A Dead End

"What's the process by which adenosine acts upon the heart? Like, its physiologic path?"

I get a smug look that I have grown to hate and the thing opens its mouth. "Why do you need to know that? You just need to know that it works. And that it's for SVT."

He is always right. Two hours earlier we were doing the truck check -- actually, I was doing the truck check, he was leaned back in the captain's chair gracing me with his golden platitudes of paramediGod wisdom and critiquing every movement that I made-- and I was checking that the lights on each of the intubation blades worked. This is something that was drilled into my head in school. The last thing you want if you have to intubate is a laryngyscope blade with no light. It's so important, in fact, that someone came up with a mantra for it. So as I snapped on each blade and nodded and "m-hm'ed" my way through the stories I was hearing for the 18th time, my mind was rythmically telling my hands, "bright, white, and to the right." He stops talking. I enjoy the silence for two seconds and look up.

"What. Are you doing."

"..."

:: smug stare ::

"Checking that the laryngyscope blades are in proper working order?"

"Why in the hell would you do that?"

It goes on like this for some time. I draw the information out of him (there should be hazard pay involved, or PTSD counseling after) and learn that the hospital has purchased blades with fiber optic lights, and you don't have to check them anymore because they will "never" burn out. Now, I'm sure that I'll still check them anyway because I'm type A like that, but we could have saved so much time had he just said, "hey, you don't have to check each blade anymore, they're fiber optic now." The entire rest of the truck check was spent thusly (he tried to trip me up by asking me to find the Narcan. I think he was actually disappointed when I pulled out the Naloxone Hydrochloride because he knows that basics don't have to know anything about drugs, and therefore I wouldn't know the actual drug name, and therefore he could lord his infinite wisdom over me. Again. In his inexplicable hillbilly drawl. Just an aside, but how do you grow up and spend your entire life in Oberlin, and speak with a redneck accent?)

The rest of the shift goes like this, and yet somehow he deems me competent enough to tech every single call we got. I just keep telling myself that God puts people like this into your pathway for a reason. I'm beginning to think that I'm not learning the reason quickly enough and God is getting frustrated with me because I have not been able to escape this guy, be it shifts at the hospital or training/calls with the FD.

We had our annual extrication training on Monday, and it was just like it always is. We practiced a bunch of stuff that we will never, ever do at a scene. The lieutenants run the trainings. This redneck is, unfortunately a lieutenant. An A Shift lieutenant. So I am always, basically, in his training group. Because our extrication trainings involve things we never do on actual scenes, none of us really ever know what the lieutenants want us to do. I am beginning to think the lieutenants don't know, either. This is how training goes.

Lieutenant 1: Hey, stabilize that vehicle.

Firefighter: ::chocks tires in two directions and lets air out of tires::

Lieutenant 1: NO! GO GET THE CRIBBING AND THE AIRBAGS AND THE PNEUMATIC STRUTS!

Lieutenant 2: Gain access to the vehicle. The doors are locked and you need to break a window.

Firefighter: ::gets halligan and flat head axe and breaks window in controlled manner::

Lieutenant 2: NO! BREAK OFF THE ANTENNA AND CREATE A FULCRUM BY HOLDING THE MIDDLE OF THE ANTENNA AGAINST THE B POST AND THEN SMACK THE ANTENNA HEAD ONTO THE WINDOW!

This is not embellishment. Maybe it's a man thing to train this way, but I don't think I was the only one who was frustrated by it. It just seems like it takes so much less effort to explain what you want out of your crew instead of letting them do what they would normally do, and then nitpicking the shit out of every action as they do it.

I lost it when they brought out the air chisel.

I was working with one of the rookies with the hydraulic spreaders. I like to teach what I know to new people, so I sort of just took over with him because the two lieutentants who were supposed to be training us weren't explaining the tool at all to him. All of a sudden, from the other side of the vehicle, came the loudest, most grating sound I have heard our service produce. We went around the truck to see what was going on, and the two lieutenants were standing over one of the rookies as he used an air chisel to peel away layers of the sheet metal that made up the truck's body. I didn't even know we had an air chisel, if that gives you any indication of how frequently it's used. The redneck lieutenant sees me standing there and hands me the air chisel and tells me, "peel off in front of the A post so we can see the hinges."

I have no idea how to use an air chisel, and I'm not too excited at the prospect of learning. But, it's not mine to decide what I do at training, so I hold the thing in my hands and look at it. It looks like an assault rifle with a big chisel bit on the end of it.

"How does it work?"

Really, Emily? Do you seriously think that they're going to start teaching you now?

"Put it up against the metal and pull the trigger."

I'm glad he isn't into guns and will never be a range instructor. I did what he said, and maybe exacerbated how ineffective it was to just "put it up against the metal and pull the trigger," and I stopped the thing. There was a long zig-zag line where the chisel had etched along the sheet metal, but it hadn't penetrated. The chisel head spins around wildly and moves in and out like a jack hammer, it is not a tool whose use is intuitive.

"Keep going."

I was frustrated at this point because he could see that I didn't know what I was doing, and he still wasn't going to actually teach me anything.

"It's not going to work. Can we do things that we're actually going to need to do on scene now?"

He gave me a raised eyebrow (I hate how this guy thinks no one will ever challenge him because he's a lieutenant.) Chapman must have sensed my frustration because he came over and actually went over the tool with all of us, explained how we could hold the chisel bit and guide it and that it wouldn't hurt us, explained exactly how to handle the tool and use it the way it was meant to be used. It was a far cry from the original instruction I was given, and it felt good to actually learn something in training. When I made the cut that redneck wanted, we learned that you can't see the hinges from the opposite and inside A post. I looked around the vehicles that the different crews had used the air chisel on, and all I saw were big gashes and triangle shaped holes along the front and back fenders. I still have no idea what the practical application of the air chisel would be in an extrication scenario.

About ten minutes later I heard Rob say, "can we do a scenario or something like what we would really do on a scene?" to redneck lieutenant. His reply was, "this is training, we get to practice all of the things that we never do."

...

We got back to the station and got all the trucks squared away and as everyone was leaving the redneck lieutenant came up to me. With his most formidable expression he asked me, "do you have ten minutes?" My stomach sank. "Sure." We walked out to the parking lot so he could smoke. He fires one up, turns to me and says, "do you have a problem with me?"

You can't answer a question like that honestly. Can you? At that moment I wished for more of Dad and Libby's spirit than my own.

"I am very frustrated. My morale is at an all-time low. I'm tired of trainings that have less to do with training and more to do with gratifying the officers' egos. I feel no brotherhood here anymore, I have no pride in telling people that I work here anymore. We just spent two and a half hours at extrication training, and the new guys are no better off as far as what they will be able to do on scene than they were when we started."

His reply?

"Well you guys won't be doing anything if we get a real accident, anyway. You'll be fighting all of us for the jaws."