A nugget of Big Medicine for your consideration. #101 Vital signs. Back in October, I dropped the Bad’Baru off for an oil change and a couple of NASCAR-style body patches at the Garage Generale Stanstead. I loved the place. It was like Cheers! with grease. Everyone really did know your […]
Hal Newman
146 posts
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,’ […]
#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 […]
A nugget of Big Medicine for your consideration. #94 The Three Paragraph Rule Of all the diagnostic techniques I learned during my life on the streets, none has served me better than the Three Paragraph Rule. Of course, a positive result for Hand Drop Over Nose (HDON) was much more […]
A nugget of Big Medicine for your consideration. #91 Christmas Jew Long before the Brunelle Family introduced me to the joys of celebrating Christmas in the company of family at the foot of a beautifully decorated tree, I was a Christmas Jew. For on Christmas eve ‘tis the moment when […]