A nugget of Big Medicine for your consideration. #101 Regularly irregular. My first conscious memory of being unable to adopt a beat was on my 13th birthday when my parents rented a jukebox for my party. Despite listening repeatedly to great tunes like April Wine’s ‘Bad Side Of The Moon,’ […]
Hal Newman
157 posts
#100 Shit happens, vomit splashes & dignity is assisted. Transcript from an actual call to 911. Caller: He’s down on the floor. He collapsed. He’s vomiting. EMS Communications Officer: Is he breathing? Caller: I don’t know. He’s in the other room. EMS Communications Officer: You need to check if he’s […]
A nugget of Big Medicine for your consideration. #99 Time. “Time is fleeting…madness takes its toll.. ahh.. but listen closely.. not for very much longer.. I’ve got to keep control.” – The Time Warp, Rocky Horror Picture Show. EMS is all about time. We cannot control time but oh, how […]
#98 Blood. I learned fairly early on in my career as a paramedic that I was okay with blood. One of my first few calls involved enough blood-letting in a kitchen it could have been fodder for skits performed by Dan Ackroyd as The French Chef on SNL. There was […]
A nugget of Big Medicine for your consideration. #97 Carpets. Carpets have figured prominently in several of my more memorable EMS calls. Yes, that’s right. Carpets. One of my least favourite carpet calls came in as difficulty breathing and then got re-prioritized as respiratory distress. The address was a very […]
A nugget of Big Medicine for your consideration. #96 End of shift Last weekend I had the privilege of meeting a brother medic/firefighter who has been on one helluva long godawful ride that has transcended hundreds of shifts and a large chunk of his life. The trauma Al experienced occurred […]
A nugget of Big Medicine for your consideration. #95 Test fire yourself. We are big on drills, exercises and simulations in EMS. We thrive on scenario-crafting. We roll on simulated cardiac arrests to practice our code protocols. We set up improbable Road Traffic Crash scenes to test our ability to […]
Lessons Learned from the Ice Storms: Backup Power by Greg Carttar [Feb 6 2009] As you surely know, Southern and Southeastern Missouri, Northeastern Arkansas, and Kentucky were hard hit by ice storms which took out power and essential services. This narrative is about a community in Southeastern Missouri. During the […]
On becoming senior & Germanic terms that make us sound smarter than we really are by Blair Schwartz [Jan 28 08] Ok, I know… It has been quite some time since I wrote anything for Big Medicine. Its not that I lost my passion for writing, nor due to the […]
A Series Of Firsts by Blair Schwartz [Oct 19 06] It’s been a while since I last posted an entry on Big Medicine, but that is the nature of the Internal Medicine Residency. A program designed to immerse you (quite literally at times) in the art and science of medical […]