Our pal Ambulance Driver has done a superb job spreading the “linky love” as he says, with the 11th installation of the pre-hospital ER/A&E blog carnival the Handover.
This month’s theme was centered around the call that made the shift and there are some new contributors you need to read.
Have a look and Merry Christmas to all.
In my confused and sleep deprived state I neglected to include an article in this month’s Handover from one of our favorites, Lt Morse from Rescuing Providence. An oversight I have come off of my break to rectify.
“It’s a three mile trip from the Rhode Island Hospital Emergency Room to the Allen’s Avenue Fire Station. ETA six minutes. I could probably make it. Everything was going great, light traffic, perfect weather conditions, no road construction in sight. I could see the promised land in the distance, a little more than a minute away. I started to relax.”
Only the hardcore providers among us have been in this situation and survived. I once ducked into a patient’s bathroom to puke, but I had been feeling bad all day and the timing was right. But never have I been a block from release only to be…well…read for yourself.
And then read all about the Lt’s movie situation, and follow along to see if I play the love interest, the cranky Captain or cross the street in the background.
This was almost a letter in my file. Phew.
This month’s handover draws from our friends across the interwebs stories of close calls. Times when they or their patients, colleagues or family almost didn’t make it. I was inspired to make this the theme not just because of the holiday weekend here in America, but to remind us all that we are fragile and put ourselves out there sometimes. Hopefully one of these links rings back when you’re in an unsafe or curious situation.
Found with the Where did the angry guy go files-
“What do we do?” asked Eric, his eyes wide.
“I don’t know about you two,” I said, “but I’m about to jump through that window over there. I don’t know if that guy’s getting a gun or what.”
by Buckman who runs Gomerville
From the I don’t think you should be driving file-
“I was overwhelmed by the dreadful realization that I had just accepted a ride from a highly intoxicated snowmobile rider and we were hurtling through the dark northwoods at 70+ miles per hour.”
from Greg Friese of, among many, Every Day EMS Tips.
From the Thank God you’re driving category-
“This was a serious incident. This was no routine, boy, we almost had an accident. This was my death.
I don’t know if my partner would have stopped on his own if I hadn’t shouted. Maybe. Maybe he had it all under control and was already getting ready to hit the brakes.”
from Peter Canning, a new contributor to the FireEMSBlogs family, at StreetWatch:Notes of a Paramedic
In a section titled simply Gulp
“Jill and I found him lying on the floor, fully clothed and in a coat, eyes shut, but eyelids flickering. An almost certain sign of pseudo-unconsciousness. A fake. I took a step back and called out to him. Jill was still standing by the front door, uncertain how to proceed. Something still felt wrong, so I asked her to go and call for police back up. With hindsight, I should have gone with.”
writes Ben Yatzbaz, resident Insomniac Medic
Found in the Basement selection
“This moment, this intense moment, was where I made a decision the likes of which I hope I never have to make again. I knew that if I stayed more than a few moments longer, I would suffocate and burn to death right there on that floor.”
from our pal Chris Kaiser at Life Under the Lights
From the lost in the snow pile-
“Dear God, they’re working a search pattern. Please, not tonight. It’s not mutual aid to another fire department; they’re working a grid search with the police. I grab my boots, then pad to the garage to check the fluids in the IV warmer. Anyone caught in this weather without shelter will be near death, if not there already.”
by Mack505 at Notes from Mosquito Hill
From the trust your guts file-
“I give my partner the “time to leave pronto” hand gesture. “Code 3, hurry up”. I give a little oxygen and attempt the IV enroute with no success. I realize that something is not going well for this patient and I don’t have the means to diagnose or fix the problem.”
by Rescue Monkey of Paramedic:Life on the Streets
From the Old School section-
“The smoke level now was to the floor as I grasped the hose line to find my way out. The urge to rip off my mask was strong but my training had taught me this would be fatal for sure.”
by HMHQ Contributor the Angry Captain
and finally, from the Hmmm…that looks wrong category
“A back board was brought up and one of the other Paramedics on the engine teams attended to him pulling off his jacket. Justin asked us if the building was still on fire. We we told him that yes, it was still on fire, he asked us to put his jacket back on. Not completely out of it.”
from yours truly and the event that launched me into the blogosphere.
Next month’s handover will be hosted by Ambulance Driver, theme TBD, watch his space for details as they develop and, above all else, be safe.
HM Clear.
Have to get in a bit about the Handover before I pop along to England next week.
This month’s blog carnival the Handover will be hosted here at Happy Medic Head Quarters. For those of you not sure exactly what in the world we’re handing over, one of our good blog buddies, 999medic.com, founded a blog roundup of sorts called the Handover. It started as a collection of favorite posts collected by a volunteer host and is now the largest and widest read blog carnival for and by pre-hostipal EMS and ER staff.
Past hosts include
For November’s theme I have chosen “Close Calls.” The theme is inspired with my own close call, which I have mentioned as the driving force behind starting this therapy experiment we now call the Happy Medic. I want you to send me a blog post you authored or have read that made you say, “Wow, that was close.” Perhaps a time you caught a patient right before something happened, maybe a time when you almost got hurt or, perhaps when you did get hurt but it could have been worse. And as Mark introduced a bit back, feel free to send in anything EMS or ER/A&E related you wrote or enjoyed. Share.
A little different than other months, I’ll be busy with Mark for a few more days then off to the UK for my turn in the passenger seat, so get your submissions in early. The deadline for submissions will be Novmeber 25th, and i will save all submissions to my handy new laptop before boarding the plane home to the USA. I will arrive home on Thanksgiving, hopefully with a good group of posts to share and be thankful for. it will be published on the 27th of November.
This month’s EMS Blog Carnival, the Handover, will be hosted here and the theme is “Close Calls.” With November in the US including Thanksgiving, I thought what better time to share an experience when we had that thought go through our mind “I/they might not make it.”
Send in your submissions about a time when you, a patient, or someone you know had a close call and I’ll put them together to share. If just one person can use that information to make their job safer, then we’ll have succeeded.
So with that theme in mind, here is the Angry Captain’s Close Call.
8:30 pm February 1982
The call: Structure fire, “house across the street has black smoke coming from it.”
It is a cold winter night with temperatures well below freezing; we are in a relief unit that had no inboard seats so I was belted in on the tailboard. On arrival, we found a residence with black smoke pouring from the rear. Reportedly, no one was home.
The home is typical for the area in that the base of the home started as a house trailer with several additions around it. As the first engine to arrive, we pulled a 200’ preconnect and forced entry on a side door that appeared to be the entry. The captain and I crawled in below the smoke and worked our way through a maze of doorways to what appeared to be a fully involved kitchen area. The ceiling was flashing over as I trained the nozzle at the base of the fire. Suddenly, my air pack warning bell went off.
We could not have been on air much longer than 5-10 minutes. I patted the captain on the back to notify him that we needed to back out. He gestured for me to head out and took the nozzle from me. My training from my previous department was never to leave anyone alone in a fire. As I turned, my air pack quit entirely; no air at all. The smoke level now was to the floor as I grasped the hose line to find my way out. The urge to rip off my mask was strong but my training had taught me this would be fatal for sure. Holding my breath was all I could do as I struggled to focus on following the line out amid my disorientation from lack of oxygen. As I moved along, I remember hearing a loud mechanical sound further confusing my strange journey through this black maze. The sound grew louder as I slowly followed the hose line hand over hand in the seemingly longest moments of my life.
Suddenly light appeared as the noise grew to a roar, but I crawled out, finally ripping off my face mask, gasping for air, and collapsing in a snow bank. My next memory was lying on the gurney in the back of the ambulance. At the hospital, they ran blood gas tests and flooded me with plenty of O2. As my color returned to normal (apparently I was quite gray), I was told that they found me outside our entry point where the truck had hung a mechanical fan at the top of the doorway for ventilation. (The loud disorientating mechanical sound.) I am not sure how long it was that I lay there in the snow bank before I was noticed. But Mrs. AC got the frightening call about 11 pm to pick me up at the hospital….no one likes that call.
Lessons learned:
1. The air pack I was wearing was found to be working properly back in a warm station house and in fact still had about ½ its air. The speculation at the time was that the moisture in the diaphragm froze causing it to stop the air flow. Had it been checked at the scene, it could have provided the exact problem.
2. Never allow a member to leave alone or leave a member alone in a fire. This was long before 2 in 2 out.
3. Always follow your training; i.e. following the hose line out and keeping your mask on in heavy smoke.
4. Do not block the egress of the hose line with ventilation. Had I been on all fours coming out feeling ahead with my hands, my fingers may have been lost to the whirling fan.
This was a true wake up call for me and cemented in my mind how important my training had been and how things can go wrong in a matter of seconds.
The Handover is alive! And for the next 12 hours my link bar will likely have all links to this edition, hosted over at Life Under the Lights.
CK has put together the funniest. calls. ever. and did a fantastic job. Anything with a one armed fisherman joke, sign offering a free cat and stories about human urination can’t go wrong. Right?
CK at Life Under the Lights has sent out the last call for submissions to the Handover. This month’s theme is “Funniest. Call. Ever.” Grab a link to your funniest call and send it to him for inclusion, but hurry, today is the deadline.
The Handover Blog Carnival is home this month, where MedicBlog999 asked for submissions describing your first emergency.
I have the honor of being included in the list of blogs I enjoy reading, which is pretty neat in my book.
So go have a look into what the authors of your favorite blogs submitted as their first ever emergency.
Next month CKEMTP over at Life Under the Lights will be hosting the Handover with the theme “Funniset.Call.Ever.” Now I have 400 posts to go through. Thanks.
BasicsDoc has published the latest version of The Handover Blog Carnival for Pre-Hospital and Emergency Hospital providers. This month’s theme was “Communication” and I am honored to be included.
The ever growing blog round up known as The Handover is live over at Rescuing Providence.
Many thanks to Lt Morse for hosting and including one of my posts in this edition. 
The photos of partners throughout media are hilarious, I’m just wondering which member of the team I am in this accompanying photo.
Great posts all!
Last chance reminder, friends, to get your submissions into Lt. Morse over at Rescuing Providence for this month’s blog carnival. Deadline is tomorrow, the 20th.
Kim over at Emergiblog is April’s host of the world’s fastest growing EMS and pre-hospital blog carnival, The Handover. OK, that might be a stretch, but it sounds bitchin’.
This month’s theme was “Emergency!” the television series, which played heavily in my early years as I’m sure it did for many of you.
“Pop on over” as founder Medic 999 would say and have a read, you’ll be glad you did.
Squad 51, standby for response…
Alright class settle down, settle down.
Over the past month you all had a homework assignment to bring me a tale of “A lesson learned.” Many of you took this to mean a number of different things. Some of you submitted a list of advice for new Paramedics, others a tale of a mentor teaching through experience and one of you turned in a spam advertisement for a breathing technique. Very funny Motorcop, now sit down and pay attention class!
Let’s start where this whole idea started and follow some lists of suggestions for New Paramedics and EMTs. The founder of The Handover, UK Paramedic Mark Glencorse, (Third row, green jumpsuit), is better known on the playset as MedicBlog999. He has a list of 20 quick tips for every new practitioner, my favorite being #16, trust your instincts.
Another list of great suggestions I found under the desk of AD or Ambulance Driver, (Fourth row, Borg drone, cleaning his handguns) over at A Day in the Life of an Ambulance Driver. Less about patient care, he gives great advice for the new Paramedic dealing with the person sitting next to you in the rig, who used to be you. His list is to ward off “New Medic Syndrome.” AD…those aren’t loaded…are they?
As an example of a learning moment, I offer up a call I went on with my early mentor Mr Bill, which taught me more in 2 hours than I had learned in the first year jocking a box. I won’t include my submission’s grade in the curve.
Where is Erin? Erin! Oh, I’m misreading my attendance sheet. There you are ER RN (First row, paisley scrubs and fresh coffee). I know you need to get back to your crowded ER but thank you for your paper about drug seekers and that appearances can be deceiving. We should all learn a lesson from Erin. ER RN, sorry. No extra points for scenting it by the way.
Some appearances hide nothing. Spence Kennedy from Siren Voices (Second row, elegant style and handwriting) writes of a time when a hidden weapon made an appearance at a call, not once, but twice. Scene safety is always a big points getter in this classroom.
Michael. Michael Morse! (Fourth row, Lieutenant’s badge) Please stop writing your next book and pay attention. Your submission titled “Fairy Tale” had better not be another story about trolls and princesses. I hope it was a moment when you saw the real person underneath the shell she had built around herself simply because you cared. What? Oh. It is? OK then, back to writing “Happy Rescuing Providence.” Oh, that’s not the title? Then you fail.
Bernice, who calls them as she sees them over at callitasIseefit(Third row, PJ pants and pager), got a bit emotional at a scene that would cause any rescuer to take a few moments and rethink what a bad day really is. The learning moment isn’t spelled out, but it’s in there, you just have to feel for it instead of look for it. Great paper Bernice, keep them coming. Now please go change into your proper school uniform.
Here’s a letter written to all of you from Peter Canning’s Street Watch Blog. It is titled Letter to a new Preceptee and has valuable information for you folks new on the street.
And Peter, you did extra credit by adding to the letter in a separate post. Well done. Your days as a speech writer in the Governor’s Office have served you well. Now please leave the podium and take your seat this is not an oral report.
All right class, time for our music lesson. Oddly enough, that’s the theme of our next report from Impacted Nurse(Back row, giggling and rubbing hands together). Often it is difficult to explain to new folks on the job the way the ER can flow like a symphony if you just listen to it. Everyone raise their instruments and…ready? Play.
Great music lesson Impacted, let’s go outside for recess and enjoy the spring weather. I’ll grade these papers while you play. Oh Motorcop and AD, the firing range is open now, knock yourselves out.
When we come back your History Lesson will be covered by Kim from Emergiblog who asks us to form our next submissions around the theme of “Emergency!” the influential and fun to watch 1970s TV show. Submissions should be sent to Kim no later than April 20th for consideration. Now go and play while you can and, above all else, BE SAFE!
HM
Medicblog999′s concept of The Handover, a blog carnival for pre-hospital and ER/A&E staff was a great success.
For those of you not familiar with a blog carnival, it’s a kind of wrap up or overview of blog postings around a topic or theme. If 999′s doesn’t spell out the idea, check out emergiblog from a California nurse who knows the format and has great stuff.
I, your humble Happy Medic, have volunteered (begged) to serve as your moderator for Volume 2 of The Handover, due out March 27th.
“A Learning Moment” is the theme for March.
Think of it as a way to help folks learn the lesson you did without actually having to teach them.
Send me a link to your post, or a post you think should be included, by March 23rd to thehappymedic at gmail.com.
I look forward to your stories. Send them along and don’t be shy.
Happy
The Pre Hospital and ER/A&E Blog Carnival “The Handover” has gone live!
Our host, Medicblog999 a UK Medic and nurse mentioned more than a few times here at HM HQ, has chosen a great group of posts for the first category of “Your most memorable post.”
Go have a read, you’ll be glad you did.
HM
Don't worry Johnny, one day we'll be recognized as a profession rather than a trade, just you wait.
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