The Old-Man Whisperer

Yesterday was minor trauma and weird call day. I should have known when the student showed up. I like that I work in a station where we get students that ride along. It's so refreshing to see the job through their eyes. A cardiac arrest isn't the OH NO NOT AGAIN call for them that it is for us. I remember those days we prayed for something "good". Though I also remember when I used to work in this neck of the woods and I had a student ask me if we "needed the monitor" on a cardiac arrest. Ummmmm. Geez, only if you WANT to shock and give drugs, yeah. Oh, excuse my sarcasm. I'm from New England originally. Incidentally, we did get sent on a cardiac arrest yesterday, but it was in a neighboring jurisdiction and we were cancelled. Killjoys.

So our student needed trauma. We complied. It wasn't end of the world, knock down, drag out broken limbs and Armageddon but it'll count. You know, people being hit by chairs, a 14 year old injured in a wrestling match, etc. But my all-time favorite was just your average abdominal pain (due to constipation x 1 week). Took us a hot minute to get there and there was a crew waiting on us crowded into the room. We found an elderly man cowering on his bed with a non-rebreather mask hissing on his face. I asked what his sats were RA. 97%. Another disturbing trend. Why, for the love of god, is everyone being put on a non-rebreather mask regardless of their sats? And this goes DOUBLE for this guy. He has massive panic issues, is obviously hyperventilating and is on 12L, surrounded by people talking loudly, with a very aggressive female firefighter yelling three inches from his face "CALM DOWN". Huh. The first thing I did was clear out the extraneous extra people. That still left the loud female, an elderly PO (older than our 69 year old patient - he said so) and me. After observing them get in his face for another five minutes and forcibly put the oxygen on his face at least twice (after I told the patient it was OK if he didn't want to keep it on) the patient was sobbing. I finally walked up behind the female and touched her shoulder and said "This is not working, c'mon." I had everyone leave but me and the patient, removed the oxygen and sat on the bed with him.

Two minutes later we were walking downstairs and out to the unit.

Just as the loud female firefighter was telling my partner how I'd "tossed them out of the room".

I'm AWESOME. I'ts OK. You can tell me.