But I would walk 500 miles
And I would walk 500 more
Just to be the man who walks a thousand miles
To fall down at your door
The Proclaimers

Ok, I haven’t quite walked 500 miles, though a few days it’s felt like it. But I have reached sort of a milestone. I’ve worked over 500 hours as a tech in the Emergency Department. The PA programs I’m looking at require some sort of minimum number of “patient contact hours”. One only requires 750. The primary programs I’m looking at require 1000 hours. This has been the biggest single worry I’ve had in meeting my prerequisites. While there are a number of classes I need to take (and I’m almost done with those), this is the one that would take the most amount of time and was the hardest to line up.

But here I am, at the end of January and I’ve hit the half-way mark. This means that I’ll be well on my way to hitting the 1000 hours long before applications are due. So that’s good.

But, there’s more than that. Honestly, I’m loving it. Yeah, there’s a lot not to love. There’s cleaning up after patients. There’s being stuck in a zone with very little happening. One can get tired of doing their 20th EKG of the day and 17 nasal swab. But overall, I’m really liking it. And I think I’m getting better at it. I even “gave an order to a doctor” the other week.

Ok, let me be clear. Techs really don’t “give orders” to anyone. Sure we can ask another tech for help or even ask a nurse for help. But typically we’re the one being asked to do things. And we have no medical authority to “put orders into the system.” That said, we’re often closer to the patients and what’s going on with them than the doctors. This makes sense. We see the details, they see the big picture.

In this case though, several of us, including one of the residents, were cleaning up a patient that soiled herself. As I wiped, I noted she was raw and said she couldn’t feel when she was urinating, which meant she’d wet herself again without warning. This would only make things worse for her. When we were done, I turned to the resident and said, “I think you need to put in an order for a Foley (catheter).”

“Oh, you think so?”

“Yes, she can’t tell when she needs to urinate and ends up urinating without warning which ends up getting her skin irritated.”

“Ok.”

Sure enough about 30 minutes later a nurse was putting in a Foley.

I’ve said we often do the scut work. Which is true, and a few people have thought that I was saying that as a complaint. It’s not. It’s an observation. We’re doing the little stuff that needs to be done that the nurses and doctors don’t have time to do or often won’t notice. That said, actually they often do notice. A nurse will go in to do something and see the well stocked IV cart and thank one of us. Or they’ll ask for something and we’ll already have it in our hand, knowing they’ll need it. Again we’re thanked.

Last night for example, I spent probably close to two hours restocking IV cabinets. I’m not sure the last time that day they had been restocked, but some were pretty barren. When I was done, it felt good knowing that the next time a nurse went into the room to start an IV or do some other procedure, they’d have the tools they needed right there.

Then of course, there’s the big stuff. Helping out with a stroke page or a “leveled” trauma. This is where the experience comes in and I’m definitely 500 hours more experienced than I was just over three months ago. I still don’t have my “red badge” so I can work trauma’s on my own, but I’m getting the experience. And it feels good.

All this is a means to an end, getting the required hours to apply to PA school. But it’s also been great. I’m very grateful I’m getting the experience in an ED where my day can vary from restocking carts to handling not one, but two trauma patients in the same evening. And that was just one shift. In other shifts I’ve helped with multiple traumas.

Hopefully not just the quantity of hours, but the quality of the work will help my application. But no matter what, I’m still enjoy it.

Disclaimer: my works do not in any way reflect my Standard Disclaimer: my writings do not reflect the views of my employer, the Albany Medical Health System. In addition, any errors in the above descriptions are my own and nothing here should be taken as medical expertise or advice.

This isn’t a story about Sisyphus, but rather something very different.

There’s a saying in the EMS field that “Air goes in and out, blood goes round and round, any variation on this is bad.” It really reduces medicine to a very critical base level. If those things aren’t happening, your patient is in very bad shape. They may have broken bones, be in acid ketosis or have a variety of other major medical issues, but if they’re not breathing or don’t have a pulse, none of that matters. I’ve mentioned CPR previously and plan on writing a longer post on it in the near future (especially in light of Damar Hamlin’s collapse on the field). But today I want to talk about something that can only be done by experts and that’s intubation.

Before starting as a tech, I was aware of the general concept of intubating a patient, but had never seen it done, let alone assisted in any way. At a VERY general level, a patient is sedated and essentially paralyzed while a tube is inserted through their mouth and into their trachea. Once this is done, the patient is either ventilated by a machine or by the use of a bag-valve mask (BVM).

A patient may be ventilated for a variety of reasons, for example, they may be unable to maintain a patent (open) airway and the ability to breath on their own, or in a very recent case, the doctors made a decision to sedate a patient who was moving too much to be placed in the CT scanner. Given his risk factors, this meant that he’d probably lose his ability to maintain his own airway, so he was intubated as a precautionary measure.

I mention all this because there’s something important to to understand. Once a patient is intubated, basically the medical folks are breathing for them. The first few times I watched or assisted, this fact didn’t really register with me. Since then I’ve come to realize how important of a factor this is. In the recent case, the decision wasn’t made lightly. The patient actually was breathing fine, but the doctors couldn’t evaluate for other, possibly life threatening, injuries until he had been scanned. So they made the decision to basically take away his own ability to breath for a short period of time. That’s a pretty heady decision.

Roc is short for rocuronium, one of the common drugs used to help temporarily paralyze the patient. Its name sticks out in my head. There’s generally at least one or two other drugs all administered in a very short sequence (basically to relax the patient and then inhibit things like the gag reflex) period of time, generally under a minute and then the doctor has less than a minute to get the tube in. Once the tube is in, then either a BVM is temporarily attached to the tube, or a ventilator is attached immediately. In either case, we’re now breathing for the patient.

As a tech, obviously I’m not the one pushing the drugs or inserting the tube (I’ll get to that in PA School) but I’m often involved with squeezing and releasing the BVM to provide airflow. I also get to watch all this.

As for the actual placement of the tube, it’s definitely an acquired skill. Since Albany Medical Center is a teaching hospital, often it’ll be a resident or similar attempting it the first time around. Only once have I seen a failure (which was very quickly followed up by a success by a more experienced provider). Even this part is fascinating since they will use a tool known as a Glidescope. This is essentially a curved plastic piece with an LED light and camera at one end. This goes in first to help restrain the tongue and epiglottis. The image is displayed on an LCD monitor. Once it’s in place the actual tube is inserted. All this can be watched if you’re standing in the right place (which often I am.) I have to say it’s rather amazing to see all this. And to watch an experienced provider do a tube is amazing. They do it so quickly.

In any event, I have to say, it’s pretty amazing to watch as the providers take over the “air goes in and out” part.

In a future post I’ll cover the “blood goes around and round” part, which is something any of my readers can (and should) learn how to do anywhere they see someone in cardiac arrest.

Standard Disclaimer: my writings do not reflect the views of my employer, the Albany Medical Health System. In addition, any errors in the above descriptions are my own and nothing here should be taken as medical expertise or advice.

My life lately has been dominated by numbers. There are good numbers. There are bad numbers. There are less than ideal numbers and there are holy-shit numbers.

It may seem crass at times to reduce a patient to their numbers, but there’s a certain effectiveness to it.

First, there’s their medical record number. I honestly don’t care about this other than the fact that for parts of my job (such as recording an EKG) they need to have a bracelet on them with their name and medical record number on it. I’d call this a neutral number.

Then there’s a number like 130/80 for a blood pressure. Generally this is a good number. But context can matter. Was it 180/120 a few minutes ago and is continuing to drop? If the next reading is similar, great. If the next number is 100/60, the nurses and doctors are going to start to get a bit concerned. If it was 100/60 before and now has risen to this and stays here, they’ll relax.

Even a number like 170/120 might not elicit much concern if the patient is otherwise stable. Yes, your cardiologist might be concerned long-term, but for short-term if it’s stable, the nurse will consult with the doctor, but won’t be rushing around too much.

60 is another number. Are we talking pulse or blood sugar or respirations? In the first case, that’s a pretty good number. In the second, it’s a bad number and again will get folks moving a bit. In the final case, that’s a very bad number!

346 is another number. If it’s a blood sugar, then we’re starting to talk holy-shit (to the point where the hand-held monitor I use to measure it will require an extra notation in the recording.)

When I was learning my wilderness medicine and later started teaching it, I developed the idea of what I call “Sesame Street Medicine”. This was not a knock at all at what we were doing but more on an approach to take. There’s a lot to be learned from “One thing is not like the others”, just like in Sesame Street.

In the cases here, other than blood sugar, which I suspect most of my readers have never looked at theirs, one can often rely on their own experience to get somewhat of an idea of whether a number is good or bad. This can be a useful guideline when looking at numbers. Consider your own numbers. Consider numbers you’ve heard from friends. Now compare.

Now, obviously a trained medical person can definitely glean a lot more information from the numbers than a layperson can, but that doesn’t mean as a lay person you can’t look at some of the numbers and start to think, “that seems less than ideal.”

But yes, in the end, we look at numbers. A lot. In context they can have a lot of meaning. So no one wants to reduce a patient to only their numbers, but numbers can be a good start.

Content warning: death and depression follows. But also hope and happiness.

Disclaimer: Events are also a bit fictionalized in time and details

Yesterday I felt a man’s life leave his body.

Today, I felt the life course through a man’s veins, a man who had been dead moments before.

One dead. One alive.

I know my time in the field has been short, but I don’t think I’ll ever fully appreciate the difference.

One dead. One alive.

In another room a woman dies while her family still is on their way. Too late to say their goodbyes.

In another room a man comes in on the worst day of this life, but leaves alive.

One dead. One alive.

Later a man, who had wished for death, comes in and now fights the nurses trying to keep him alive because he fears they’re there to kill him. He survives to fight another day.

One alive.

In one of my favorite episodes of M*A*S*H, Hunnicutt, Hawkeye, and Houlihan fight to keep an injured soldier alive at least long enough so they can record his death on the day after Christmas, rather than Christmas Day itself so the soldier’s children don’t have to think of Christmas Day their father died. In the end, they can’t do it and end up falsifying the records in order to cheat death.

Despite the title of the episode being “Death Takes a Holiday”, the truth is, death never takes a holiday.

In my very short time working in the Emergency Department I’ve seen people die and I’ve seen people live.

But this shift, the eve of Christmas Eve has been especially poignant and has hit me a bit harder than other shifts. The death of a loved one, especially an unexpected death can be hard. I think so doubly so during the holidays.

But also, as I said above, I saw a man who was dead come back to life again because of the efforts of all those around him, complete strangers doing their best to give death a holiday. This time the succeeded.

Today and tomorrow, I’ll be giving my family an extra hug. I hope you can too.

Disclaimer: my views do not represent my employer: Albany Medical Health Systems or Albany Medical Center.

Editors note: I had planned on posting this last week, but realized 1/2 the class had not yet taken the lab. I hope by now they have. So all times are relative to last week, not this week.

Technically I’m a week or two early depending on how one counts, but I consider this close enough. Final exams are next week, so I’m not technically done until after Wednesday next week. In the meantime I have the following: yesterday an A&P practical (more on that in a minute), a Bio II Unit 4 exam tomorrow, an A&P Unit 4 exam on Friday, and then next week, both on Wednesday, an exam in each. And this coming weekend I have at least one 12 hour shift, probably two. And in a few hours, I start a 12 hour shift. So this should be an interesting week.

It started with the A&P II practical yesterday. Our practicals are, in my mind, fairly simple. The professor lays out models or pictures on the lab benches, labels 40 parts, and then we enter, pick up a keyword sheet and an answer sheet and fill in the blanks. The focus is knowing the parts of the body and where they are, not necessarily on spelling. Occasionally it can get tricky. Last semester for example while I had focused on pictures showing the muscles of the upper leg, the practical used a model and as a result of where the leg model ended, trying to pick out the pectineus was harder to do than expected. At one point I was holding up two different labeled models doing a “compare and contrast” of labeled muscles to figure it out by the process of elimination. It ultimately worked. (for those who are more curious, because the model didn’t show the origin of the pectineus and the insertion is under other muscles, all I had to go on was a small fan-like piece of it showing at the top of the model.)

Yesterday though was a bit different. We were supposed to cover the urinary system and reproductive system. Honestly, I thought it was pretty easy to study for. But when I walked in, two of the labels confused me. Internally to the kidney are structures known as the minor and major calyxes. Basically minor calyxes drain into major ones. So I’m standing there looking at label number 36 which has two lines on it. I can’t quite tell, but it appears to me that they’re pointing to the minor calyxes. So I put that on the answer sheet.

Then I get to label number 17 (because there are 10 stations and multiple students, you don’t necessarily encounter the labels in order). It’s sitting on top of what appears to be a minor calyx. Now, I know the professor well enough to know he’s not one to try trick questions like having the same body part appear twice on the practical. So I’m stuck. At times like this often I’ll pick up the model and walk over to him to ask. But I didn’t want to pick up two different models and bring them over. For one it would have been a bit unwieldy and for another, it would deprive other students of two stations to work at.

So I tried to reason it out. I figured since station 36 had lines pointing to the minor calyxes, that station 17 must be a major calyx, even though it really looked like it was sitting on top of a minor one.

Anyway, I finished, confident about my answers except those two. I waited outside the classroom to talk to a couple of my other classmates. At least one other admitted the same confusion. This actually made me feel better, that I wasn’t completely confused or misunderstanding the labelling. As we waited for our final classmate to finish up, the professor popped his head out the door. So I asked him which was which. I was impatient. I didn’t want to wait until he corrected them. “Well, the lines on 36 show the flow into the major calyx, so that’s the major one and 17 is the minor.” When I explained my confusion he had a stricken look on his face, went back into the lab and peered at station 36. I saw him quickly pull out his sharpie and update the label. He then came back out, “You’re right, I didn’t actually show the direction and I can see how it would be confusing. Don’t worry, I’ll make sure you all get credit for it.” The other class section has their practical on Thursday, so with the updated labels, I think they’ll do fine.

But now I wish I had asked while taking the practical itself. It might have solved the confusion earlier.

An addendum, turns out by the time he corrected the practical he had forgotten to credit us and I had to go in and get my grade updated.