What happened between breakfast and lunch today?

 

I am brand new to National Blog Posting Month and like everything in life it  comes with its very own acronym– NaBloPoMo. Isn’t that great? I love it.

Anyhow, you will get to know me very well, and if I don’t scare you away with my sarcastic humor and my look at life through fire iridium lenses, I’ll bet you will enjoy the ride.

The topic prompt that I am using is from a couple days ago: What happened between breakfast and lunch today. 

Quite simply, I am learning how to save YOUR life.

I am taking an Emergency Medical Technician course at the local college and it is full of acronyms and mnemonics. The first one is the name of the course itself. Yep, you guessed it: EMT.

I’m not the oldest student in class but I am no spring chicken either. At 40 I am wise enough to know when study and young enough not to be suffering from a case of (mild) dementia.

To start the day off right, I stopped off at the local gas-n-go and grabbed at extra tall extreme java mocha with whip and a day-old half-priced doughnut with those little sprinkle-ly things that somehow always get stuck in your teeth. The breakfast of champions right?

It is an hour to the college. Everything is an hour away in Alaska. That’s why nobody lives here. Well that and Monday Night Football actually starts in the afternoon…

We are half way through the course and what does that mean boys and girls? Test Day! All of my co-students were anxiously pacing and biting their fingernails enough to put the local manicurist out of business while we waited one-by-one to be called to the hallway to perform a trauma assessment.

The deal is–your tester (a paramedic) holds on to these sheets and you run down a checklist as you work your way from head to toe on your patient. My patient was a co-student who’s name is John but wants to be called Fred. Go figure.

After donning the required safety gear–those cool blue latex gloves. You start with the A.B.C.s (airway, breathing and circulation) and then the acronyms start in earnest.

We have:

D.C.A.P.

B.T.L.S.

L.O.C.

S.A.M.P.L.E.

O.P.Q.R.S.T.

Glasgow coma scales,

B.P.s,

S.P.O2’s

and on, and on, and on…

You have exactly 10 minutes to get ‘Fred’ stabilized, packaged up and ready to roll, all the while your tester is making sure you don’t miss any ‘starred’ items on the sheet.

Sure most of this is from memory. That’s okay. That’s why we do it over and over again so when we get our fancy Star of Life patch in December we will be ready to come to YOUR home and do this for real. Yep, we won’t see any real blood and guts until after graduation.

That may be okay for some but what happens if you spent all this money and you have a weak stomach? Remember that old show Quincy, M.E. where the new doctors fainted at the beginning of each show?

Needless to say, I passed with flying colors and I just so happened to be the last one under the gun. What happened next? Lunch!

Where did we head? McDonalds of course. 

Look at it this way. I’m already practicing the eating habits of our fine men and women in uniform. Fast food is a public safety worker’s best friend.

What did you do between breakfast and lunch today?

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