I arrive on scene as the ambulance crew is making their way inside. I know the medic fairly well. He did all of his intern rides with Slimm and I, and he is good at his job. I know he won’t need me, but I would like to see him working on his own. The fire crew has been there several minutes.

I walk in to see the fire crew taping down an IV in the patient’s arm. “It’s a white-out, C” says Ashley the medic, with his thick drawl. “Suggah is thutty.”

(Think Kevin Bacon in JFK. Not Costner, because his attempt at a southern accent was piss-poor.)

I see Ashley and his partner spiking a bag of saline while a fire crew member is reaching into his bag for the D50.

“Hey, b’fore y’all go ‘head and push that dee-fifty, let’s mix it up in this bag right here.”

“But he needs the sugar. His glucose is really-”

“I know, I know, but we should mix it up in this right here bag instead’a givin’ it straight in the vein.”

“That doesn’t make any sense-”

“Look, now. If I tell you that duck can pull a truck, then hook that duck up! Lemme show ya’ ” Ashley replies, grabbing the syringe, attaching a needle, and mixing it into the bag of saline.

“Now, what we got here is dee-ten. It’ll wake’em up just tha same, but it’s just less shockin’ to tha system” he explains.

I know exactly what he is doing, because that is my preferred method of dextrose administration.

The patient wakes up quickly, and I glance at the bag. About 100ml are in so far. Somebody repeats the glucose stick. “Eighty-nine.”

“Now see, he’s had a hunnid of dee-ten, and he’s already awake. Ain’t that suggah better’n givin’ tha whole amp and jackin’ it up to tha three hunnids?”

Apparently, when a Southerner tells you that a duck can pull a truck, you are supposed to shut up and hook that duck up.

Learn something every day.

I’m definitely no movie critic, but Gatsby was just awesome.

Carey Mulligan and Toby Maguire were interesting choices for Daisy and Nick, but played the parts perfectly. Leonardo DiCaprio was everything I have ever imagined Jay Gatsby to be.

My hat is off to Baz Luhrmann. He was an excellent choice to produce and direct Gatsby, and he did a magnificent job capturing the opulence of West Egg in the Roaring Twenties.

The Brooks Brothers suits and “so many beautiful shirts” were spot on.

It really was exactly how I pictured the book, and I can’t wait to see it again.

Bystanders said the “victim” was “struck by the holy spirit during worship.”

Can you describe the assailant? Should we get PD out here?

This lady is laying on the floor, not speaking. She follows commands, though. Stroke assessment is normal. Blood glucose is normal. Vital signs are better than mine. She’s hyperventilating, of course. She’s just not talking. Maybe something is wrong with her.

And maybe Kim Jong Un is serious.

She gets snapped out of her pseudocatatonic state when some random woman starts yelling at her, snapping her fingers in her face.

“BY THE BLOOD OF JESUS I COMMAND YOU TO SPEAK!”

So the entire ride to the hospital she continues to say “Blood of Jesus, blood of Jesus.”

For twenty minutes.

An hour later, after the attention she was seeking had subsided, she walked out of the hospital.

I just wish he would share, and I didn’t have to occasionally pee in a cup.

He’s loaded in the ambulance, and we are on the way to a fancy building where they have the capabilities to repair his protruding tibia. He’s gotten a little bit of morphine, which seems to help his pain. He now describes his injury as “gnarly.”

Sounds of music waft into the patient compartment as Slimm turns up the radio a bit.

“Dude, is that Floyd?!”

“Yes, sir.”

“Is it Dark Side? What’s your partner’s name?”

“Yeah, we were listening to it earlier. His name is Slimm.”

“Hey, Slimm!” he yells. “Turn it up!”

My intrepid partner obliges, and we all jam out to Pink Floyd for the next several minutes. The delightful gentleman even gave an excellent air drum rendition during Money.

I arrive shortly after the ambulance, and make my way into the decrepit house. I overhear the medic talking with someone in the house. This seems to be a regular occurrence at this home.

Around the corner I find the other medic fiddling on the ground next to an unconscious person. The monitor is on the floor, and off. The jump bag is on the floor, not open.

The medic on the floor has a tourniquet around the patient’s arm, patting the antecubital.

The patient is an interesting shade of blue. And I don’t see chest rise.

“Hey, maybe we should grab that airway first, and bag this dude or something” I suggest.

“Thanks, man. We got this.”

Yet somehow, I’m the asshole.

“Do you have chest pain? Yes?” There. Chest pain has now been ruled in. Fixed it for you.

I digress.

Nurse hands me an envelope sealed tighter than an evidence packet. She walks away. Interested in what findings this dipshit nurse may have found, I follow her out to the desk.

“Can I get a report on the patient in B?” I ask her as politely as humanly possible.

“Everything the hospital needs is in that envelope, and I already called report to them.”

“Oh, okay. But I could use a report, just so I know what is going on.”

“I can’t tell you that. That would be a HIPAA violation.”

—–

Now this is where the old CCC would have said something along the lines of “Come on, lady. It’s a HIPAA violation for you not to give me a report. This is 2013, and you can’t give me a report on a patient you expect me to take care of for the next half-hour? Oh, that’s right. I just ride in the back of my ambulance, twiddling my thumbs. I didn’t spend 3 years in school or nothing.”

But nice CCC says: “Oh, okay. Have a nice day.” As he opens the envelope and begins reading the notes.

Just another miracle of modern medicine. Better living through pharmacology, I say.

There is a cardinal that has taken up residence in a tree in my backyard. I’m sure he is a nice bird. Probably a good bird-father, a loving bird-husband, and he makes sure he brings the highest quality materials so his bird-wife can make a good nest.

I named him Ozzie, after my favorite St. Louis Cardinal.

But this Ozzie isn’t too smart. I certainly wouldn’t call him a wizard.

Ozzie keeps flying into my windows downstairs. I have a sliding glass door, and he stopped flying into it when I moved the screen. Then he started flying into the other side of the glass, the side that slides.

He flew into that for a little while until I hung some stuff on the inside of the glass. Then he started attacking the window over the sink.

There are three other windows on the same side of my house, in the family room. I think Ozzie has attacked every one of those as well.

Earlier, while I was in the shower, he attacked the window there, too. And that’s upstairs.

All in all, there are are ten windows on the side of my house where Ozzie’s tree is. And he routinely attacks each one of them. Repeatedly. All day. Until the sun goes down.

I kind of feel bad for him, but then, his wife probably thinks he is a stud since he is always fighting off so many other cardinals.

Doctor Lawson puts a tourniquet on someone’s leg.

“Good, we have homeostasis, let’s get to the hospital.”

I swear, if I ever heard that on scene, my natural reflex would be a backhand slap to the face.

I recently tried watching this new series on TNT, Monday Mornings. It seems like a cool concept, centered around the weekly meetings that some teaching hospitals have. In the last episode I saw, a drug seeking guy assaults two doctors in a parking garage, causing the prettier one to fall to the ground, obviously sustaining a head injury. I say obviously because of the blood coming from the lady’s ear, and the Battle’s sign that was present before her head hit the ground.

The neurosurgeon with the bedside manner of a rotten cucumber performs a craniotomy that seems to take about 40 minutes. Then the patient wakes up several hours later and begins speaking. She looks ready to go cut someone open again, albeit bald.

No ICU bed. No ventilator. I’m willing to bet the nasal cannula wasn’t even plugged into oxygen.

But the show was based on a book by Sanjay Gupta, so I shouldn’t have expected much.

Last night I was trying to fall asleep, and flipped the television to a showing of John Q. What do I see? This kid on a ventilator, with a tube coming out the right corner of his mouth. He wakes up when Denzel calls his name.

“I can’t talk” he says. While being ventilated. And intubated. Apparently without sedation, either.

—–

And on a similar note, every single time I see an EMS crew on TV moving a patient, they are always going backwards. When is the last time you took a patient on a gurney head-first? And why are the EMS stretchers in cinema never made up with a sheet? Am I the odd man out, since I put a sheet on my stretcher?

I’m sticking to baseball games from now on.

No, it’s not an accident. Accidents aren’t preventable.

4 cars, with damage to their cars that is considerably less than the damage on my daily driver. One dumbass wasn’t paying attention and smacked into the back of a perfectly delightful lady who was sitting at a red light, waiting to turn left. Then two additional dumbasses caused the other damage.

Nobody has any injuries. The first dumbass says her neck hurts. Probably not as much as the tattoo on her neck. She doesn’t want to go.

She signs a refusal. Nobody else has complaints.

“Hey guys, we’re gonna leave it with you.” I say to the fire crew.

“Who all did you get refusals on?”

“Just her. She was the only one with a complaint” I say, indicating the pillar of society on the phone with her lawyer.

“Oh, you didn’t get any more refusals? We have to get refusals on anyone in a wreck.”

I survey the scene, and my quick, rudimentary math counts 4 drivers and 7 passengers. Honestly, I ran out of fingers to count on.

“So you have to get a refusal on everybody in every car that is involved in an accident?”

“Yeah. It’s our policy”

“So if I climb in to one of the cars and sit there, you have to get a refusal on me, too?”

“I guess so.”

“Interesting. See ya later.”

Whatever.

She strikes me as grumpy. Not to us, but to her family members who seem to be completely ignoring her.

We’ve got a long way to go, and I’m curious about where she is from, with her thick German accent.

“What part of Germany are you from?”

“Nuremberg”

“Neat. My family came from Schwabach.*” She is not impressed. “When did you move to the States?”

“1947”

Holy shit.

It dawns on me. She’s 84, and lived in Nuremberg in the 1940s. She was 19 when she moved from Germany.

We spent the next hour talking about what it was like growing up as a teenager in Nazi Germany.

She had incredible, heart-wrenching stories.

She smiled at me when I left and I said “auf weidersehen.” I wonder when the last time she smiled was. I wonder when the last time someone talked to her. I wonder when the last time someone listened to her.

*Essentially a suburb of Nuremberg.**

**I can do geography, too.