Friday the 13th

I'm back to work today. Yeah! It started out with a psych transfer at 0830. It was for a "homicidal" patient. Just what I need on my first day back-someone that wants to kill me. Oh well. While we were waiting for paperwork there was a lady down the hall that was calling out, "hello? Hello? Hello?" Over and over again. I predict she will be our next transfer. Maybe she was just holding her phone upside down, what do I know. It's good to see not much has changed. The patients are the same, the crews that I run into are the same, and the paperwork is never ready when we get there. Ahhh...life is good.

We are back in quarters. Welcome home. I forgot how uncomfortable my bed is. This is going to be a long shift-I feel like I just came out of retirement or something. It's good to be back.

We were actually busy for almost the entire shift. I had predicted a while back that my first day back would be filled with BLS, psych patients and fat people. I was completely right. We only got one ALS page for a patient that was confusted s/p falling. Yeah...it wasn't ALS at all, the guy had just been admitted and the nursing staff didn't know him. They just didn't want to deal with his problems. They said, "well, he was lethargic when he got here...he just seems more confused...he ripped open his old g-tube site but I steri-stripped it...we don't really know, he was just admitted this morning at 1130..." Yeah, so nobody knew anything, the guy was uncooperative, and after contacting the hospital (the one he just happened to have been discharged from), they said just to bring him in-no interventions needed. The guy flailed around on the cot so much that we had to wrap him up in a blanket like a burrito and secure the straps. He kept yelling at me (while I was giving report on telemetry); "You cut my legs off!" Good times.

We had a psych patient that was really crazy. She said that all cops and doctors are going to die...that we were cops there to take her away, and that all she needed was a shot of penicillin for her pneumonia and she would be fine. She also needed a gown so she could go to L.A. She said both my partner and I would be killed (because we were "cops").

We also did a few other basic transports. I don't remember them all. Mostly psych patients. When we took our last patient out of the local hospital, they still had 8 psych patients that needed trasfers. Surprisingly we didn't get any of them. The psych ward in town only had one more bed after the last patient we took there. It looks like the rest are headed for the city.

I think we only did eight calls altogether, but only two of them were before 2000; six were between 2000 and 0800. Yuck-a very long night.

Today I did absolutely nothing. I slept until 1400. I am now getting my apartment ready to paint and fix it up-seeing as my roommate's old room is in ruins and I need to repaint it. Now I am hanging out with a friend. I hope my CO detectors are working because we both have bad headaches and are nauseous. They aren't going off and I don't smell any natural gas or anything. I'd feel like an idiot if I called the fire department and they didn't find anything. I figure if one of us passes out I will call. Until then, I will suffer. I just don't want to look stupid. I already had one CO incident this year, and with my luck it would be the same crew that would show up this time.