What Has Been Seen....

Just down the street from the station is the house of one of our regulars with some psychological issues. We got called over there most recently by his family because he was unresponsive on the floor of his room. However, when we arrived he was standing in his bathrobe in the middle of the living room. Now, while I was standing on the porch waiting for someone to open the door I had set my equipment down at my feet. I was the second one to enter the house and as I bent down to pick up my gear I heard our patient say, "Hey, wanna see something gross?" Usually this is a bad sign, and this was no exception. I was already bent over and involuntarily looked up to find him standing directly in front of me with his bathrobe open and, right at eye level, were his testicles that were swollen to the size of a cantaloupe. Fortunately he closed his robe immediately as we were followed in by the police.

As to the report of unresponsiveness, he tried to explain that he had been faking unconsciousness as an April Fool's Day practical joke on his family. When we pointed out that it was October he said that he had not done anything on the actual first of April so he was making up for it now. We informed him that we would like to examine him and that he might have to go to the hospital. He was not at all happy about this and proceeded to pace laps around the room ranting about a whole host of nonsensical and bizarre things. He wasn't behaving in an overtly threatening manner and, eventually, he seemed to be losing steam, so all we could do was watch the spectacle. He finally ran out of ravings and stopped, leaning against the living room wall. In a delicious stroke of timing, he stopped directly beneath a clock at exactly the turn of the hour. As he completed his last lunatic statement and leaned on the wall, the clock over his head chimed in with what we were all thinking, "Cuckoo! Cuckoo! Cuckoo!". The beauty of it was that the humor and serendipity of this was not lost on any of us and I don't think anyone held in their laughter.


The ambulance arrived and the patient was 5150ed by the police. We wound up having to restrain him onto the gurney. The ambulance medic, who had not been witness to the earlier flashing incident and didn't know about the testicular malady wound up leaning on and across the patient's lower half to secure the seatbelt and restraint. As you can imagine, this elicited quite a reaction from our patient who screamed out in pain at the very confused medic.

There's one police officer who still thinks I'm the one who leaned on the patient and he frequently tells the story of this call.

Are We First In?

We were just about to clear a false alarm in the East end of our district when a structure fire call came in. It was on the Northwest border of our district and the next one over, technically the next station's first in, but there were a lot of units from our battalion working another structure fire at the time. As I turned the rig around and put on the lights and siren, my firefighter said, "Guys, we've got smoke behind us". When I got out onto the main streets again, we could indeed see a pretty good column starting to form.


Since we were on this other call when the fire was reported we were not initially attached to the alarm assignment. My captain kept trying to tell dispatch to attach us so we could get the address sent to our MDC (mobile data computer in our rig). There was so much radio traffic that they weren't answering him. Fortunately, I knew the street and could pretty much follow the smoke. When I got within a couple blocks of the street I needed to turn on, Truck 56 showed up behind us and followed us in. The smoke was really pumping now, dark and heavy. Finding the address was easy enough with the smoke and flames and crowd of people on the street, but not having a chance to see the map and not having it on our MDC, we didn't know where the hydrants were on this street and so far I hadn't seen any on the whole block driving in. As we approached the address, my firefighter suddenly spoke up from the backseat, "Are we first in?" Hard to believe, but we were. Now he would get to fight fire.

Turns out the fire was burning up an awning, a fence, some trees, and a boat in the backyard of the residence. The fuel and fiberglass of the boat were causing the thick, black smoke. I committed the rig to the long driveway but had to stop short due to some very low hanging cable/phone wires. I angled the rig to the left and my crew pulled a mobile standpipe (2 1/2 inch supply hose with 100 feet of 1 3/4 inch attack hose) to attack the fire. I heard some radio traffic about another engine who found a hydrant and would be bringing me a water supply (thank god) and more engines going to the court behind this house for a better point of attack. I got my crew's line flowing and waited for the engine to show up with my water supply before my tank ran out. I have a 500 gallon tank and the attack line flows 160 gallons per minute, so there really isn't much time.

Waiting.

Waiting.

Ahh, hell...no engine and no other crews or rigs except the empty truck on the block with me. A second BC pulled up and I asked him if there was a rig coming to give me a supply and he said he didn't know. Great. I radioed my crew and told them we were at 1/4 tank and had no supply. A minute later I radioed that I was shutting down their line. Fortunately, this was an outside fire, had they been inside a burning structure this could have been very bad.

Turns out, the supply engine went to the street behind and supplied the engine on that side and I was forgotten about. Meanwhile, another engine was getting ready to clear the scene as most of the fire had been knocked down. I stopped the captain of that rig and told him I needed his water. They quickly pumped their tank into mine so we could continue with our operation. It was pretty much just mop up work at that point so we were able to do it with just the newly filled tank.

A lot of little lessons learned on that one and fortunately a positive outcome despite all the miscommunications.

A Toast To A Job Well Done

What is going on behind closed doors on your quiet, tree lined, suburban street in the middle of the night? You honestly just don't know.

I still don't know all the details of how this one unfolded, but here it is from my perspective and pieced together the best I could.

A third party called the police to report an assault in a house in a residential neighborhood, unknown address. Police respond to the neighborhood and find a twenty-something hispanic male wandering the streets with a bloody lip. He is intoxicated and Spanish speaking only but is able to lead them to a house where he claims he got into a fight. We are cleared to enter and this is what we find:

The homeowner is a larger man in his late forties-ish wearing a bath robe. He is inebriated but only enough to be beligerent to the police which, all arguments regarding the Occupy movement aside, is pretty much never a good idea. There is a bookcase knocked askew and a few items scattered on the floor giving credence to the claim of a scuffle. There is a kitchen table inside and a patio table outside both covered in wine bottles and other liquor bottles (good stuff too). And curled up on the living room floor, completely hammered, is another twenty something hispanic male with his pants undone and down around his ankles. As I started assessing the guy on the floor, the homeowner again started getting feisty with the cops and me, so I stepped back for a minute to be on guard. It was at this point that I looked down the hall and saw a tripod with video camera attached set up in the bedroom.


We removed the patients from the house for treatment and ambulance transport and let the cops deal with the homeowner.

So, the best we could figure out from the drunken patients was that they were landscapers who had just completed work on a job in this man's backyard and he invited them to have a drink and celebrate before they left, which they did. And then they had another and another and another. The first guy must have fallen asleep or passed out and then awoke to find his partner on the floor with his pants down being spooned by the homeowner in the bathrobe.


You could say, he freaked out a little and that is when he and the homeowner got into their scuffle, during which he was hit in the mouth. He then fled the house (leaving his partner behind) and called his or the other guys' girlfriend who then called the cops who called us in.

One thing that struck me as odd (one thing?) was that, as rude and uncooperative as the homeowner was and the seemingly obvious nature of what had gone down, as far as I could tell, the police just let him be, cleared out and said goodnight. It could be that they had to wait until they could talk further with the landscapers, get statements, and find out if they wanted to press charges before anything further could be done but I kind of doubt that will happen.

Suburbia...what are you gonna do?

Paging Dr. Google

Ohhh, the internet. You gotta love it.

We responded at about 8:30 pm for a 23 year old male having a panic attack. When we arrived at the house the rest of my crew remembered that they had been on this guy before a couple months back.

We found him sitting on the couch complaining of rapid heart rate and some hyperventilation. He did not appear to be in any distress at all. He said he had been practicing the relaxation tips the doctor had told him to use but it wasn't working. He was speaking normally and his pulse was barely over 100. He had no tingling in his hands or chest pain or any other symptom that we would worry about so we really weren't too concerned. Nor were any of his family, as evidenced by the fact that his sister (?) appeared in the hallway, glanced back into the living room, saw a crew of firefighters, turned and went on her way without a word.

Our patient decided that he didn't want to go to the hospital by ambulance after all, because he didn't want to "waste our time". I'm sure we all mentally said, "Too late". So we cancelled the ambulance and he signed out AMA. As we got back on the rig the firefighter said, "He's gonna call us back you know that, right?"

Fast forward eight hours...yes, at just after four in the morning, thank you very much, we got toned out for the same address. When we walked in this time the first words out of his mouth were, "I'm going to the hospital this time." Oh, we already knew that. Again, he was in no apparent distress and in fact his heart rate was in the high 80's and his pressure was fine and his ekg normal.

He, however, had spent his time between our visits cruising the web for information on all the things that could be wrong with him (which probably triggered the second event).

As we waited for the ambulance to arrive he peppered us with questions. Could it be tachycardia? Well, tachycardia just means a heart rate greater than 100 beats per minute and you don't even have that right now. What about palpitations? Well, a palpitation is just a sensation in which a person is aware of an irregular, hard, or rapid heartbeat, which...again...you don't have. And so on.

In defense of his research, he stated that he had a lot of time on his hands, which I took to mean that he was jobless. He also stated at one point that this was his grandmother's house. So, I thought to myself, you're 23 years old with no job and living free at grandmas house.

If that's the case, what are you so stressed about?

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Halloween

I signed up to work overtime at my old station with my old captain. The engineer on duty the next day was working overtime at a station right by my current one so he asked if we could swap. No big deal, I still had a good crew to work with and would be closer to my home station in the morning.

Unfortunately that station can get busy, especially at night. They had actually been shut out the day before (no calls) which is pretty unheard of for them so we kind of knew we were going to pay for that. We drilled and ran a couple calls during the day. As predicted, we wound up being up all night (four calls after midnight). Our first night call was for a diabetic who is one of their regulars. His blood sugar was in the teens and we started an IV and gave dextrose. He came around and of course didn't want to go with the ambulance. This sometimes happens and we just make sure the patient has some real food (longer lasting sugar) and someone to watch over them. We have to make sure they eat and are mentating well enough before we can leave. In this case we were on scene for an hour getting this guy to eat and stabilize. We probably should have just pulled the plug and made him go to the hospital but we were being excessively nice. After that we got up at 2 o'clock for back to back calls and again at 5 o'clock a.m. It was one of those nights where the calls are spaced just far enough apart to never get back to sleep again.

I went from that station to my regular house for my regular 48 hour shift. My house is supposed to be the slow one, but once again we ran a couple calls in the day and 2 more after midnight. I think I got 3 hours sleep on the overtime and maybe 4-4 1/2 on my first shift. The second shift wasn't as bad until the next morning when I was getting ready to come home.

At 7:30ish that morning I got a call from the BC telling me to stay put at my station because I might get mandatoried. They had one person to call before me but he was out on a medical call and they had to wait for him to get back to the station.

Did I mention this was Halloween?

Well, the guy ahead of me claimed Family Care issues (which is the only thing that can get you out of a mandatory) and so I got stuck with it. The mandatory was at my old station with my old firefighter so at least that part was good, but it meant that I would miss going out with my kids and that my wife would be stuck dealing with them for an additional 24 hours (now 96) by herself.

The firefighter had also been mandatoried and was as unhappy as I was about it. He made a good point that Halloween was the one holiday we can't do on a different day. If we work Christmas or Thanksgiving, we celebrate the day before or day after, no big deal. He asked if I though his neighbors would look at him funny when he took his kids trick or treating on November 1st.

We had an overtime captain with us for the first 12 hours and the regular captain was coming in at 8 that night. We kept the day low-key and did our regular engine and tool service and decided to just go pick up burritos instead of shopping and cooking. There is a small taqueria right across the street and down a couple so we decided to just walk over there and get dinner. So, at about 5:30 we put on our uniforms, grabbed radios, and headed across the street. We had just reached the door of the place when the radios went off: "Engine 56, Truck 57, Engine 57, Engine 40, Rescue 19 respond for a structure fire residential".

Well we took off running back to the station pulling off our uniform shirts as we went. I must admit, I always think of the scene in the Superman movie where he is running and pulls his shirt open to reveal the iconic S whenever we do that. In any case, as I put my turnouts on and checked the map for hydrant locations I knew that it was going to be a race to see who got there first. The house was in the next district over, but pretty close to the border of our district. As we flew down the street towards the address I commented that I couldn't see any smoke. Just as I said that though we could all smell it. We saw the other engine coming towards us from the opposite direction. We pretty much met at the intersection but they made the turn first and took command. We swung in after them and went to assess the structure for ventilation. There was a decent amount of light colored smoke coming from the garage as we made our way around the house. We could see in almost every window and most of the way through the house and it was all clear of smoke so we were pretty confident that whatever fire there was would be confined to the garage. A crew went upstairs to confirm there was no fire or people inside: all clear. The initial engine crew made there way into the garage by way of a side door and were able to move through the cluttered and smoky garage to unlatch the garage door which allowed us to open it up from the outside.

There was a smoldering fire in the middle of the packed garage which was quickly and easily extinguished. It really didn't classify as a 'structure fire' but it gave us something to do and added a little excitement to my day. We helped pick up and load all the hose for the attack engine and went back to our station. I realized on the way back that we didn't have anything to hand out to trick-or-treaters if we got any. We stopped at the little market on the corner and the firefighter ran in and got a bag of blow pops.

If we weren't hungry before we certainly were now, so we put our uniforms back on and went back to the taqueria. This time we got our food and ate without interruption. We only had one small group of kids come to the door but at least we were prepared.

That night, the engineer due to relieve me called in sick and I almost got mandoed again. There was only one guy ahead of me on the list with the proper qualifications and if he had cried Family Care, I would have been hit again. Fortunately he accepted the mando and I was able to go home.

Coward

Normally, I try to keep these posts relatively light but this was messed up.

The tones went off and we were dispatched to a motor vehicle crash. En route we were given the update that it was a vehicle versus pedestrian with multiple patients. We were the second rig on scene and the first paramedic had already done a quick triage. I was split off from my crew and told by the IC to grab my monitor and go confirm the death of one of the patients. Over by some bushes at the base of a light pole there was a yellow highway blanket covering a body. I started to head over when somebody, I can't even remember who - a cop I think, stopped me and said, "Just so you know, it's a kid."

I later found out that what had happened was that two twenty-something idiots decided to peel out while leaving a gas station. They started to fishtail, lost control, and over-corrected sending them onto the sidewalk and right into two pre-teen skateboarders. The first kid tried to jump out of the way and was just grazed by the car. The other took the full force of the car and was sent flying.


I lifted the blanket and saw a twelve year old boy with his obviously lifeless eyes staring straight up at the sky. He had been thrown through the air and into the pole. He must have hit hard enough and in just the right position for it to immediately stop all his momentum because he seemed to have dropped like a stone right to the base of the pole. I thought to myself that normal physics would have had him bounce off or spin around the pole. I still don't get how he landed where he did. In any case, everything conspired against this kid that day, because if the car and hitting the pole alone didn't kill him, the four inch bolt sticking up from the bottom of the pole that went through the base of his skull certainly did. Of course, I didn't learn about the bolt until later when the coroner went to remove the body, but it didn't matter, there was no question he was dead. He had been triaged correctly. I still had to follow the protocol and hook him up to my monitor and run a strip showing him to be asystolic. I did so, and covered him back up then went to help in the extrication and treatment of the idiots in the car.

The driver of the car turned out to be a Mexican national without a driver's license who wound up leaving the hospital, fleeing the country, and supposedly returned to Mexico. I don't know how much more unlucky this kid's family can get.

Please, teach your children to respect the lives of other people, respect the power and force of a moving car and don't screw around with either. That way, maybe they won't wind up killing somebody else's kid. But if they do, I hope they are noble enough to stand up and face the consequences. I don't know how that driver can can live with himself and I can only hope that he is tortured every day by what he did.