It was my first ever observer front-line ambulance shift and I was nervous as hell. Sure, I'd been volunteering as a medic for three years but during that time I'd always been working as the just in case medic, not the one that gets called when the shit has really hit the fan. I spent the entire day and most of the night before the shift reading up on my clinical procedures, trying so hard to cram everything I'd learnt back into my head, I was terrified of forgetting something at a critical moment and I wanted to be prepared. I didn't want to be the stupid rookie that everyone was expecting me to be. I want to be the best, and being the best starts right from the word go, you can't do a half assed job of being top dog.
Arriving on station I was even more nervous than before I'd left the house. Oh god, all the paramedics were staring at me, eyeing me up and down. I suddenly felt so over dressed in my uniform with the shoes I'd cleaned and uniform I'd washed and folded out so neatly the night before. I felt like I was wearing too much eyeliner, like my eye shadow was a little too bright. "You need to take your nose stud out. It's not in the uniform guidelines. And you're also gonna need to cover up your earrings, those aren't allowed either." I thought about the tiny, hardly noticeable star nose stud I had as I looked around the room at some of the other medics, tattoos covering both arms. She's worried about a little star?? I thought to myself, I ignored her and left my nose just how it was. My ears aswell. I figured if anyone was going to stop and complain about the person trying to save their life having a nose stud and more than one set of earrings in their ears then they probably weren't much in need of an ambulance anyway.
I sat down to have a cup of coffee. I hardly got the cup to my lips before a loud siren started blaring, I thought it was the fire alarm!! A voice came over the speaker, "City 1 you have a priority 1 call heading towards Queen Street, Code (I forget)." The paramedics I was crewed with both looked at me at the same time, "that's us kid!" One said as she started walking towards our bus.
My heart started pounding a crazy beat. Suddenly I was excited!! And still SO extremely nervous. The butterflies in my stomach were having a full on battle with one another as I buckled up my seat belt and the ambo began to roll out the doors, then the lights and the sirens flicked on and off we went. The nerves dissappeared as we flew down the road, cars moving out of our way as we danced through the traffic. My first ever ride in an ambo!!!! And it lasted all of about five minutes as we drove a few hundred metres up the road to a lady lying dramatically on the ground. Oh....that was it.
Call after call after call was like that. Elderly male with heart problems, lights and sirens!!! Disappointment. Car crash, lights and sirens!!! Disappointment. Diabetic in trouble, woman in labour, choking child, period pain, stroke victim, drunken hobo on bridge. Lights and sirens!!! Disappointment.
As I was sitting on station, truely realising exactly how much ambulance time is wasted every day on over dramtised calls, the alarm went off again. "City one, you have a priority one heading towards Greenlane, Code 9." "Whats a code 9?" I asked the paramedic as we headed towards the bus. "It's a cardiac arrest."
Two words started going through my head: oh shit, oh shit, oh shit. The butterflies came back in a full on storm, my mind was racing on the correct technique and hand placement for compressions, how to make sure you kept up the right rhythm, how to ensure the breaths you were administering were adequate enough to sustain life. Everything was gone. I couldn't remember a thing. Oh god, I thought, some poor bastard is about to die because I had the biggest brain fart at the most important moment of my life. My heart was now beating so fast I thought I was going to arrest myself as the ambo pulled up outside a small white house. I grabbed gear. I tried to grab everything, the defib, oxygen, suction, first response bag, paper work. Too much!!! I waddled like a donkey laden with gear into the tiny house behind the medic. A lady, tears streaming down her face stood in the hall way and pointed us into a room to her left.
So many different aspects of that room hit me all at once. The faces of all the family squeezed into the room, their emotions of grief and of a love so strong I could literally feel it. And the smell. Oh god, the smell. Now please note that this man had only VERY recently passed so there was no decay or bodily excretements to speak of. But as soon as I walked into the room, wether it be placebo or not, I could smell death. It was like it had soaked into the walls, the carpets, the bedding the poor man lay in, the clothes we were all wearing. Like we had breathed it in and were now living in the smell. But I could deffinately, for some reason, smell the death in the room. And then I laid eyes on the man. I'm not going to lie, and for feeling like this I still feel guilty, but I was absolutely terrified. Every inch of my body got instant goosebumps, from the soles of my feet, to the top of my scalp my body tingled with fear.
It was evident that he had been sick for a very, very long time. His exhausted body was literally no more than skin, bones and weakened, unusable muscles. The bones in his arms and face were visible through his paper skin and his eyes stared blankly in different directions, looking at things that no longer belonged in the same world as you and I. His weak fingers still clutched onto his blanket and his mouth hung slightly open, dropping down towards the left. The cloth nighty he was wearing was gently lifted so pads could be placed on his chest. A chest so frail it would not have held up against aggressive resus attempts, had they been made. As the monitor was turned on, only one thing appeared. A long, consitent line flashed onto the screen and coursed it's was along. Asystole. This man was gone. There was no longer life left in his broken body, it had simply given up the fight.
It was sad. Very, very sad. His entire family was packed into the room with us and they knew, even with no medical knowledge, that their loved one had passed away. They knew as soon as we walked into the room. As soon as we stopped moving fast, put our bags slowly on the ground, and went about confirming what we already knew.
I have many, many goals in life. The one playing the most on my mind and that is with me every day is to become a fully qualified advanced paramedic. I want to go as HIGH as I can. I want to be the very best..the one that others talk about in regards to skill, intergrity, honesty, passion..you name it, I want it. I have worked, very hard, for the last three years to get the meagre qualification I currently have but I am constantly reminded of how far I still have to go. In terms of the peers I have worked with, without sounding vain, I am better than alot of them. Because I have an intense amount of dedication. I have my eyes on the goal, they've been staring it straight in the face since I was in single digits...I know it sounds exaggerated but I can recall piggy backing other children to the medical room in primary school when they fell over and scraped their knees. I've been that way ever since.
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