I've long thought that Bob Seger's Turn The Page could easily be about EMS.  I'd like to use it for our annual company video sometime.  It describes the life of a rock singer, and I think there are some great parallels between how he describes his day and how we think about ours.  The song has a wickedly good sax solo & Segers tired, worn-out voice to add ambience.

The other day I was chatting with my trainee, and she mentioned that her boyfriend plays in a rock band.  He had just called her and told her that he didn't get up until 2 that afternoon, because he had been playing music for most of the night.  That started a discussion about the similarities between Rock Stars & Paramedics.

This is what the fortune might look like.  Other fortunes:

You will lose important papers soon. 
(Don't let that DNR form out of your sight)

I think that to some extent, all EMS blogs dance around the privacy issue.  Some bloggers go way out of their way to obfuscate the details of their professional life to maintain patient privacy, and some  don't.   Especially in a small town, trying to maintain some sort of storytelling while keeping a professional distance is extremely hard.  Now, not only can you not name the patient, you can't even provide enough details for anyone to pick out one patient from another.  I learned my lesson early in my blogging, and try hard to keep it ambiguous.

We're on the South side of the bay, checking out some visiting Canadian warships, hoping to finagle a tour.  But, we get interrupted by the radio, dispatching us to an "assist the police" call on the other side of the harbor on one of the docks.

Dispatch tells us that if we need more info, we can call in.  So, I call up on my cell, and am told that the officers want us to identify some 'organs' to see if they are of human origin.  WTF?  I'm not a physician, pathologist or M.E., but what the hell - it sounds interesting.  What I'm thinking, actually, is that I'll tell the officer "Yup, that'd be a gallbladder from the Mexican Jumping Kangaroo, and I think it might have been diabetic."  That'll teach them to call us for help!

"The notion of someone other than a respiratory therapist providing care to patients with breathing problems is preposterous."

This is one line out of a story about threats to Respiratory Therapists and their jobs.  The gist of the story is that while RT's have been worried about Nurses taking doing the RT function & taking away their jobs, it's actually the EMT that they need to be worried about.