injury, applies a gauze pad and asks the yuppie "don't you have a car?"
Yuppie replies "Well of course."
So why didn't you just throw your child in the car and go to the ER?
"What?" replies the affronted Yuppie "and get blood in the Beemer?"
He realized he could no longer work there and not just go off on some fool.