Thursday, October 30, 2008

Medic Ride-Around

I just returned from 10 hours on a paramedic rig in San Francisco. This is part of the emergency medicine rotation at San Francisco General. It was a rather interesting day. Not very busy, but busy enough that I only napped for 10 minutes around 1:30 PM.

The cases included:
  1. A morning commuter who fell in a crosswalk, skinned her knee and was bleeding from the head.
  2. An older gentlemen one week out from a prostate surgery who had bloody urine and pelvic pain.
  3. A kid who fell in gym class onto a tennis court and had midline neck and back pain.
  4. An eleven year old who was post-ictal from his first seizure.
  5. A different eleven year-old who konked heads with a classmate playing football.
  6. An elderly diabetic woman who fell at the food pantry and incurred a non-bleeding scratch on her knee. She later offered to dance for us - for a fee.
Three of these went to a hospital. The medics apologized for not having any 'interesting' cases, but one pointed out that his favorite kind of day is one where no one gets hurt. It was interesting to me to see what people call 9-1-1 for, and the expense incurred for it. That's a difficult thing to get my mind around. And I'll have to think about that a little more.

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