The rest of the story

So we had a couple of other ambulance calls with the FD on Sunday and suddenly our MIA third volunteer shows up. I, of course, made sure to get the story from his side on whether and why he was leaving. It's no good listening to the gossip when you could get the real story instead. Apparently, he asked for a leave of absence for this semester because he's taking 20 credits at school and didn't feel like he'd have time to respond as a volunteer. Management denied his request, so he submitted his resignation with 2 weeks notice instead. This was 2 weeks ago, so this weekend was his last shift with us.

Also entertaining was a spate of "suicide attempts" Sunday afternoon. Somebody blamed it on the football game(s), but who knows. It wasn't just our town though because we went to 2 different hospitals who were both complaining of the same patients.

I got to tech one attempter to the hospital who tried to run a garden hose from the tailpipe to the window of the car. FD measured carbon monoxide in the car and found no elevation at all. I had to work at it, but I was able to keep a straight face when the patient looked at me with the sad-puppy eyes and said, "I guess I didn't do a very good job, huh?" Yeah, not so much. The doctor at the emergency department actually complemented the FD for measuring the CO and me for reporting it because it cut down quite a bit of what they were going to have to assess the patient for at the hospital. I made sure to take no credit for it, because I didn't really have anything to do with that decision - but when you get updated from "suicide attempt" to "carbon monoxide exposure" by dispatch en route to the call, checking the levels is definitely on the to-do list.

Monday was pathetically slow at the ambulance co, my truck did 1 lift-assist for another crew, 1 transfer and 1 truck shuffle in an entire 8 hour shift. I did get some other work done and a little reading in so it wasn't a complete loss, but it is frustrating to feel like you spent the whole day just wasting time.