Class ride time, day 1

The ambulance company I work for also sponsors the ride time required for my class. Meaning that I could ride with only people I know quite well and feel comfortable with if I rode at the station I work out of. Thankfully, I think, most of the people in my class live much closer to the north station than the other one, so I ended up having most of my ride time at the south station. The first day of which was yesterday.

Rise and shine for a 0700 shift start on a day that the north station is doing a mass casualty drill, so every one who is "anyone" is up there practicing for some major incident with pretend patients and so on. The south station didn't even have a supervisor on site, which worked out well for me because then I got to ride on all 3 of the 911 trucks instead of just the supervisor truck, which translated into 7 calls instead of 3 (I missed one with that truck because I was already out), which is a busy day for 8 hours at the south station. I did know one of the medics on shift because he works both stations and at the FD I volunteer with, but the rest of the people were new to me as far as working with them goes.

Everyone treated me well, which was nice because sometimes full-timers are harsh on students, especially if they aren't used to having them along. I did get a little "feedback" from a medic on a call where he put the intermediate and I in the back with the last direction of "start a line", which we did, but we didn't do a full set of baseline vitals first so I got the "do BLS before ALS" lecture. Actually, I thought it was weird at the time that we were starting a line before having vitals, but I'm not really confident enough to question someone I know is an experienced full-timer when I'm still just a student. And for the record, the medic was more annoyed with the intermediate than with me, he just wanted to make sure I heard the message too so I would be confident enough to step up and say something next time.

Not too much excitement altogether, an overdose, a pair of geriatric abdominal pain calls, a teenage seizure patient, a nursing home "diabetic emergency" that wasn't anything to do with blood sugar nor really an emergency, and a pair of difficulty breathing calls, not in that order. I went 2/3 on IV starts, missing one on the overdose which the medic on the call also missed, and the two I got were geriatric patients which are sometimes harder due to their fragile veins.