Blood, Sweat, & Tea by Tom Reynolds

Author:Tom Reynolds [Reynolds, Tom]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780740788970
Publisher: Andrews McMeel
Published: 2008-09-15T05:00:00+00:00

Shopping

I went out today and saw an alcoholic, a COPD (chronic obstructive pulmonary disease), a couple of heart failures, a handful of kids with chest infections, and at least three anosmias (anosmia is a lack of a sense of smell).

The anosmia patients are those teenage girls who think that the best way to attract a slack-jawed mate is to empty half a bottle of cheap perfume over their heads—do they not know what they smell like?

However, I wasn’t in an ambulance, and I wasn’t on the FRU—in fact I wasn’t working at all.

The answer is fairly simple—I just went shopping.

The problem with being surrounded by patients for 12 hours a day (first as a nurse, then to a lesser extent as an EMT), is that your eye is automatically drawn toward people with obvious symptoms. It’s not just your eye—a trained ear can hear the cough of a child with a chest infection, or the puff and wheeze of a chronic bronchitis.

I suspect doctors have the same problem, the constant inspection of clubbing in the fingers, the subliminal inspection of the eyes, and the unconscious appraisal of someone’s gait.

In some part, it’s because you are trained to look for what is wrong with people—but equally, there is that desire not to be around the person who is most likely to have a heart attack in front of you. At least when you are not on duty. This is why, when the 80-year-old female with ankles the size of tree trunks and blue lips decides to hit the pavement, there won’t be a medical professional to be seen for miles.

It’s not that we are lazy, or that we have no love for our fellow man when we are not getting paid for it, it’s just that without any of our “kit,” there is very little we can do to look busy, or effective. Without equipment, the options are CPR (if their heart has stopped), the recovery position (if they are unconscious), or a “there, there,” with a bit of hand holding if it is a grazed knee.

Of course, the first thing to do is to call for an ambulance.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.