I ended up telling the army I was gay to get them to stop calling me. Wild couple of years.
After 9/11, I had a cousin here in :kkkanada: sign up for our military to help America.
I once responded to a cardiac arrest call. These are the most intense thing I've ever experienced and require a massive adrenaline mode to process and act during. The ride to them is like a fight-or-flight overload which primes you to see/do one specific thing.
So I pull up and there's a crowd. I have to blare the sirens to disperse them, then in the middle see my patient. He's being held down by two other men while a third performs what he thinks is CPR. This patient, who is supposed to be naturally dead, is actively fighting them. If their compressions weren't so dog shit they would have probably killed this guy who they found passed out drunk. Every neuron in my brain short-circuited trying to understand what I was looking at and what they thought they were trying to accomplish. They even said they weren't giving him mouth-to-mouth because he was yelling at them.
:michael-laugh:
it's not even funny and yet it's fucking hilarious. is this what happens when people know about medical problems only from movies?
Either that or just a panic-brained attempt to do the sick person thing. I've never seen bystanders do useful CPR unless they have a medical background.
I saw the stats for how often CPR revives someone when performed under ideal conditions and that was a sobering moment. TV really does distort how you see the world.
It's wild to see that in a trauma bay. A full team with a combined experience of 100+ years, all the tools of modern medicine, surgery on standby, and it's still like 20% at best for me. That 20% is people who left emergency in a state stable enough for another ward so who knows how many of them survived the next week or year. In the field I didn't expect any of them to recover but reasoned that I couldn't kill them twice by trying everything.
Yeah. Medicine has gotten a lot better in my lifetime, but when you hit the limits its a sobering reminder that there are a lot of limits. : |
How do you evade the personal injury lawyers chasing you with their Toyota corollas?
I think good samaritan laws probably do and should cover them in that case. If the patient had actually needed CPR they might have gotten a bit of blood flowing even if their compressions were too shallow to do any real good. As long as I'm there within 6 minutes of it happening it's not going to kill him twice.
My mom's 400lbs ex jumped off a roof with only a couch cushion to break the fall. He insisted it would be fine because "they're Lazy Boy cushions". He was still getting surgeries 5 years later for it.
Not 10 and 60 pounds anymore, you can't do that shit. I remember roof hopping as a kid though, at some point I got scared of heights. :(
chair jousting is the last bulwark of chivalry against crass modernity
When I was in my 20s I was in a car with four other people and we were driving around in a beat-up clunker and the color of the doors didn't match the color of the body. We were on the way to a diner. It was about 10 pm. A cop car started following us and out of nowhere there was a command relayed over its speakers "Pull over to the side of the road."
The driver did so. The cop car pulled over too and then the cops turned on that spotlight side light thing squad cars have and everything in the car was very, very bright. I was sort of freaked out at this point. But other people in the car were playing it off or pretending to. "What is this shit?"
I only vaguely knew the driver. He said "Fuck!" and I got more freaked out. What was up? Some moments passed and for reasons that were never made clear to me the driver acted like a crazy person. He suddenly reached over towards the glove box. Somebody said "What are you doing?" He grunted "Getting my registration." He opened up the box, he quickly got his registration, just as quickly he opened the door, and he jumped out of the car.
We were near a college town and everybody in the car was white but my heart was pumping full speed anyway. I was half-expecting a hail of gunfire. Nothing happened. But it's decades later and I still can't believe the driver did that. It was a stupid, risky thing to do that made no sense at all. I quickly learned the driver was the sort of moron who can't be educated. People tired to explain it to him at the diner but he laughed away the risk. I knew in my bones he was an abject fool who would never learn.
I wonder what happened to that guy.
You know those car cigarette lighters (not sure what they're actually called)? I pushed it in, then popped it out and just wanted to touch the hot part with the tip of my nail. Short story short, I got a little spiral design on my thumb. I made that mistake twice, cause if a mistake is worth doing, it's worth doing twice.
You know that shitty yellow braided cord? I saw someone tie a mattress down to a Toyota accord with a granny knot in that then hold on for dear life with their left hand driving.
Oh yeah I have seen things used to tie down heavy loads on vehicles. The road is a scary place.
Watched someone come into traffic court late and then yell, like yell at the judge that they didn't have time for this and they needed to go. They got to go. But I'm certain it cost them a lot of money and a bench warrant.
idk i saw a guy get shot jamming a loaded shotgun into a safe, the stupid thing was leaving it loaded and i didn't see that but i saw the aftermath :shrug-outta-hecks:
also saw someone get t-boned turning left when they had absolutely zero business doing so :elmofire:
oh i also have witnessed a believably sober person admit they'd had drinks to a pig. idea to like ingratiate the pig by being honest. they got a DUI and were completely unrelated to the thing the pigs got called to
Saw a guy load rounds backwards in to his pistol. The guy teaching the CC class (some sort of horrific amalgamation of cop, vampire, and rabies virus poured in to the shape of a human.) fixed the mag so he could do the practical shooting part of the test. Guy managed to cut himself twice, pretty good, with slide bite. Got his CC anyway because of course he :grillman: did. Fucking cops.
Actually now that I think about it I've been swept a lot of times, but that just fades in to the background after a while because so many fools go to the range who shouldn't be armed. The loading rounds backwards stands out because how do you even do that?
When I was operating a gravitron for a traveling carnival I would see people do some real stupid shit. People would flip upside-down, forgetting that the seats slide back down when the ride ends. I would also see people slide up to the very top of the seats and try to sit up against the force. Don't do that, you'll crack your skull when the seats slide up.
Some of the other peeps out on the road could do tricks in there (like doing pushups against the bar) but they're around this thing all the time.
When are we getting the thin carnival barker line? Shaking my head.
Carnival barkers are a thing of the past, my good man. The closest you'll find is a jointee with a PA system, and usually because they're not naturally loud enough to get your attention. I knew some good ones but I wouldn't call any of them barkers.
One contender would be my supervisor standing in the hopper of a wood chipper while it was running and attempting to clear a blockage in the feed wheels using a tree branch. Another was two guys who tried to street race on a heavily used urban road and ended up in a horrific wreck.
