On the first session of this last complete week we worked on our presentation about short American stories due next class. It was really easy to create the presentation because it wasn't really needed. So we only copied a bunch of images and we were done. On Wednesday I wanted to present first because I was afraid that if we were the last ones we will eventually end with nothing new to say. We presented at the middle of the hour. Everything went just fine, neither good nor bad.
Even though we haven't officially finished our curses I'm already dealing with final exams. My first final exam was last Thursday, so I decided to call that class absent since I'm not short on those. Ir wen very well, I only got three wrong from fifty. That same afternoon I had another exam, this was a partial test of human physiology that I needed to present for my technical degree at Red Cross. It also went well, but I finished the test in 5 minutes because I didn't want to waste time of potential study for my final clinical semiology exam. That night I had my dinner celebration for my 21th birthday at the Arcos, a seafood restaurant in Morones Prieto. It is a good establishment, but I would have enjoyed it better if it wasn't for the intestinal intoxication I got that same afternoon for eating rotten vegetables at the cafeteria of San José Hospital. I will think of it twice after eating there again, even though the complete plate is only $40. After eating there I slept a while and woke up with fever, chills and intestinal colic. That Friday I woke up sicker and I was fortunately able to recover myself from that Saturday morning, so I went with friends to a quinta.
That Sunday I arrived early to my ambulance and had some free minutes to read and sleep on the back stretcher, I'm already starting to get tired of waking up six out of seven days a week early. I waked up with the sound of the GPS and my partner saying we have a service in the river. I got excited although it didn't turned out to be a service. We arrived to the Santa Catarina River from out base at the Fire department. The partner I had to work with didn't seemed to like a lot sports, so it was going to be difficult to reach the river for her. We arrived and the police was already there, we followed them on foot down the side of the river and crossed to the other side. There was a young man no older than me laying down on the side of the river. He was dead. We got the call just to make sure he was actually dead, he had no vital signs. The cadaver was not in rigor mortis, that means that he had kicked the bucket that same night, few hours ago. His skin was so cold. It was a mysterious case, this man came from Veracruz and even thought he had a line of blood in his left cheek, we were not sure if it was his. He had no traumatic injury, the river's water was too shallow for drowning, he had no torture marks, and we found it laying down perfectly straight, so there were no indications of a suicidal fall from the street running above the river. The distance of the fall will have damaged his body notably, perhaps it was a simple hipothermal death. We couldn't smell any alcohol or any other drug that could have made him end the night in the river. The work of a paramedic doesn't really include diagnosing the cause of dead, that's a work for a forensic doctor, in this case the SEMEFO, but there is no one out there to do the work so they usually call us. That was a good start, but from there on we were called to attend an event. It was the American Football Pumas Club that was having a game. This only involved the children category so they didn't get hurt. We got bored that evening but I was able to read a lot. We had very few other services during the day, and 15 min before the 12 hour guard finished, we got a call and finished one hour late.
