A day to be out and about. I went to the Saturday optional EMT lab; it went from noon until 4:00 p.m. There were, all total, 5 of us there. We were first given an impromptu quiz – the questions centered around ugh – extrication and chain of command. I have been forcing myself to be interested in this sort of subject matter, but it is difficult. Never say never, so I will put it this way – I don’t see myself, in the foreseeable future, extricating anyone from a vehicle.

I missed so many of the answers that I had to squelch the sudden urge to say “Okay, enough. I am done with this. I can’t go on anymore.” Add to this, a classmate, and in fact a member of my group, went into copious detail about his ride along.

Oropharyngeal airways

We are all required to put in a total of 24 hours – two days, riding around in an ambulance and spending time in an emergency room.

The buck stops here. I have no desire to spend any time with an ambulance crew, no desire at all. I just don’t like seeing people in any sort of duress. I don’t even want to spend time in the emergency room, but at least there I get to see people (among other things) being prepped for surgery. All I want at this point in time is to do well in the course. I know now that the odds of my passing the NREMT exam are quite low. And this is quite okay. I will have done what I set out to do, which was to expand upon my first aid data base. Har har.

Well, I didn’t leave; instead, I reminded myself that change is a constant. In this case, this meant that perhaps I’d momentarily feel less overwhelmed.

An odd thing then happened. I had, unlike any of the others, come in with an agenda – some things that I saw needed doing on my part. This included getting some blood pressure readings, working on putting patients on a spine board, doing airway work, and long bone mobilization.

I just started suggesting we do these things and we began doing them. The grande finale was this --- we had 20 minutes of lab time left. I said we should do a medical scenario. It was decided to do a group scenario – I immediately volunteered to be the lead person. No, I insisted I be the lead person. I don’t think that the guys were too thrilled about this because they had to take a back seat to me – but I told myself this was of little consequence.

I did just fine, with them watching. What they will never, ever realize was just how difficult it was for me, all afternoon, to first suggest what we should do, and then be so insistent that I be the responder when we did the medical exam scenario. Now, writing about this, which is a form of reliving the event, I have broken into a sweat.

I did what I had to do because I want to know that I know what to do, should I be the first responder in a medical emergency. And, now I am glad that I did.

Next: 311. 11/10/19: A Conversation with Ryder, Hrimmi, and Tyra