525
It started easily enough. I had never worked with Mike, and my tertiary interactions with him led me to believe that he was something of a hard ass, but Rob's assertations to the contrary were enough to allow me to start the shift with little more than the ordinary trepidation. Being a very green hospital EMT, I still had plenty of anxiety every time I heard our tone over the radio. At the fire station when we got a medical call, I just hopped onto the engine and knew there would be at least four to five others to help get the job done. At the hospital, as a basic and under the direction of the paramedic with whom I was partnered, I had to hop behind the wheel of the ambulance and take care of all of the mundane tasks including working the foot-pedal siren while careering through Oberlin traffic with a paramedic simultaneously laughing and yelling at me to go faster, getting vitals while not getting in the way, loading cots, unloading cots, spiking bags, establishing 4- and 12-leads, the list goes on. Add to the fact that I am PRN at the hospital and only work when someone calls off (which happens a lot less than you might think,) and the anxiety level just rachets up. It can be weeks between shifts for me; by the end of a twelve hour shift the nurses might have learned my name, but when they see me the next time I work two weeks later, they all ask me if I'm new and if this is my first shift. Suffice to say that there is a world of difference between fire based and hospital based EMS, and I was still traversing the murky area from one to the other.
In the shabby corner of the hospital that is the EMS room, I stood reading the weekly bulletin and waiting for my shift to begin. One of the medics that I work with at the fire department came in and gave me a hug before I had a chance to sidle away (his nickname is Lt. Pig Pen for very good reason.) "Thanks for coming in, you saved me and Jon. One of us would have had to stay and I have a staff meeting and this is Jon's Friday," he said with genuine appreciation. I would find out later exactly why he was so appreciative not to be stuck with the 7-12 shift.
At six minutes to seven, I clocked in and EMS was immediately paged to do a triage. The three of us in the EMS room gingerly exchanged glances and I was the first to succumb. "I'll go." At the hospital, the majority of the patients who are admitted to the ER arrive on their own. We only average about six ambulance runs per 24 hours, so during the times we aren't doing our actual EMS duties, we have duties to help around the ER. One of those is triage. In triage, we take a patient's preliminary set of vital signs, get their medical history, and find out what exactly is going on with them. This is not always as easy as it sounds. The ER duties have always been a bone of contention within the EMS department because our wages are provided by the tax payers of our community, and not by the hospital. Invariably when the nurses page us to do a triage or a splint or to start an IV or any of the other myriad tasks for which we are beckoned, it is when we're in the middle of a truck check or report or restocking supplies and there are three nurses sitting at the nurses' station, ten feet from the triage room, talking about who won on American Idol last night.
On this occasion, I rounded the corner to the triage room and was met by a man in his mid-40s, already sitting down in the patient chair. He was ashen colored, sweating profusely, and completely covering his left hand was a very bloody rag. Next to his chair on the floor was a plastic bag full of ice that, like the rag, had blood all over it. I knew I didn't want to see what was in that bag.
"What seems to be the problem," I felt idiotic asking this question of someone who was clutching their hand over a blood-soaked rag, but it seemed an appropriate way to start the ball rolling.
"Well we had this new guy at work who totally fucked up the machine and when I tried to fix it I got my hand hung up in there and I think I cut my three fingers off, I don't know, I don't wanna look at it."
"What's in the bag?"
This seemed the next logical question. It could be the pastrami he was planning to eat for dinner, right?
"The fingers. Do you think they can reattach them?? We put 'em on ice."
He had to get to a room ASAP. His color was bad, his vitals weren't good, and I didn't want to spend anymore time with the bag of fingers. He and I and the bag headed into the ER and I set him up in one of our trauma rooms. A couple of nurses followed us in and started asking him about what happened, and as I tried to sneak out of the room thinking they had forgotten about my presence, the dreaded bag made its way into my hands.
"Here, hold this," the charge nurse commanded without even looking at me. She thrusted the plastic bag at me, which was now dripping a mixture of melted ice and blood. "What the hell," I thought to myself. I opened the bag. I looked inside. I found three perfectly maintained half-fingers--index, middle, and ring--starting back up at me. They were dark from the blood and looked strangely small mixed within the ice as they were, but they were unmistakable. Three fingernails, three knuckles, no hand. It was far more surreal than anything, and I don't think I would even describe the sight of them as gross. The ER Doctor relieved me of my bag-holding duties when he entered the room, and I felt that I had just experienced some kind of ER rite of passage by not getting sick at the sight of the handless fingers. As I was heading back to the EMS room, one of the other EMTs, Rob, stopped me.
"Ready for a long night?" he asked.
"I'm just on 'til midnight. That's not too bad," was my reply. He chuckled. I raised my eyebrow.
"You're covering for Shannon, right? When she called she said she needed five hours of coverage because her dad had been life flighted to Saint Vince's with an MI and she was the only one in the family who could be there with him. I don't know about you, but if I had to drive two hours to a hospital to be with my dad who might be dying, I wouldn't be coming back to work at midnight. Of course, she could just be at home and wanted to sleep tonight. She's not exactly the most honest person in the world."
My stomach sank. Shannon's shift was 7:00 pm to 7:00 am. If she really didn't show up, I would be stuck working her entire shift and I'd have to go to my daytime job on absolutely no sleep, and no prospect of sleep until 4:00 pm! It was only about 7:15 and I was already yawning. Rob saw the panic in my eyes and laughed. "You'll be fine," were the only words of consolation he could offer. "We all have to stay awake for 48 hours sometimes."
In the shabby corner of the hospital that is the EMS room, I stood reading the weekly bulletin and waiting for my shift to begin. One of the medics that I work with at the fire department came in and gave me a hug before I had a chance to sidle away (his nickname is Lt. Pig Pen for very good reason.) "Thanks for coming in, you saved me and Jon. One of us would have had to stay and I have a staff meeting and this is Jon's Friday," he said with genuine appreciation. I would find out later exactly why he was so appreciative not to be stuck with the 7-12 shift.
At six minutes to seven, I clocked in and EMS was immediately paged to do a triage. The three of us in the EMS room gingerly exchanged glances and I was the first to succumb. "I'll go." At the hospital, the majority of the patients who are admitted to the ER arrive on their own. We only average about six ambulance runs per 24 hours, so during the times we aren't doing our actual EMS duties, we have duties to help around the ER. One of those is triage. In triage, we take a patient's preliminary set of vital signs, get their medical history, and find out what exactly is going on with them. This is not always as easy as it sounds. The ER duties have always been a bone of contention within the EMS department because our wages are provided by the tax payers of our community, and not by the hospital. Invariably when the nurses page us to do a triage or a splint or to start an IV or any of the other myriad tasks for which we are beckoned, it is when we're in the middle of a truck check or report or restocking supplies and there are three nurses sitting at the nurses' station, ten feet from the triage room, talking about who won on American Idol last night.
On this occasion, I rounded the corner to the triage room and was met by a man in his mid-40s, already sitting down in the patient chair. He was ashen colored, sweating profusely, and completely covering his left hand was a very bloody rag. Next to his chair on the floor was a plastic bag full of ice that, like the rag, had blood all over it. I knew I didn't want to see what was in that bag.
"What seems to be the problem," I felt idiotic asking this question of someone who was clutching their hand over a blood-soaked rag, but it seemed an appropriate way to start the ball rolling.
"Well we had this new guy at work who totally fucked up the machine and when I tried to fix it I got my hand hung up in there and I think I cut my three fingers off, I don't know, I don't wanna look at it."
"What's in the bag?"
This seemed the next logical question. It could be the pastrami he was planning to eat for dinner, right?
"The fingers. Do you think they can reattach them?? We put 'em on ice."
He had to get to a room ASAP. His color was bad, his vitals weren't good, and I didn't want to spend anymore time with the bag of fingers. He and I and the bag headed into the ER and I set him up in one of our trauma rooms. A couple of nurses followed us in and started asking him about what happened, and as I tried to sneak out of the room thinking they had forgotten about my presence, the dreaded bag made its way into my hands.
"Here, hold this," the charge nurse commanded without even looking at me. She thrusted the plastic bag at me, which was now dripping a mixture of melted ice and blood. "What the hell," I thought to myself. I opened the bag. I looked inside. I found three perfectly maintained half-fingers--index, middle, and ring--starting back up at me. They were dark from the blood and looked strangely small mixed within the ice as they were, but they were unmistakable. Three fingernails, three knuckles, no hand. It was far more surreal than anything, and I don't think I would even describe the sight of them as gross. The ER Doctor relieved me of my bag-holding duties when he entered the room, and I felt that I had just experienced some kind of ER rite of passage by not getting sick at the sight of the handless fingers. As I was heading back to the EMS room, one of the other EMTs, Rob, stopped me.
"Ready for a long night?" he asked.
"I'm just on 'til midnight. That's not too bad," was my reply. He chuckled. I raised my eyebrow.
"You're covering for Shannon, right? When she called she said she needed five hours of coverage because her dad had been life flighted to Saint Vince's with an MI and she was the only one in the family who could be there with him. I don't know about you, but if I had to drive two hours to a hospital to be with my dad who might be dying, I wouldn't be coming back to work at midnight. Of course, she could just be at home and wanted to sleep tonight. She's not exactly the most honest person in the world."
My stomach sank. Shannon's shift was 7:00 pm to 7:00 am. If she really didn't show up, I would be stuck working her entire shift and I'd have to go to my daytime job on absolutely no sleep, and no prospect of sleep until 4:00 pm! It was only about 7:15 and I was already yawning. Rob saw the panic in my eyes and laughed. "You'll be fine," were the only words of consolation he could offer. "We all have to stay awake for 48 hours sometimes."
