Contact

The night began about as oddly as any I've had yet. I show up with my overnight gear at 6 p.m. to be greeted by two of the EMTs who were outside the garage, smoking a cigarette.

"If the last two hours are any indication, you're in for a fun night."
"Well, I'm just glad they all got it out of their system early tonight."
Grins all around, and I walk inside to find my team for the night has all traded off, and I'm with two experienced EMTs I haven't worked with before. We order chinese, and before it's ready, the phone rings. Transfer from the Hospital to a patient's home - not something we do often, but should be pretty simple. After one false start - the patient wasn't quite ready yet - we're ready to move her.

It's a 96-year-old woman. We approach her in her hospital bed, and as is fairly common, she's distressed at first, and understandably so. Three uniformed men are here to take her away; but she's happy to hear that she's going home, and once we let her know what's going on, she's not worried. She does, however, look at me, and say, "He's too small for me!" causing laughs all around. As we move her, though, a pained, terrified look comes over her face; it wasn't a very clean move. Her legs are clearly in pain, and we do everything we can to make her comfortable.

We move her out to the ambulance, and I turn on the lights and get the heat on. The first major mistake I made, that I only realized too late, was that we loaded this poor woman into the back of the ambulance without turning the lights on inside first, which I imagine must have distressed her. I'll touch again on this in my next post, where it comes up, but the inside of the Ambulance - which I find very comforting, because it's clean, orderly, and full of options for interventions that feel very empowering to me - can be very unsettling to someone who isn't used to it.

"Where are you taking me?"
"We're taking you home, ma'am." A smile. She's alert and understands what we say to her, but she asks the same question over and over again, which is very convenient - I like to be able to make someone happy with the same answer six times in a row.

I take vitals. Her arms are completely devoid of muscle - they're completely soft. I worry that the BP cuff will squeeze too hard, and she says it's cold, so I move her sleeve down and put the cuff over it. Her vitals are textbook perfect - 120/80 BP, pulse very strong (a little irregular), and good skin condition. I place my stethoscope on her chest to take breath sounds, and notice that they're strong, but very shallow.

Try an experiment to get an idea of what this is like. Spend a couple minutes taking breaths that only last at most half a second in, and see how little you can do breathing like that.

I pull my scope out of my ears, and I move to withdraw my hand from under her blankets, but I stop. A few moments pass, and my partner looks over. He sees I'm not listening, but my hand is still near the patient. "What're you doing?" He asks, bemused.

I don't know whether it was for warmth, comfort, or just human contact, but I replied, "She's holding my hand."