Follow up

One of the frustrations in EMS is that you frequently don't know the end of the story. You drop your patients at the ER and that is the last you know about them. Since our city only has two hospitals, sometimes you can follow up on your patients a little more, and being the main transfer service means that sometimes you hear more from your colleagues.

So here's some updates on a few patients I've written about recently:

• Patient our student revived was still alive in ICU 2 weeks later. Hospital did eventually find some family members so hopefully they were able to make good decisions for him.

• The Asian and I were mulling whether a Catholic nun could disconnect her sister from life support without committing a mortal sin when we saw the patient's obituary in the paper. She died within 24 hours of arriving at the hospital. My best guess would be that nobody had to make a decision like that, the patient probably went into cardiac arrest again and this time they were able to honor her wishes for DNR.


• Car accident patient who got us on the news had his legs put back together by orthopedics. Still some danger he might lose the worst one if infection sets in but a pretty darn good outcome for being crushed in a box truck.
  

I'm hoping that my string of bad luck has finally run out. I've had two 911 shifts in a row without a dead person or someone seriously circling the drain. My run of luck has been so bad that The Asian has more IOs with the new EZ-IO than anyone else in the company. He has seven and the next nearest medic has three. This streak started in September with a string of pediatric patients and has been all over the map since and I would not be sorry to work a bunch of drunks and psychiatric patients for a while.