… bound for lovely Columbus, Nebraska to speak at their spring EMS conference.
The TSA security theatre was entertaining as usual, and this time, they used lubricant with the body cavity search!
Regular blogging to resume shortly from Cornhusker country…
I’ve had a friend visiting from out-of-town for the past few days, down here researching the possibility of life as a snowbird. Considering that temperatures at home this time of year routinely hover near zero, I can’t say that I blame her.
I took her to the range the other day, and she tried out KatyBeth’s Smith&Wesson M&P15 .22.
Valerie DeFrance shoots an evil black rifle!
KatyBeth and I took her to Sunrise Catfish Farm, an entirely new experience for her. Apparently, back in Alaska, she just wades out into the crick behind her house and scoops 40 lb salmon up onto the bank with her bare hands. This whole “rod and reel” thing was a bit foreign to her.
Out of respect for the nice Mennonite family that runs the catfish farm, we didn’t use my preferred fishing technique, ala Hub and Garth McCann. We did catch a fairly nice stringer of catfish, though.
But the signature moment of the weekend came on Friday, when I went to the DMV to turn in the tags for the now-deceased Frankenhoopty. Valerie opted to wait outside while I went in, took a number, and settled in a chair to wait my turn.
I’d been waiting perhaps fifteen minutes when a concerned patron walked in and said, “There’s a woman out there just lying spread-eagled in the grass!”
Now normally, this would be my call to action, but something about the warm spring day told me to hold off. “What did she look like?” I asked. “Long brown hair in a ponytail, pink shirt, green cargo pants?”
“Yeah, that’s her,” the concerned motorist nodded. “Maybe somebody should go check on her!”
“‘Y’all don’t mind her,” I chuckled, “she’s from Alaska. She’s just not used to decent weather, that’s all.”
I had been looking for a compact carry gun for some time, and at Blogorado had pretty much fallen in love with FarmDad’s Kahr P9. But, after one 300 pound buck and the resultant repairs to Frankenhoopty, the Kahr became a bit too rich for my blood.
Flash forward a month, and the receipt of an Academy gift card from a collection of people who never know what to get me for Christmas, and I brought home a new Taurus 709, otherwise known as the Taurus SLIM.
And a slim little pistol it is, too, barely an inch thick, with streamlined and contoured edges. I carry it in a Don Hume model 715M size 30C IWB holster designed for the Sig P239, and the rig practically disappears under a shirt.
Specs for the Slim:
Model: 709B
Caliber: 9mm
Capacity: 7+1 (with a promised 9 round magazine supposedly on the way)
Construction: Polymer frame, checkered polymer grips
Finish: Blued
Front sight: Fixed
Rear sight: Fully adjustable for elevation and windage.
Weight: 19 oz
Length: 6″
Barrel length: 3″
Action: SA/DA
MSRP: $459
As usual, you can find them new for significantly less than MSRP. I picked mine up at Academy for $359.
It’s a well-balanced gun, and points well. I have fairly large hands, and one of my issues with compact semiautos is that I am forced to adopt a grip that is somewhat awkward for me. The Taurus 709 is no exception, but despite having no place to put my pinkie finger, I had no problems shooting the 709 accurately. Hopefully, a 9-round magazine with grip extension will make for a more comfortable grip without sacrificing a great deal of concealability.
Sights are of the 3-dot configuration, and unfortunately, made of plastic. In their favor, they are well contoured, with no sharp edges, and are fully adjustable for windage and elevation.
That’s a good thing, because the Slim shot low and left out of the box. Normally, I’d blame such a grouping on the loose nut behind the trigger, but it seemed that everyone who shot the Slim had the same general grouping, while I had no problems shooting my other pistols accurately.
On an amusing side note, while my guest and I were shooting the Slim, one guy at the range buttonholed us and offered his entirely unsolicited opinion that the Taurus Millenium Pro 9mm he had bought for his wife was an unmitigated piece of shit because it shot waaaay left.
I replied that I’d had no such issues with my Millenium PT140, and then proceeded to chew out the bullseye at 10 yards with both his new pistol and my slightly older PT140.
It’s a poor craftsman that blames his tools, folks.
The Taurus trigger does take some getting used to, however. The trigger on the Slim appears to be a hybrid of the Glock safe action trigger, working the Taurus SA/DA action. I wouldn’t call the SA trigger pull crisp, but neither does it approach the suckitude of a Glock trigger, and that particular piece of engineering hasn’t appreciably harmed my accuracy. With the Taurus SA/DA action, the first pull of the trigger is single action, albeit with a takeup most appropriately measured in furlongs, but if for some reason the weapon fails to fire, the trigger resets to DA mode.
Not sure of the utility of that feature, though. If the gun doesn’t consistently go “BANG!” when I pull the trigger, I’m not thinking, “Gee, what a relief that I can pull the trigger again before I go through my failure drill!”
More likely, after making sure it isn’t the ammo, I’m thinking, “Ditch this unreliable piece of shit before it gets me killed.”
Recoil is easily manageable, and accuracy is as good as you could hope for in a compact carry pistol with a 3 inch barrel:
As you can see, I’m still a little left, and I threw one flier in there. Still, it’s a very shootable pistol, easily concealed and well worth the price. Round count is currently around 500, and thus far it has run without a hitch.
For a $359 concealed carry piece, the Taurus Slim is hard to beat.
For that one call, that’s why.
That one call that makes it worth being paid chump change, makes it worth being disrespected by other medical professionals.
That one call that makes wading through the piss and shit and vomit seem like a fair bargain, even if the person whose hurts you mended will never know your name.
And sometimes, you don’t even know it was that one call at the time you ran it.
Beverage alert is in effect.
Oops, he already got fired from his day job.
By now, most of you EMS types have read about the South Carolina firefighter-paramedic who got fired over an Xtranormal text-to-movie video he posted on his Facebook page.
Opinions on the incident range from “Whatever happened to free speech?” to “Serves the idiot right.”
Without question, the video was in poor taste. It was profane, scatological, reflected poorly on EMS and the fire service, and played into every tired stereotype of paramedics and nursing home nurses. But hey, if poor taste and potty humor were a crime, I wouldn’t even have a blog.
In my opinion, Colleton County Fire Rescue’s administrators bungled the handling of the incident, and overreacted by firing the medic in question. My guess is that they had no formal policy on social media, but you can bet they, and others, will develop one after this brouhaha. Let’s hope the policies developed are more even-handed and well thought out than their handling of this incident.
Here at The Borg, we were reminded of our social media policy after this story hit the news. I can sum it up for you in one sentence: “Don’t act an ass in public while representing yourself as an agent of this organization.”
That’s pretty broad, and open to much interpretation, but that’s all that really needs to be said. When you post, respect patient confidentiality, don’t air your agency’s dirty laundry in public, and don’t make any statements you’d be ashamed to own, because there is no such thing as anonymity on the internet.
Above all, I think this guy’s biggest sin in posting this video is that it just wasn’t funny. Just another tired anti-nursing home rant, really, one of a gazillion such war stories told by paramedics every day.
I’ve seen a number of these videos across the blogosphere, and none of them are particularly funny. I’ve thought about making one myself, but they don’t have any pure EMT characters, only cops and firefighters, and I reject that on general principles.
Then again, the original was a pretty hard act to follow:
So this guy is lying in a hospital bed being treated for his pneumonia, and he’s got a non-rebreather mask strapped to his face.
A nurse’s aide comes in the room, and the guy asks, “Are my testicles black?”
The aide, long since used to dirty old men, ignores him, checks his vital signs, refills his water pitcher and leaves.
Later, the respiratory therapist comes in the room to administer an albuterol nebulizer, and the guy asks again, “Are my testicles black?”
Pointedly, the respiratory therapist replies, “That’s not my area, Sir. You’ll have to ask your nurse.”
After lunch, the nurse is hanging the guy’s IV piggyback of antibiotics, and he asks, “Are my testicles black?”
The nurse leaves the room in an indignant huff, and tells the doctor that something must be done with the patient in 403.
Wearily, the doctor trudges down to the room to have a word with his patient. When the patient sees him, a look of profound relief flashes across his face, and he says, “Thank God, it’s my doctor! Tell me, are my testicles black?”
The doctor flips back the sheet, gives the man’s genitals a cursory examination, and says, “Mr. Jones, there appears to be nothing wrong with your testicles.”
The patient heaves a mighty sigh, pulls the non-rebreather mask away from his face and says, very distinctly, “Are. My. Test. Results. Back?”
**********
Riddle me this, Batman: If you could replace every oxygen delivery device on your ammalance – every venturi mask, simple face mask, partial rebreather, nasal cannula and non-rebreather - and replace it with a device that does the work of all those things, is less claustrophobic for the patient, and prevents you from mistakenly checking your patient’s testicles, would you do it?
Yeah, I thought so.
The OxyMask is a nifty little doohickey I’ve seen at the past few trade shows I’ve attended, and the device intrigues me somewhat.
Pictured: pediatric, adult, and multi-OxyMask, suitable for aerosolized medications.
Basically, it’s a skeletonized oxygen mask, fitted with a proprietary venturi system that allows delivery of oxygen concentrations ranging from 24%-90%, depending upon flow rate. That encompasses the practical oxygen delivery concentrations of everything from nasal cannulas to non-rebreathers, folks. Plus, you can suction through ‘em!
Using a separate adaptor, they’ll allow end-tidal waveform capnography with any monitor that uses Oridion’s CO2 monitoring technology. Sadly, no such adaptor exists for you folks using Zoll monitors.
Here at The Borg, we stock our rig shelves with at least 6 nasal cannulas, 6 non-rebreather masks, and 6 hand-held nebulizers, and if we need a nebulizer/mask combo, we have to cannibalize a non-rebreather to do it.
We could do the same thing with a half dozen each of the pediatric and adult OxyMulti Masks, and take at least 24 otherwise superfluous hunks of plastic off our rigs.
The company even has a variant that looks just like a telephone operator’s headset, for the occasional patient with facial burns or trauma.
For an oxygen delivery geek like me, this thing just looks neater than kitten toes. I think I’m gonna have to plant a bug in the ear of The Borg’s product review committee, and see if we can’t get a few of these things to play with.
Any of you EMTs out there use ‘em in your system? What are your thoughts?
You arrive on the scene for the unconscious male lying in the roadway, cruise slowly past the police cars blocking traffic, and without even getting out of your ambulance, you roll down the window and bark, “Leon! Get your ignorant ass outta the road! Someone runs over you, you might damage a perfectly good car!”
And not only does Leon obediently cease being an impediment to traffic flow, he also hobbles meekly to your ambulance and climbs aboard. You should have seen the face of the cops who called us.
Yes, Leon is a patient we transport all the time, and yes, that’s exactly how the call went down.
And no, there is absolutely nothing wrong with him that about 220 grains of Trepanazine wouldn’t fix.
*Of course, The Borg frowns on us referring to such people as frequent fliers. Rather, they’re valued repeat customers, which everyone knows are the foundation to a successful business.
 This blog is part of the Emergency Services Ad Network. For marketing opportunities, please click here |
While doing a drill at the firehouse the other day, DFC Pat Mann noticed the position of the gloves… (more)
There has and always will be the need for an ALS component to pre-hospital care. However, in the… (more)
Recent Comments