My average work day

One of the places I work is CARE ambulance, a small private service that handles critical care transport for Tulane, Touro, and Kindred among several facilities in and about metro New Orleans. I've been working there for a while now since offshore safety work and civil service have made cut-backs brought on by the recession. Pictured above is my ambulance, unit 901, a module dually quipped for ALS critical care transport (EKG's, intubation, IV's, drugs, ventilators, oxygen, and pediatric isolates).

This is my partner, JP, who as always is relieving the daily stress by asking somebody to kiss is ass. This is me giving him the "What the hell" look.

EMT's and paramedics are a strange sort of creature - full of melancholy, trauma junkies, good humor, and bipolar depressive souls. Our day started out like any other day for an average private paramedic (non-emergent inter facility transfers) - a short drive to the quick stop for coffee and a cinnabun (well, protein bar for me). Chit chatting with the manager there, an Arab of course, about foreign politics and Sunni - Shiite fussiness while observing the chaos that is New Orleans toll gate for the crescent city connection. It is known as the CCC to the locals...or the bottle neck into the city. It wasn't long before Shannon, our dispatcher, gave us our first call coming out of Kindred ICU (long term care facility for ventilator dependent pts) going to Touro hospital for a cardiac echo. This made it our turn to creep our way through Toll booth traffic.

I thought to myself, like so many times before, why on earth Orleans parish citizens put up with this. The damn bridge has long since been paid for by collecting tolls, now it amounts to nothing more than extorting a dollar from every worker drone that is forced to pass through the heavily policed road portals. More policed in fact than the inner city streets where we see at least one murder a day. How's that sit with you? Meanwhile citizens have to put up with potholes that go unfixed for years up and down every street, today being no exception, as we stumbled right into a poor citizen who drove his car through one and tore the front end out having it disappear down the hole. It happened as we turned on the road leading to Kindred.

I'm serious! They have at least 50 police cars lined up next to these tolls ready to pounce on anyone not paying, or hopefully doing something else illegal, so the city can extort some more money. Freedom is an illusion. OK.....that's my daily toll booth rant. If anyone wants me to rant again let me know. The pickup at Kindred was for a lady in her sixties suffering quadraparesis (total limb weakness), respiratory failure secondary to an unknown neuromusclar etiology. She had a trache that needed frequent suctioning, i.e. copious airway secretions, and constant cardiac monitoring. Poor lady was hooked up to PICC central lines, foley, and a rectal bag. Ahhh, the kind of retirement that everyone dreams of....right? She couldn't talk, barely move, and just managed to bat an eye and shed a tear. Morbid prognosis and a healthcare system that would do everything technologically possible to keep her breathing, no matter what, despite the fact her body amounted to a non-animated Zucchini. But hey, doctors, nurses, Kindred healthcare, and ambulance services get to feed off her Medicare and Medicaid. Just doesn't feel right....despite the food it puts on the table for me.

Took an old lady home to die later on, way down in Avondale, a military ship yard and rail depot town which sits next to the Huey P. Long bridge. She too didn't have much to say, except to stare at the few sunny afternoons she had left. Was she reviewing memories of a better time, or simply lost in incognito, a death delirium. I wonder about these things.

After many calls like this I had a huge stack of paperwork, a card deck high, and all of them had to be imputed into a computer and scanned before leaving the station. This weekend coming up, I will repeat this healthcare delirium and depressionary tale all over again, but scripted in its own sort of way, a tale of misery.