A nugget of Big Medicine every day. #67 Hurricanes happen On my way back home after working on the ground as part of the NOD’s SNAKE [The Special Needs Assessment 4 Katrina Evacuees] team immediately post-Katrina, I stayed overnight with some friends-of-friends in the Florida panhandle. I was standing in […]
Monthly Archives: August 2012
A nugget of Big Medicine every day. #66 Codes Code 99, Code Blue or just Code. Shorthand for cardiac arrest. An absence of life signs. No respirations. No pulse. Seldom as simple or as clean as the previous description. Often comes as a surprise to both the patient and the […]
A nugget of Big Medicine every day. #65 Hark the herald angels sing We live in the country. The only traffic lights in our town are the ones at the Canada-U.S. border stations advising you whether or not it’s your turn to pull up and chat with the agent. You […]
A nugget of Big Medicine every day. #64 Look for the clues A long time ago, I worked with a paramedic named Mike ‘Elwood’ Crowley. I loved that I was The Jake* of the team. While we called ourselves The Blues Brothers, we were known to the cops as The […]
A nugget of Big Medicine every day. #63 Be the human in the loop I just came back inside from picking blackberries. Here on our property, we’ve got hundreds of blackberry plants and for a few weeks in August, tens of thousands of blackberries all become ripe for picking at […]
A nugget of Big Medicine every day. #62 Stay focused or else Concentrate on the task at hand. Keep your eyes on the prize. Whoever said that must have been familiar with handling horses. When Di and the girls started their whole horse love affair I decided to take horse […]
A nugget of Big Medicine every day. #61 Sometimes hungry is a state of mind Late in the afternoon on a bone-chillingly cold and snowy day last November Matt paused while sawing wood for the new chicken coop and said, “Hey, is that one of your cats on the stoop?” […]
A nugget of Big Medicine every day. #60 Mutual respect runs deep It started with an after-hours knock on the door at The EMS House. I was working part of an evening shift because the scheduled medic/driver was going to pull double-duty and roll through the overnight providing us with […]
A nugget of Big Medicine every day. #59 The things we carry [with a nod of respect to Tim O’Brien]. This episode of The Positive Paramedic Project could have also been sub-titled ‘Knowing the deal doesn’t make it any easier’ and that’s where I’ll start our story. “I received the […]
A nugget of Big Medicine every day. #58 Growing hope This episode of The Positive Paramedic Project takes place in the village of Hatley in the Eastern Townships of Quebec. Hatley isn’t a village so much as it is an intersection of two roads, a town commons, and a collection […]