... with God.
Not a sport, however, not a game. Just what I did as the Mobile Intensive Care Paramedic. It often seems that all the forces of the Universe were planning to take a concrete life, and I, who were in the right place at the right time and with the right tools and experience, would do everything in my power to prevent this from happening: press and pull until it starts some kind of wave
I was just from a paramedic school, working in Daytona Beach, Fla., And was preparing to move my last patient to a local funeral home. At that time (1974), my role as a physician often included the patient’s dead body, which I had just “lost” to my final switching station before burial.
It was bad enough to fail, not to mention being embarrassed about what to say to the funeral home director: “Yes, here’s something else for you.
It was a particularly painful call that led me to a beautiful Florida evening to move back and forth in the hospital parking lot, my fist ascended to heaven, yelled at the top of my lungs and rant and raged on God, which put me in the position of killing one from my patients.
The past hour earlier, I was approaching the five-story hotel room of a German couple who came on a tour of Florida and ended up in my “call zone”. My newcomer EMT partner and I were sent to the woman-down call. I warned him at the door to just stand still and be silent for a moment before knocking on him. “Listen, first listen, let me know whether there is a fight or a dog or something is not very fun to fight.”
When we entered, we were met by a man in the mid-50s, sitting in underwear on a sofa in a small living room, after drinking. He casually pointed to the bathroom. “She was there for a while,” he said.
"How many?" - I asked, when I quickly approached him. "Oh, maybe half an hour."
I moved with hardened urgency. My mouth said that nothing serious was happening, but my logic said that, given the circumstances, it still could be. In the bathroom I found a middle-aged woman hugging a toilet.
In the bowl there was quite a bit of frothy, not pasted substance. I was surprised by the alcohol, so I put my head in a bowl to smell it. I have a very bad sense of smell from a child accident (my elder brother beat me on the nose with the edge of a tennis racket!). I often turned out to be excessive to compensate for what made the witnesses on the spot think about this process.
Alcohol. I was sure. The woman was covered in sticky sweat, weak, but she could talk. I asked her if she drinks. She said: "A little with dinner," with a fly, and her husband shouted in a thick German accent: "Yes, she does not drink much."
True, I told myself. I asked about the pain, and she said that her jaw hurt, and I thought to myself, if I kill so much, mine too.
Her pulse was weak and weary, and she had a rather comfortable blouse that seemed to explain the almost unintelligible blood pressure. If it was a very tense night, I could well advise the couple to do what I found after long nights with too much rum and an intimate meeting with the God of China: “Just let her sleep. "Good".
However, there was something not very comfortable for me in the whole mess, and I did not feel terribly confident in leaving her husband. I helped my partner pick her up on a gurney.
On the way to the hospital, the woman looked rather sleepy, I decided to connect her to a heart monitor. I did not use it in the hotel room, because the space around the patient in the bathroom was rather compact, and I did not see the point of going through the turns necessary to hook it after I realized what was going on. However, I thought to myself, it does not hurt to check.
Of course, the image that greeted me on the monitor was an extremely slow rhythm with a lot of wide, dangerous, and additional beats located between weak normal impulses — a very critical configuration that put a woman on the threshold of death.
Suddenly jumping up to action, I shouted to my partner, who was driving: “Come to code three! I have cooking here! ”I ripped off my blouse and made another blood pressure ... of course, it was unintelligible in a moving ambulance, but I knew in my heart that it wasn’t functional. I juggled with oxygen, managed to launch an intravenous line and administrative intravenous adrenaline to increase the heart rate, and called to the hospital to “set up to stop the cardiac arrest!”
By the time we arrived at the hospital, I was at full speed and tormented myself due to the lack of a call. I diagnosed a woman as a simple drinker, but did not recognize all the foci of myocardial infarction. I was uncharacteristically nervous and trembling, but I felt better because her heartbeat accelerated as I ran adrenaline and I was SURE that I heard some blood pressure. The woman was conscious — barely, but noticeable.
In any case, there was hope, and then, to my surprise, we were met at the door by a gaggle of men and a woman dressed as a doctor. They all surrounded the gurney when we took the woman, and I breathed a sigh of relief. In the Cardiac Room of the emergency room, the woman was transferred to a hospital stretcher, and I was standing in the corner when I saw the “team” seized around the same time as my patient lost consciousness.
It took me two full minutes to figure out what was going on. What I initially interpreted as concerted actions of professionals was, in fact, a bunch of interns who were “headed” by a doctor who did not spend more than two shifts in the emergency room, and everything worked out from the textbook’s panicked knowledge to keep it “What a wonderful case to practice. " Boy! they all twisted.
It is logical that I left my seat directly to the patient, so now I had to find a way to maneuver, close myself and assert myself more fully. For a short period of time, I realized that everything was wrong, until I could do something, the “gang” managed two wrong drugs that dragged a woman into a heart attack, neglected her intubation to protect her airways before she vomited and stopped breathing, and defibrilized her twice in quick succession, both times with oars placed in the wrong position on her chest so that the electric current moved in the opposite direction to revive her heart.
My head said, “OhMiGod, they give her atropine instead of adrenaline, and her heart slows down even more, her BP drops quickly, the oars get charged to 200 Joules, and she needs 400, and they, Oh, Shit, they inflate her heart, and it's my fault !! "
And then it was all over, and I could not do anything except change the past, and it was not possible. The woman was dead.
Oh, how I worked to free myself from guilt! After all, didn't I catch my mistake and get this line, and in fact I didn't have blood pressure by the time we took it?
But again, I missed it and cost her the most important seconds of her life, and then, I stood and basically refused my responsibility for a bunch of dolts. I was on an emotional rollercoaster ride.
And at that time I had to calm down, knowing that the time of the woman was over. I was just the impersonal part of a series of impersonal f * ck-ups that followed the death of a woman. Nothing personal. At this time, the universe was time to go. Period. I turned out to be the impersonal agent of this death, just as each of us is inextricably linked with the death of everything that has ever been or will ever be. It was not personal.
However, at the same time, I was used (Damn it!) As a tool that was clearly a tool that could cause serious ripples in the course of the life of every person to whom the life of the poor woman was concerned.
Some Higher Power Somewhere known feature of my specific weaknesses, arrogance and a bad nose and used it all to the fullest to bring another soul home. How beautiful!
It had to be about me, because any other team of Medics in the city that night would have saved her. It was personal.
Despite this, unnecessary losses were imposed on others, and I was the key factor. I had to live a long time with this. These moments have influenced every call that I have had since. From this day forward — for the remaining nine years of my career as a medical assistant — I never repeated another mistake.
I would not take any steps with my patients until I was sure that I was as careful as the situation resolved. My two-hour relationship with the woman who was alive when I met her and died when I left her played an important role in ensuring that dozens of people lived. Dozens of? Maybe hundreds, I never count. It could not be by design. Could you?
Today I have no doubt in my heart that my relationship with God is impersonal, but I am going out of my way to pay attention to what I personally say.
