Sometimes I just have to stop and think how crazy my job is and how much I love it. Trying to intubate someone in a car during a thunder/hail storm while firefighters are ripping the car apart to extricate my patient just reminds me why I wanted to be a paramedic in the first place. The situations we find ourselves in are sometimes truly unbelievable.
At times, other healthcare professionals don’t understand the environments we need to work in. When we arrive in the ER, our patient is neatly packaged and stabilized, they don’t know that in order to get that IV we needed to use our cell phones as a flashlight to see what we were doing or that we needed to cut the fence out around our impaled patient to get him in our ambulance. Sometimes we don’t have the convenience of checking their Mallampati score or even getting a history before treatment.
