Went to Home Depot today for some supplies for the farm renovation. While there, we stumbled onto a parade for Seabrook’s own Olympic athlete, Scott Lago. It was a short, strange parade, with a few fire engines interspersed with regular traffic. Of course all I had handy was my cell phone camera. This is Hampton Falls 23-Tank-4.
February 25 – the weather men missed again. What should have been a little wind and rain turned into a full-blown Nor’easter without the snow. We experienced major destruction in the region, with our power infrastructure virtually destroyed. This is at the end of my street. Two poles and wires down, and this is only one spot of dozens in just our small town.
February 26 – The EOC is open, and we’re staffing the firehouse 24/7. Our old station was designed as a volunteer house in the 1930′s. Sleeping facilities consist of army cots in the meeting hall, with the tables and chairs all pushed to one side. Rob got a little cold. . .
As of this posting Sunday morning, power is back but the cleanup will continue for a while.
Welcome to Volume 2, Number 1 of the Handover, a blog carnival by and for EMS. I’m very proud to be hosting it here at Notes from Mosquito Hill this month. I’ve been participating since Kal hosted the carnival last July, and I count myself lucky to be among such exalted company.
Prehospital medicine is a passionate business in many ways. We often deal with people on the worst day of their lives, and emotions run high. This makes for interesting stories. Most of us don’t do it for the money, as we could often make a better salary in another field. (Some of us even do it for free.) We stay because of our own passion for the work.
Then there is that unique condition of the EMT or medic who blogs: the passionate story.
So without further ado, I bring you The Handover: Passion Edition.
Ben the Insomniac leads off with a post which combines two of life’s great passionate subjects, war and children.
Archie cries. Renee can do nothing to comfort him, but tries anyway. She sings to him, her voice broken by her fears. She smiles at him, the glint in her eyes betraying the tears that she tries to hide. She has nothing to offer other than her warmth, her touch, her love.
This is The Whistle.
Squeezy writes of her own passion.
After 3 years, day in, day out, she can only hope she is offered the best job in the world: a job as a paramedic.
This is Girl in Green.
CKEMTP writes of what the job has given him.
Thank you EMS for allowing me to see the power and passion in people going through the worst times in their lives… and in some cases the best ones.
This is Thank You, EMS.
Michael Morse brings us a snapshot to chill the heart of any parent.
The kids were no longer smiling. I think they sensed my trepidation.
This is Tiny Package.
Greg Friese sends a tale of a whole gaggle of passionate patients.
. . .they had already walked/run more than two full marathons, bicycled more than 65 miles, swam more than ten miles of cold whitewater, and kayaked nearly 50 miles.
This is Passion in the Blazing Heat of the Utah Desert.
Peter Canning sends a series of snapshots of parents and their love.
“He’s had a hard day,” his mother says. I can see the sadness and tiredness in her eyes, but there is no anger there, no hint of a breaking point.
This is I’ll Be at Your Side.
Justin Schorr, aka The Happy Medic tells of his own passion for his job.
Why do folks think I have an answer for why I love my job? I just do.
This is Why Do You Love Your Job?
Mark Glencourse, aka Medic999 sends along a post on dealing with the trauma we face.
I dont know whay this one has affected me so much. I know that it all goes down as experience, it will end up as another story shared with new colleagues, but it will also be another one stored away, but never forgotten.
This is Suicide.
EpiJunky submitted a beautiful example of the kind of passionate writing I love to see, and a wonderful example of the attachments we sometimes form with patients.
She managed to smile. “Don’t be sad, I’ll be okay.” I didn’t realize that I had tears running down my face.
This is A Fan of Her Life. It’s a two-parter; be sure to read them both.
For my own submission, I handed the blog and the theme over to Mrs. Mack505. To my delight (and relief?), she selected one of my top three candidates.
Her husband had seen to her every need, helping her to the bathroom and feeding her for as long as he could. Her degeneration had progressed to the point that he had to carry her upstairs to the toilet, yet he continued single-handedly.
This is Olive Oyl.
For those of you who may be new to Notes from Mosquito Hill, I would encourage you to dig deeply, or to try the EMS and CMTSU (Can’t Make This Stuff Up) tags. I’ve been posting a lot of photos lately, but the writing is all still here. It’s just spread out a bit.
Next month’s edition will be hosted by CKEMTP over at Life Under the Lights. His working theme is ‘Respect,’ and he has a big idea to go with it. I’ll let him tell you about it when he gets the post up.
Here’s hoping you enjoyed our spin on passion. Thanks for reading.
Mack505, in quarters and off the air.
Between sick, work, and remodeling I haven’t had much time to do this lately. Alas, it must end after this blog post.
Two new blogs have crept into my blogroll in the last week, and I wanted to be sure to mention them before the upcoming Handover.
Girl in Green is written by a student paramedic in Australia. Squeezy is relatively new to the Blogosphere, but she shows great potential.
I don’t know very much about Drug Induced Hallucinations, but the writing is excellent and I love his post on The Rules. It’s all stuff we’d like to have the guts to attempt. ”Pip, pip, righto guv!” indeed.
Go give them a read, they’re both worth it.
Cold, wet, & gray at the Eastern Front today.
Went to the vet today. My silly dog kept her ears up and tail wagging virtually the whole time.
She was born before the Great War. She grew up in an era when transportation was primarily by foot or horse. Here in The City you could go almost anywhere on an electric streetcar for a nickel. She has survived two World Wars, a Depression, a Cold War, the Great Society, the rise and fall of Communism, and disco. She’s seen 18 presidents and outlived all but 5 of them.
And now she sits small and frail in a chair in a nursing home.
She’s mad as a wet hen that we’ve come for her, and she makes sure we know that she is NOT a resident here. At just shy of a century old, she comes here to volunteer!
She’s in no real distress right now, and she balks at the idea of our stretcher. We gently talk her into accepting our care, and off we go to Local Suburban Hospital. She’s very gracious with us, differentiating between annoyance at her situation and our need to do our job.
I see she can be feisty, though. The nurses at LSH are going to love her, for the same reasons I do. Keep it up, you’ll live to see that century yet.
Little old ladies are my Kryptonite. I’m truly powerless in their spell. I lost the last of my grandparents over ten years ago, and I still miss them all dearly. I’m fortuate to meet a slew of wonderful Grannys in the course of my duties, and every so often one just stands out. I can happily put them back to bed at all hours of the night, no matter how busy the shift has been. I don’t mind having a chat, fetching a drink, or making sure the cat gets looked after when we leave. And the feisty ones, they just make life worth living.
If I get to four-score-and-ten, plus, and kids the age of my great-grandchildren come to cart me off in an ambulance, I plan to give them h*ll too. With a smile, of course.
Clouds over the marshes in Hampton, NH.
Beth and Ericka on the infrared (FLIR) screen at the Museum of Science. Those shades are cool. Literally.
or “How to Create a Major Multi-Jurisdictional Homeland Security Incident Without Even Trying.”
Step 1: Find a location interesting to law enforcement such as a port or air terminal. For our purposes, we’ll use a small local harbor. Our harbor doesn’t have much shipping, but it does have day tours, fishing boats, and lots of small pleasure craft. It falls under the jurisdiction of multiple police departments and small harbor patrols from the towns which surround it, as well as the US Coast Guard. The local patrols spend most of their time watching for DUIs and towing clueless tourists from the tidal mud. They don’t have many large incidents.
Step 2: Find a coworker who works part time for one of the 18 or so agencies mentioned above. Catch him near the end of a long day of BLS transfer work, and tell him about how he’s missing The Big One out on his harbor. Play up a story about a burning tour boat with lots of rescues being made.
Step 3: Watch him call his boss to get a situation report and offer his services just as soon as he can get free from his Dialysis & Discharges shift.
This is where the joke should end. Everyone gets a good laugh at said coworker’s expense, and he’ll get his revenge next time around.
Unless:
Step 4: Unbeknownst to you, said boss is a bit insecure about interagency communication. He will start making phone calls, wanting to know why no one told him about the major incident unfolding in HIS harbor. Soon boats from all 18 agencies will hit the water, looking for a disaster which doesn’t exist and being very p*ssed at the other 17 agencies for not notifying them.
Oops.
Fortunately this one was caught before any boats were launched, but there were lots of ruffled feathers, a few written apologies, and a letter or two in people’s files.
It was pretty funny, though. The take-home lesson is to let the boss in on the joke BEFORE you unleash it on your unsuspecting coworker.
(Disclaimer: of course I don’t advocate wasting any agency’s time. Thankfully this one was caught before it reached critical mass. And I wasn’t involved.)