Week 7

This last Sunday I had a lot of spare time to read while waiting in the ambulance to attend an in-calling service. Our first service was almost at mid day and the call involved a classical accident: a geriatric patient fell from her bed and fractured her left hip and ipsilateral knee. This kind of services are usually quite easy, we only need to transport her to the hospital using a ferule to prevent any other damage to her inferior extremity. During the transport time we usually take her vital signs and data. After this we ate inside the ambulance waiting for any notification on the GPS. Late that afternoon I attended my first "14" which is the code for corpse. Arriving to the residence we met the police who described the look of the patient, as we entered the whole family was gathered in the lobby of the first floor, they didn't quite know what had happened with their relative. As I entered the bedroom I nearly stepped on blood from the corpse. This lady was about 50 years old, she used to be a nurse who got paranoid and depressed after she broke her leg. She committed suicide by trying to cut her body, after what she used the backrest of her bed to hang herself. After determining her dead  being careful not to move any evidence to prevent us from getting into any trouble and getting the corpse's data we left. There's not much we can do in this cases, dead people belong to another department. That night the last patient was a drunk adult who was selling hot dogs at the corner of the street fell and hit his occipital bone with the sidewalk. We treated his injury and transported him to the Metropolitan Hospital of Monterrey. Drunk people usually have hypoglycemia because of the metabolic effects of the alcohol on the body's enzymes, so after being sure he had not neurological damage we decided to canalize him with a crystalloid sollution composed of 5% glucose. He was a difficult patient, he wasn't very cooperative. Basically this summarizes my Sunday.