2022-10-08 - Paramedic Training & Duty

This Blog Post was originally published on adagia.org.

Yesterday I was at my first large paramedic training since the beginning of the pandemic with Everyone's Favorite Virus™️. I started around 9 am with a brief introduction to the different stations where we had 30 minutes to complete the challenge.

The first station for us was training with the firefigthers new swivel ladder. The voluntary firefighters got this new vehicle one or two years back, and it was quite impressive to see this thing in action. They've got Brackets for our carriers which we use in our ambulance vehicles. So we can quickly put a patient on our carry and transport them down from buildings up to 23 meters (through a balcony or window, for example). As a closing of the "mission", we could climb into the ladder's basket and fully extend it around 30 metres and 75° Upwards. I could get a new and exciting overview of the city I'm living in. :)

The second station was a more theoretical one, where we had a brief refresher on our radio equipment and data terminals in the cars.

The third was the typical CPR (cardiopulmonary resuscitation) station which is part of every training.

Now two very "fun" stations continued. We drove to a nearby forest where another set of firefighters was waiting for us. Our challenge was to transport a patient who had an accident with a chainsaw through the woods downhill to a nearby ambulance vehicle. Although we were six people, this was quite a challenge. We had to transport some of our equipment a few 100 meters uphill into the woods and afterwards get out everything, including the patient, out again. Everything was on a 45° (or so) slope.

The second forest station was a short walk away from the last one, where we had to rescue a patient with an injured ankle, but instead of downhill (like the last patient), we had to take them upwards on a similar slope, but with only three people.

It was a pretty incredible experience to train with other emergency services again. After the last station, we were transported back to our home base, where we had lunch. I then drove home and took a shower (I was sitting in the mud more than once), but on a new uniform and went back into duty at around 4 pm to start my evening/night shift.

As it is always when I'm doing night shifts, this one destroyed part of my sleeping cycle again. I was chatting with other paramedics till around 2 am. My codriver and I went to our beds but didn't arrive there as we were called to a person lying in a trench and not responding to wake-up calls. We arrived there in under 10 minutes, and the young girl we found at the place was sleeping beside the road. It is autumn, and Austria's temperatures have dropped significantly at night (I think it had around 10 to 15 degrees celsius last night).

Several wake-up shouts and trying to apply pain stimuli didn't make the person wake up, but luckily she was breathing fine (well, snoring), and her other vital signs didn't look bad. She wasn't heavy either, so we put her on our carry relatively easily. We went to the hospital and discussed what might have happened to her (my colleague and me) through the window in our vehicle (the front and back are separated) while driving. We didn't smell a lot of alcohol, so we thought that maybe she had taken (or was forced to take -> put into her glass) some other stuff.

Later in the morning, I heard she had around three per mil (‰) of alcohol in her blood. No wonder she was sleeping so great on the cold floor.