ALOC/OD

We got a call for a woman laying on the floor of her living room unable to open her front door. Something a little different. Fun.

When we arrived on scene we were greeted by the neighbors who informed us that the old lady that lived in the apartment next door was unable to unlock the door. They were under the assumption that she had fallen and hurt herself.

My engineer and I grabbed some tools and started looking for a good spot to do some breaking and entering.

We found that all the windows and doors locked so we decided to make our entry at the sliding glass door. We simply popped the sliding glass door off the rails and tried to lift the door over the locking mechanism. Instead I broke the screw that was holding it together. The repairs cost the owner only 35 cents.

We found our patient, a 76 year old woman with dementia, laying on the floor next to her couch. We quickly determined that her hip was dislocated or broken. We don't know how long she had been there but she was unable to make it to the bathroom. She tried to tell me that she just wanted to lay there a while and that she would get up later. She was very vocal about not going to the hospital. We found out later that she had run away from her daughters house to come back to her old place. Since she wasn't all together there (because of the dementia) we couldn't leave her. We kindly informed her that she had to go.

Still no dice. She wasn't going.

So we told her that if she chose to not go the police would have to get involved since she was obviously unable to take care of herself. She didn't decide to cooperate until PD was called.

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We cleared that call to take another one, just around the corner. This time it was a 51 year old man that was a little out of it. His family was sure that he had taken some Valium and/or Vicodin but couldn't figure out where his stash was. He was able to answer our questions with a lot of prodding and patience. He just didn't seem right even though all his vitals checked out.

His family, bless their hearts, kept trying to explain that he was going to die if he didn't go with us. Almost as if it would happen the second we drove away. After being there a while his mental status had deteriorated. He was no longer able to tell me what day it was or why we were there.

At that point he had to go.

Of course, he didn't want to go. And this was a big guy. Finally, we explained the same thing to him that we did to the old lady on the previous call...go with us or the cops. We ended up calling PD. Then one of the family members suggested bring the gurney up close and just telling him to get on. It worked, sort of. He tried to stand and couldn't without assistance. Once we helped him to the gurney PD arrived. The officer that showed up had, for one reason or another, been on every call we had had that day.

Both patient had blood sugars of 98. The amount of similarities between the calls amused me, if only for a second.