Saturday, October 24, 2009

Dear God The Exhaustion (Part 2)

Last night I worked as Standby Crew for a campus event to kick off the basketball season, and that is always followed by a brief musical performance (usually by someone we've never heard of). "Oh! This will be easy!" I thought. After all, the event started at 7pm, and would be over by 10! What could POSSIBLY go wrong???

We were there for FIVE MINUTES before we had TWO patients, both found in the bathrooms puking their guts up (thank heaven for small favors- they made it to the bathrooms) because THESE geniuses thought that aggressive drinking was the best way to attend a basketball event. The irony is, they were so sick, and so drunk within the first FIVE MINUTES (ie. before anything had HAPPENED at the event) that they missed the whole thing. Local Hospital was being EVIL and on full diversion (we're not sure why...we think it's because they dont like us) so our Duty Crew (the people who were on the actual night shift) were taking two patients at a time to a farther hospital, which turned the whole thing into a Mass Casualty Incident.

The thing about MCIs is that you have one as soon as your number of patients overwhelms your resources and personnel. We were at that point about 15 minutes into the event- public safety officers were scouring the building for sick or drunk people, and kept calling us. We had 7 EMTS, working in 3 teams (3 on the rig, two pairs with a jump-kit each)...there WAS another crew, a paid professional squad, but they were technically on call only for the athletes and the entertainment, NOT for the students. As a result, they wouldn't transport for us, leaving us at several points with patients stacked up waiting for rides to the hospital.

By 10 pm we had upward of 12 patients, and 7 VERY testy EMTs. I'm exhausted, and I just slept for 8 hours. Ugh. I hate hate HATE drunk students.

1 comment:

LivingDeadNurse said...

good grief..drunk students...that sucks..hope that doesn't happen again to u