En Route by Steven "Kelly" Grayson

Author:Steven "Kelly" Grayson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: ebook, book
Publisher: Kaplan Publishing
Published: 2009-02-19T16:00:00+00:00

Pissing Contest

I SEEMED TO be developing a prodigious talent for pissing people off. I’m a nice guy. I was courteous and compassionate with my patients. Well, most of my patients. My coworkers liked me. The volunteer EMS agencies in the area worshipped graven images of me. But for some reason, I occasionally gave the wrong people a serious case of the red ass.

A cynic might say it’s because I have a difficult time concealing my disdain for people I consider stupid. A cynic might say that I’m occasionally, unintentionally arrogant and condescending. But cynicism doesn’t jibe with my overall sunny worldview, so I am forced to conclude that some people just search for reasons to get their panties in a bunch, and that I just tend to be their most convenient target. I’m sure that’s what it is.

I mean, it sounds plausible, doesn’t it?

The latest inductee to the “Kelly Grayson Hate Society” was Elaine Milner, the director of nursing at DeVillier Community Hospital. Elaine was a starchy old battle-ax who had fond memories of white nurse’s caps, support stockings, and orthopedic shoes. She knew the original recipe for blood, was close personal friends with Florence Nightingale herself, and thought the rest of her staff could learn a lot from Julie Elton. Naturally, we cordially detested each other. The only thing that kept us on fairly amicable terms was the great relationship Lasson and I had with the doctors and her nursing staff, Julie excepted.

Our latest clash involved a patient suffering a myocardial infarction Lasson and I had just brought in to DeVillier. Since we didn’t have a twenty-four- hour cath lab nearby, a lot of our chest-pain patients went to the local hospitals first. Lasson, Mary, and I had found our own little groove in treating ischemic chest pain. Quite often, the patient received a thrombolytic within fifteen minutes of arriving at the ER.

That wasn’t the case this morning, however, primarily because Elaine Milner seemed intent on getting in the way of everything we were trying to do. She had some very definite opinions about the role of paramedics, all of which can be summed up in three short sentences: She calls. We haul. That’s all.

She probably had some vague idea that we did oxygen therapy and CPR, but not much more than that. So, being the nursing director, she was naturally curious as to why a paramedic was mixing an Activase infusion in her Emergency Department while his EMT-Basic partner was starting a heparin drip. Activase infusions were a Big Deal around here. A lot of the nurses treated the stuff like kryptonite, to be handled only in the direst of emergencies, and only when a physician had insisted upon it.

A lot of the help we gave the ER staff blurred the line between prehospital and Emergency Department. Hell, let’s be realistic—it erased the line. Most of the nurses and doctors didn’t have a problem with that, when it was necessary, but Elaine Milner and Julie Elton tended to get all pissy about it.

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