The MacMedic

Yesterday was quite the busy day, after work I didn’t get as much sleep as I had planned and the running around was a little more draining than I expected. I met with my new psychiatrist today and we agreed that after more than 10 years on the same medication regemin and more and more breakthrough episodes of my depression it was time for a change. The medication that I had been on longest was to be tapered off and a replaced with a new medication that is supposed to be more effective. I hope so, I need to keep this under control.

Gymnastics, karate, and dance all took up the rest of the afternoon running place to place with all three of my daughters. I figured it was a successful day since I started with three kids and ended the shuffling with three kids, nobody got left anywhere.

I crashed right after dinner and slept like a rock until this morning when I woke up late to get to my day shift at the local ambulance. The nice thing about living 3 minutes from the station is that even getting up late I was able to be there on time. I am not expecting to do much today, they usually only do a couple of calls, if that. Still, I enjoy working there very much.

The day in the ED was bordering on hellish with very high patient volume and no place to move the patients to. Patients would come in, be treated, need to be admitted and have no place to go. As the day went on the congestion in the department got worse and worse. No beds for admission, no place to transfer patients within a reasonable distance that had beds either. We just had to sit on them and wait for someone to be discharged home from the floor or transfered to the “eternal care unit”.

By 1900 both of us were looking forward to getting out of the department and heading to quarters. We had done 4 calls during the day with only a couple of transports (one each) and were more than ready. Around 1930 we were cut loose for the night and we headed out to the truck to leave and were hit with two back to back cancellations which kept us from getting to our rooms until almost 2200. By this time I was exhausted and while I had the best of intentions to get my paperwork done and catch up on some of my work related email it just wasn’t going to work. I fell asleep quickly and slept more soundly than usual while at work until the next dispatch at 0320. A cancellation as soon as we signed on with dispatch.

I went back to sleep but slept fitfully for a couple of hours until another call came in at around 0640 which was, you guessed it, another cancelled call.

I’ve got a busy day ahead of me, after a few hours of catch up sleep I will be running for most of the afternoon either with appointments of my own or the usual Tuesday shuffle for my kids.

A day off and now I am back for another long day. I truly hope that I can sleep better tonight than I did last time. As I get older I am becoming less and less tolerant of poor sleep patterns. Yet another new partner today so, once again, I don’t know what to expect. I’m a little better prepared for the shift though. I am better rested and I finally found my small bag so that I am able to easily bring a change of uniforms, spare socks, t-shirts, and such, as well as some supplies to use during my down time in quarters like the power adapter to my laptop (which I forgot last time) and ethernet cable, and a couple of books that I have been reading.

A day off and now I am back for another long day. I truly hope that I can sleep better tonight than I did last time. As I get older I am becoming less and less tolerant of poor sleep patterns. Yet another new partner today so, once again, I don’t know what to expect. I’m a little better prepared for the shift though. I am better rested and I finally found my small bag so that I am able to easily bring a change of uniforms, spare socks, t-shirts, and such, as well as some supplies to use during my down time in quarters like the power adapter to my laptop (which I forgot last time) and ethernet cable, and a couple of books that I have been reading.

A mixed day, the ED was busy for almost the entire day, we had five of our six calls during the day as well which made us happy and the ED staff less so. After we were dismissed to our quarters around 1930 there was only one call more and that was cancelled enroute when the ambulance signed on with a paramedic on board making us redundant.

All told there were three ALS calls in 24 hours but I only transported with two of them. Both of those were routine ALS calls only, little more than IV, oxygen, and monitor. My partner transported the only ALS call that we had that required more than that, a patient with chest pain.

At the end of the shift we had totaled three ALS transports and three calls cancelled enroute because the responding ambulance was at the paramedic level. I managed to get 3 hours of very uneasy sleep and I was more than ready to go home.

I still have to get used to the twenty-four hour shifts that we run here when we are assigned to the intercept unit instead of the ED. In reality it has been well over 15 years since I work long shifts like this with any regularity and I am slowly remembering all of the reasons I didn’t care for them. It’s great when nothing comes in and you get to sleep uninterrupted but it is really awful when you don’t get to get much sleep at all.

My partner today is a career firefighter who works in the state capitol, Since I have only worked one other twenty-four hour shift I really don’t know what to expect.

It’s actually much later than the end of the night shift. Because of all sorts of noise in the neighbourhood yesterday I did not get to sleep much during the day and I was already dragging when I got to work at 1900 last night. Fortunately we stayed pretty steady throughout the evening and early morning but by 0400 things had died down and I was struggling to stay awake. By 0600 it was almost impossible for me to keep my eyes open and when my relief showed up half an hour early I took the opportunity to just punch out and go home. After I got the kids on the bus I was able to get a couple of hours napping and felt much better.

Nothing extremely interesting in the department last night but I am hopeful that my weekend will be better. I have two twenty-four hour shifts during the course of three days and hopefully will get something.