The Pride of Cleveland

He was fat. Well, to be fair, they were all fat, but he was the slovenly kind of fat that makes you imagine that his car is packed with papers and fast food wrappers and that if you were to get into said car after the offer of a ride, it would take five to ten minutes of moving the aforementioned papers and wrappers around before there would be enough space for a seat. And they were all Cleveland firemen and it made me glad I didn't actually live in Cleveland, apart from the other obvious reasons. He was thirteen months pregnant and as he lost his breath pacing the floor of the front of our classroom, I wondered if they made SCBA waist belts big enough to accommodate the girth. He spoke in a very peculiar language of half-sentences with tangential interjections peppered throughout like machine gun fire, the sum total of which made it nearly impossible to determine if there was a linear aspect to any of the instruction he was attempting to give, or if he was the kind of person who needed to get everything out, all at once, and the brain just couldn't keep up. Or keep track. When he spoke it was as if we were all invited to participate in his very disorganized and foreign internal world.

It was only our second lab with him, and my hope that the instruction would improve after the nervousness of the first session were quickly being put asunder. He was furiously scratching an equation onto the whiteboard. The paper in front of me on the desk said "medical math for paramedics," and I had stopped after the first three problems. This was the point at which he realized that no one in class had understood his preliminary instruction on the subject, and that further explanation was necessary. And probably, for many of us, it was the point at which we realized that any further explanation would be of positively no use.

"See, you can't just blindly plug numbers into these things," he mused to no one in particular as he plugged numbers into the equation he had just written. "That's why I teach you two ways," we all just looked at each other, "so you can figure out what works best for you. Now, the best way to do it is to work backwards see," I had no idea where the numbers were coming from that he was using, "now you know that the proper drip rate is 45gtts." I had scrunched my face up in the hope that squinting would make it all clear -- so much so that my eyes hurt. I didn't fix my face in time and he looked at me and chuckled, and started the whole cycle again, with a different problem. I had already decided that google would be my teacher for this particular skill and I cringed when I remembered that this was the guy who would be teaching us IV skills. And I immediately said a prayer for the first three to four victim....patients that I will be starting IVs on.