Better Days

My blog post "50mg of Benadryl And Some Morphine" is about one of my frequent flyers. Thankfully she hasn't been calling lately.

The other day we were doing inspections in our area and we walked by her apartment. She happened to open the door as we walked by and she struck up a conversation with us. We remarked that we hadn't seen her in a while. She laughed and responded that she was doing a little better these day. She looked like she was doing better.

Hopefully doesn't slip up. I don't want to start running calls on her again.

Vegetation Response? In My District?

At 11:30 some unfamiliar tones went off at my station. They were the tones for a vegetation fire. We have almost no "wildland" in my district to burn so we were a bit confused. Really the only places that would fall into that category are the areas right along the freeway and along side the railroad tracks. Armed with this knowledge I decided to just don my structural firefighting pants and boots and to throw on my wildland jacket.

Once in the truck dispatch informed us that we were responding for a small vegetation fire on the side of the freeway. No big deal. The biggest danger there is working along side rubberneckers driving and texting while doing 75mph. Then dispatch gave us another update. There were reports of a vehicle on fire as well.

Now I was really happy that I had chosen to use my turnout pants. In the back of the rig I swapped my wildland jacket for my turnout jacket and slipped into my BA. I was now ready for the car fire.

While getting on the freeway we could see smoke showing about a mile down the road. But the smoke was all wrong. Instead of the thick black smoke of a car fire it was the much lighter colored smoke of a grass fire. As we pulled up I realized I was way over dressed for this call.

There was a small fire about 100' across. I dropped my SCBA and stretched out the hose line on the bumper. I started at the edge of the roadway and quickly worked my away around the head of the fire. While I was knocking it down there another crew (from Engine 110) started fighting the fire from the other side. Within a couple of minutes the fire was out and we started hunting down and cooling off hot spots.

We found out afterward that CalTrans had put down some road flares to warn people of the sweeper train ahead of them. A car ran over a flare and kicked it out into the brush causing the fire. That's how the vehicle was involved in the fire.

Done With Life

The call came in as a wellness check. We were dispatched along with PD to the house of a single elderly woman. Her brother had talked to her on the phone and he didn't think she sounded ok. When he hung up the phone he called 911.

PD arrived first. When they knocked on the front door there was no answer. As they went around to the side of the house they heard moaning. They went back to the front door and kicked it in (in the past they've waited for us assuming incorrectly that we would do something different).

Inside they found that it was a hoarder house. Piles of trash, papers, boxes.....just stuff all over the place. There were trails leading to the different rooms. They followed the path that led to what would have been a living room. There on the floor they found the patient. They decided to wait for us before doing anything else.

My patient was an 80 year old woman. She was alert and oriented. She said that she was sore from laying on the ground in the same spot for so long but other than that had no real medical complaint. She did say that she was just tired of living.

Since she was done with life she curled up next to a space heater (which amazingly didn't catch the house on fire) and didn't move. She had been there for over 2 days.

The old lady let me check her vitals which weren't horrible for the circumstances. After a little talk we informed her that the police were putting her on a psychiatric hold and that she had to go to the hospital. She was amazingly compliant.

We helped her onto the gurney and sent her off to the hospital. Hopefully she gets the help she needs.

Cat In A Tree

Yes, the fire department does get calls for cats stuck in a tree. Not very often but it does happen. But what happens when your local FD fails to even try to get the cat out of the tree? Get the next best thing....an off duty firefighter.

The other day my neighbors cat decided it wanted to touch the sky. It had climbed over 20 feet in the tree. The local engine crew said that they needed the truck guys and then conveniently got a call.

I went over to investigate what was going on. Once I saw the cat in the tree I figured my ladder would reach. Maybe.

I set up the ladder and climbed up to the top. The cat was still about a foot or so out of reach. So I clmbed the tree. Just enough so that I could reach the scruff of the cats neck. I grabbed the cat and made it safely down to the ground without falling or getting scratched.

I just hope the cat didn't think that was fun.

A Shakey Situation

We arrived at the business park and were ushered upstairs. In one of the many generic offices a man had had a seizure.

We talked to the person with whom my patient was meeting and he said the guy just stiffened up, started shaking and rolled out of the chair onto the floor. Apparently the seizure lasted several minutes.

The business had their own emergency response team that was activated. I don't know what type of training they had but they did show up and check a pulse and they placed the patient on oxygen. I told them after the call they did a great job.

My patient was still postictal. A time period after a seizure when the brain is sort of trying to reboot. It can take several minutes. The person that experienced the seizure can be quite confused if they're responsive at all during this time. My patient wasn't responsive.

I grabbed a quick set of vitals, kept the guy on oxygen and checked his blood sugar levels. All were within normal limits.

At this point AMR arrived. While they loaded him onto the gurney we talked by phone to the wife of the patient. He was in town on business so no one around knew his medical history.

According to his wife her husband had recently been out of the country on vacation and had also been snow skiing. There was no medical history to speak of and he wasn't on any medications.

We couldn't rule out head trauma as a possible cause of the seizure. It also could have been something else entirely. Without the hospital and the tests they would perform there was no way to know.

After the patient was loaded up we headed for the rig. We took the stairs while AMR took the elevator. I waited for the crew at the back of the ambulance holding the door open for them. When the elevator doors opened the medic yelled that she needed me to start a line (meaning an IV). The patient was seizing again.

I jumped in the back of the ambulance and had an IV started in no time flat. But by that time the seizure had stopped. I asked if the AMR medic wanted me to ride along and she declined. I later found out that the patient seized one more time in the ambulance.

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Note about this call. A couple of weeks later the AMR medic let me know that the patient we had here had been found to have a brain tumor which was causing the seizures. He was scheduled for brain surgery.