This morning we had a late call. We should get off at 7 am but this call came right after 6 am and we had to go to the hospital in Tyler. With that said there was evident that we were getting off late since it is a 45 minute drive to the hospital. On our way back to the station I posted this picture on my social media outlets

Not intending anything specific with it more than, I had a bag of chips for breakfast because I was on overtime, at this point it was “only” to be about 45 minutes to an hour late. It ended up to be later because we got another call on our way back.
Well, this picture spiked some reoccurring conversation on my Facebook profile about my eating habits. Mainly my Swedish friends thought I should have food with me on the truck. We’ve had this “talk” before about why I don’t have food with me but I thought I would take you through a shift on the box, based on last shift. Which was actually a very smooth and easy shift.

First some basics here… I am an EMT, Emergency Medical Technician. (That position does not exist in Sweden). I work in East Texas and the truck I am on is a 24 hour truck. In our system we also have 12 hour trucks and 9 hour trucks. We cover 5 counties in total but my station is in Mineola. This truck is the busiest 24 hour truck in the system. I don’t have the average amount of calls we do every month but last shift was actually not a very hard shift!

The Paramedic is the lead on every call until he/she has determined that this is a lower level care and then the EMT can run it. My job as an EMT is in quick words to assist the medic. I drive 90% of the time. I make sure the truck is correctly stocked, cleaned and presentable. A lot of that is teamwork of course but that is things I often do while the medic is writing the report for example. Due to that I am driving, there is no way I will eat and drive at the same time! That would make me fired very fast

Okay… it is 6:40 am when I pull up at the station. My shift starts at 7 am but i like to be early in case they get a late call I can take it so the EMT can go home. Or I can start checking off the truck to make sure everything is stocked, doing the station duties and wash this beauty.

It is not all shifts we get the opportunity to wash the truck. Yesterday was one of those days (this is an old picture). We got our first call at 7:04am. So thankfully I at least had enough time to make sure we had everything before that dropped.
We were also 3 on the truck this shift. Sometimes, since my partner is a FTO (Field Training Officer), we have new hires that are in training with us. So when that is, I get a little rest from driving.

Our first call was to a nursing home for a difficulty breathing. We transported this patient to the closest hospital, UT Health Quitman. At the time we were done it was now 8:16 am. Depending on what is going on in the system we may have to post or, if we are lucky, dispatch will let us go back to the station. We were super excited to go back to the station. But the happiness doesn’t last long. Well, long enough to go to the bathroom and check off some more stuff on the truck since I wasn’t really finished with it.

8:46 am and the next call drops. This call is also a high priority call for someone with heart issues. This patient requests to go to a hospital a little bit further away, in Winnsboro. It takes us 40 minutes to get there. Due to the nature of this call and the transport time we are not done with this call until 10:16 am but we are then still in Winnsboro and 40 minute drive home. We literary have time enough to go to the bathroom before the next call drops, at 11:08.
This call is a low priority call and the driving time is around 15 minutes to the scene. The patient is having blood in the urine and wants to be checked out at the hospital due to his other medical history. His doctor is in Sulphur Springs and the driving time from the scene to the hospital is 45 minutes. Since both the call and the hospital is north of us the driving time back to the station afterwards is an hour. Thankfully we are outside our coverage area so the likeliness for us getting a call is quite minimal.
We came back to the station at 1:45ish pm. Perfect timing to restock the truck again and go to the bathroom. Have in mind, yet we have not even started with our station duties that needs to be done every shift! The medics had just enough time to eat their lunch while I re-stocked the truck. At 2:24 pm the next call drops. Another hight priority call for chest pain. It took us about 15 minutes to get there. The patient requested to go to Quitman so the driving time wasn’t that long. We had to convince the patient to go which took a little longer time thou. But at 3:31 we could clear from the hospital.

Dispatch was very nice to us yesterday and let us go home a lot instead of posting. We had to fuel up the truck now to make sure we could continue taking calls. This round at the station even I had time to heat up the food I brought and eat. I always bring my own food since I try to eat healthy and there are a lot of things I should stay away from, such as salt… So I prioritized to eat my food instead of starting with the station duties. This was simply going to be one of those shifts when that was not getting done. There are not many of those shifts but this is one. I made up my mind because I knew how this day was going, we would be interrupted too much to get it done and it was already close to 4pm. The hottest time of the day, I was not going to wash a truck now. Yes I could have started mopping the floors inside but I decided to go and rest for a little bit, you never know how the night turns out here…

At 5:20pm we got our first posting of the shift. That is actually not bad! Some shifts we post already at 7 am, even thou we are not suppose to do that until 7:30. But we had been moving anyway. After 20 minutes of posting we got a call to a motel. Honestly, I don’t really know why we took this patient to the hospital. General pain and complain I guess because this person was not happy with anything. It was just one of those confusing calls when you try to get an idea of what is going on but the patient changes the story so much so you finally say “lets go” and when you give the report to the doctor you just say “ask him/her…”. The patient requested to go to UT Health in Tyler so down in the cluster we go! We know that if we get into Tyler we will most likely have to run several calls there before we can go home because we end up being the closest unit. Don’t ask me why that is, Murphy’s Law I guess. So I don’t know if I should say we were lucky that just when we made it to the hospital dispatch advised us that there was a transfer from that hospital back to a nursing home in Mineola. So when we were done with our patient, I took the stretcher out to the ambulance to clean it and prepare it for our next patient. Well, that was a little hard because another ambulance had parked too close so I couldn’t load the stretcher.

No worries, I figured it out and it actually gave me a good laugh out of it. It wasn’t really necessary to load it either but thankfully we didn’t come out with a patient when it was like this. Got our gowns and respirators because our transfer was a Covid positive patient. Since this patient was going from the hospital to the nursing home, it was a lower level of care transport so I could run it. It gave the medics the opportunity to talk about things they had to go through with previous calls and one less report for them to write. Fur us as a unit, it guaranteed us to come back to Mineola and not be stuck in Tyler.

Finally, at 10:20 pm we could clear from the nursing home and take off the hot respirators. On non Covid or respiratory patient we use N95 masks by the way…
We made it back to the station but again, happiness doesn’t last very long in this business… 20 minutes later the tone dropped again. Back to the nursing home where we just left. But not for the same patient. This patient had diarrhea but was cleared from Covid. But since we picked him up at the nursing home and they have a lot of covid cases, we treat it as a positive patient. While I am driving the patient I don’t have a gown on but sure enough the respirator… I don’t want that CoCoCovid crap!

As you see, I can’t even have my classes on correctly with this respirator, but who cares?
But back to Tyler we go… Another 45 minutes there and 45 minutes home plus the time at the nursing home and the time at the hospital. 2am and I can hear the bed calling for me. So glad I took that little rest earlier instead of doing what I really should have done with station duties… Had to restock a little before I really felt the pillow.

I woke up by myself at 5 am. That is the time when I usually go up so no surprise there. Went to the bathroom and laid back in bed, checked social media just for fun. We usually get a call in the morning at some point. It is just a question if the new crew will be there or not… and sure enough. 6:01 am, one hour left of the shift. Guess what… back for the third time to the same nursing home. We had been blessed that this was only our third time this shift, while we have been running other calls we’ve heard at least 3 other ambulances called to the same nursing home… That is a total of 6 calls to the same location. And that was not even enough. While we were transporting the patient to Tyler, another two ambulances was dispatched to the very same nursing home. For those of you who say Covid is not a thing… sorry, you are wrong!!! And my deepest respect to everyone at any type of facility (nursing home, hospital, etc) who takes care of these patient!

It was clear that we would not get off in time today. We made it to the hospital in Tyler to 7am, but wasn’t done with report to nurse and cleaning up afterwards until 7:30am. Now we could just pray that we made it all the way back to Mineola. Well the prayers didn’t help but thankfully this was an easy call. It was just a patient who fell and needed help back up in the chair. Something to take with from this call was that already in the notes it told us a location for the key. In this case that was essential or we would have had to either call police and/or fire or made entrance in a not very pleasant way.

We finally came back to the station at 8:30am. The new crew was already done with their station duties (and they had to do ours too by the way) so they started with checking off the truck and washing it. We packed up our stuff, clocked out and went home. 25.5 hours in the books done.

So… when it comes to food… often at the hospitals we can grab some snacks, chips, drinks and now and then a sandwich. As I said earlier, we are not supposed to eat in the truck simply because driving and eating is not safe and it makes a major mess! And, as you see on the times, there is not much downtime. I am fortunate to being used to only eat once a day anyway so as long as I eat one meal, preferably between noon and 4pm, I am all good. My post with the chips was more the overtime than what I was eating in my opinion.

I love my job. I have an awesome employer that gives us a lot of room to work freely. What I love with my job is simply that I have no clue how the shift will be when I get there in the morning. I have no clue who I will meet, why we will be there or where it will take us. I see it as a blessing and an honor to put on my uniform in the morning. Sure, I gripe and complain about things, nothing is perfect but I still try to keep a positive attitude.

What is me missing a meal compared to someone never having one, ever again?
What is me working an hour or two of overtime compared to someone never coming home to their loved ones again?