The Down and Dirty

The Down and Dirty

By Barbamedic

The right shoulder is painful today.  Years of wear and tear on it...... pushing, pulling, turning, rolling, assisting, catching, and all the other things I do and have done to patients and "former” patients....

It has not been my intention to yank or wrestle or even FIGHT with some of them, but it has happened.

I didn't want it to become a fight for the most part... but, then again, I wished many times I could have really kicked their ass but good!!!

Not the way to get things done, though.

In that type of context in my writing I am putting it very lightly to you that some of these patients are living.

AND SOME ARE DEAD.

 I have years of stories to tell you before my own life fades. I do not intend to make this something to scare you, or cause you unrest, although the thought is amusing to me.  All of what I am about to tell you are based on true happenings with only names or  places changed to secure the ethical practices I have been sworn to in my early careers as a Funeral Director/Embalmer or in EMS (Emergency Medical Services). 

 I also cannot guarantee any certain truth about lives of people involved.  I do guarantee the practices and procedures of technical aspects are truth to the best of my knowledge... but that is also subjective as neither mortuary science nor emergency medicine is an exact science.  The years in Emergency Medicine are the flip side of the record, in which I had been partaking, while concurrently undertaking.

For years I owned a small funeral home in an ethnic melting pot of the big city. I got married. I popped out three babies. I was a social flower that bloomed. I lived pretty large and I even got large. We lived in an apartment above the funeral home. I raised my three delightful children there and went to work downstairs. I had a nice husband (at first of course...or I wouldn't have tied the knot.)  I got divorced 13 years later. (He became 'not so nice!!!') That is why 13 is such a lucky number to me! Then I moved north...like about 65 miles north. I felt that was far enough for beasts not to roam.

I also worked in a hospital as an Emergency Medical Technician-Paramedic and in the field based out of a Fire and Rescue Department in a small town on the ambulance. That was the Northern Life that I choose for "fun" while going through an ugly divorce. A bit more on that later.

I guess people like me are "adrenalin junkies" . We do not run the other way when something happens. Our eyes open wide and our pupils dilate, our ears perk and we zone in to sounds as if we have bionic hearing.... then in a guttural "HUH????" comes out of our mouths.  We start to drool and run toward the scene.  Soon, as I have many times observed, the fire and rescue personnel become like buzzards, flocking over the sick or injured to get their "skills" in. They are starting IV's, immobilizing the patient on a backboard, calling in other departments for MUTUAL AID.  They are putting on oxygen and bandaging.  And all this is for a scraped elbow! 

Now I really do love helping the new firemen, because they are so cute...but eventually I say this is overkill....They really did not need to send 8 emergency vehicles to that scene.  Ahhhh wait......CHAOS ...  Chief Has Arrived On Scene....

Dead or Alive.  They are loaded on white sheets being soiled in crimson and taken away. SOMEWHERE.... is it bright lights and cold steel?  Or a cold dark room where they lie alone until their disposition is determined and next of kin are notified? 

  

Stay tuned for the next chapter.......