Eventful week

I never started a blog because I didn't think I had anything particularly interesting to say, but reading cut-to-cure changed my mind. I do not have that writer's experience, and I don't imagine that I ever will, but my collection of experiences might be of interest to a few. Consider this a view of EMS from the trenches.

The past week has been memorable. I needled a chest for the first time recently, and I also used the EZ-IO for the first time on the same patient. It was a traumatic arrest, so I don't count that case as one of my shining achievements. Survival from traumatic arrest being about zero, I guess I don't feel too bad about the outcome, either. The old figure of less than 0.5% is likely far too high, although there is some debate. Weird thing was, he had no obvious external signs of trauma apart from a small lac to the forehead. I guess his car was pretty much a crushed pop can, though. According to the autopsy, he had a transected spinal cord injury. Nothing anyone could do.

I also witnessed a septic patient becoming progressively more symptomatic from DIC until being called upstairs to the (terminal) code blue. (If you guessed gram-negative bacteria as the cause, you win!) In the course of CPR, bluid* shot out from her nose and mouth with each compression. Does it count as an exposure if some of that hit my arm? To make things better, there was an EKG lead in the center of the sternum in a rather unorthodox placement (even for the EASI-lead business) that led to a large bruise over the heel of my right hand until I tore the lead off and repositioned it.[*Bluid: (n.) Any of a dozen blood-tinged fluids encountered in health care. Think of Sangria and you're pretty close, although the slice of orange is optional.]

Prophylaxis after exposure to N. meningitis is administration of one 500 mg ciprofloxacin tablet. I need to look up some info on the rationale behind that, and whether it's actually effective. My uninformed impression is that you might as well give me a tic-tac.

I do hope to have better research, more research, and links to more than other blogs and wikipedia articles in the future, and I'll try to set out some observations about health care, EMS, etc.

For now, I need to sleep.

zaius