January 03, 2005

It's been a while since I last posted. It's been busy around the house and I just haven't had the time. Our son and his family are home from California and our Daughter and her family just left yesterday to go back to North Dakota. It's been a house full but a very enjoyable time.

Christmas was very good this year. It was the first time in almost four years that we've had the entire family home.

To catch up on my work; on December 29th we ran a total of four calls. We transfered a 87 year old female back home from the hospital, we transported a 40 year old to the ER complaining of severe chest pain. This patient had a very extensive history of hear attacks. He had already had four heart attacks and ten stints placed. I believe he was in the middle of having his fifth heart attack. We also responded to two difficulty breathings. One was a 51 year old female that was actually having a panic attack. We calmed her down and got her breathing back under control and she decided to stay home. The other was a 90 year old female that lived alone at home. She was having extreme difficulty breathing with a lot of fluids on the lungs. We gave her some lasix to help get the water off the lungs and transported her to the ER. All in all it was a pretty good shift. We only got up once thru the night at 3:35 am and were back in bed by 5:30 am. The rest of the calls came during the day.

The beginning of January 1 changed shifts to station 1. This is affectionally referred to as the "vacation station" as there are very few calls and you are almost guaranteed a good nights sleep. My first shift was January 1st, 2006. We responded to two calls. The first one came at 2:05 in the afternoon and was called in as a diabetic emergency. The patient was a 30 year old female with a blood sugar of 19! Her family was able to give her some glucagon before we arrived and her blood sugar was upto 74 when we checked it. She was also starting to talk to us (always a good sign). We transported her to the ER for further evaluation. The last call came 19 minutes after midnight and was a fire standby.

Since I've changed to the vacation station I will probably not post as often as before since the number of calls are so few and far between. I will try to post weekly as a "week in review." Until next time, remember . . . be safe, slow down, and buckle your seat belts.