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Hat tip to Colt CCO for this.
If you’d like a wry chuckle at a pretentious windbag, go over to View From The Porch and read this post. Scroll through the comments, and meet Thesaurus Boy. I won’t name him directly, lest he show up over here and clog up my comments section with the literary equivalent of Sominex.
I’ll just leave it to you to figure out which guy humps his thesaurus at night, hoping against hope for a woman worthy (read: desperate) of his intellect.
Goofy Female Patient: “I have a bread wrapper stuck in my throat.”
Ambulance Driver: “The same bread wrapper you had stuck in your throat on Friday?”
GFP: “Yes, and I can’t swallow! (Swallows several times and grimaces for emphasis)
AD: (mentally counting to ten) “Ma’am, three days ago you had a barium swallow x-ray and a couple other unnecessary tests, and none of them showed this bread wrapper.
GFP: Well it’s in there, and you didn’t get it! This morning it gagged me, and I almost got it out with my fingers, but it slipped back down.”
AD: (massaging temples and whimpering) “Ma’am, the x-rays would have shown it. There is nothing in there.”
GFP: “It’s got plastic around it! It won’t show up on an x-ray!”
AD: “Plastic wrapped around a piece of wire. Ferrous metal. You know, the stuff that basically glows in the dark on an x-ray.”
GFP: “Plastic.” (folding her arms across her chest petulantly)
AD: “Metal.” (accompanied by the sound of grinding teeth)
GFP: (testily) “Is the doctor going to give me a referral to the surgeon or not?”
AD: “Sure, I’ll go ask him one more time. I’m sure he’ll change his mind about calling a gastroenterologist at 7 pm and explaining that you need an endoscopy for a foreign object with absolutely no physical evidence that there is a foreign object, including irritation or swelling. Incidentally, does your health insurance include a Fairy Tale Rider?”
GFP: “A what?”
AD: “Never mind. The other option is that we can refer you to Dr. XXXX, who just happens to be on-site.”
GFP: “Isn’t he a shrink? Why would I need a shrink?”
AD: “Because apparently it will take a psychiatrist to convince you that there is no bread wrapper lodged in your throat.”
AD: “Sweet mercy, not her again…”
Local Paramedic: “Excuse me?”
AD: “Sorry, did I say that out loud?”
SAPP: “I overdosed on my medications!” (looking proud of herself)
LP: (rolling his eyes) “Two each of Trazadone and Haldol.”
AD: “Is that all? SAPP, were you trying to kill yourself, or were you just trying to get readmitted to the psych unit?”
SAPP: “Nah, I don’t wanna kill myself…right now. I just got tired of seeing all the snakes.”
AD: “And I’m sure the snakes are tired of seeing you. I know I am.”
LP: “So what will you you do for her?”
AD: “Wait five minutes, then call the Doc. She’ll need that long to compose a tale sorrowful enough to get her admitted to the psych ward for suicidal ideation. In the meantime we’ll get prepped for a little punitive gastric lavage.”
LP: “Punitive lavage?”
AD: “Because even though she may not need one, she damned sure deserves one.”
SAPP: “I ain’t getting no lavage.”
AD: “Hmmm, I smell a challenge. Go get the leather restraints, LP.”
AD: “Fraid so, Sport. But it doesn’t hurt so bad. I’ve given a gazillion of ‘em, and I’m pretty good. In fact, I gave one to your Dad last week.”
Bodybuilder Dad: “That’s right, and it didn’t hurt a bit! Plus, you’re tough, aintcha Sport?”
FLK: (tearing up) “But I don’t wanna shot.”
AD: “Nobody does, but sometimes we need ‘em so we can feel better. Tell ya what, you turn around and wrap your arms around your Dad’s neck and bury your head in his shoulder. Relax your legs, and if it hurts a little, scream ‘Purple Pig’ as loud as you can.” (quickly swabs a butt cheek and gives the shot)
FLK: “OW! Puuuuurp – hey! That wasn’t so bad!” (wiping his eyes in relief)
AD: (grinning and pulling a few stickers and a Cadbury creme egg from my pocket) “Told ya it wasn’t so bad. And I got some cool stuff for ya, too.”
Bodybuilder Dad: (in mock indignation) “Hey, you didn’t give me any cool stuff when I got a shot!”
AD: “That’s because you’re 35, and only half as brave as he was.”
FLK: (giggling around a mouthful of chocolate) “Y
ou’re a real wimp, Dad.”
New Doc: “No, I’ll get it! And we need blood gases…and a 12-lead EKG…and a chest x-ray…and I’ll need some Versed and Succinylcholine…and someone needs to get an IV…and..and…are you getting all this???”
AD: “Yup.”
New Doc: “Then why are you still standing here?”
AD: “Because I’m wondering how you’re going to ventilate this person without a BVM, or check breath sounds without a stethoscope, or suction her in case she pukes when we give the paralytics…and I’m really curious how you’re going to do all that stuff by yourself.”
New Doc: “Oh. Yeah. Well, first things first…”
AD: “Yeah, that’s what I was thinking. Let’s secure her airway and get her ventilated, and we can handle all that other business at our leisure.”
New Doc: “Okay, I’ve got the airway if you’ll go get – “
AD: “You said that before, Doc. But airway is a Team Sport, and right now I’m the rest of your team.”
New Doc: (fear and realization dawning in his eyes) “You mean…”
AD: “Yep. In this whole entire hospital, I am your only backup. Welcome to a rural Emergency Department, Doc. What we lack in volume, we make up for in pucker factor.”
New Doc: (swallows nervously) “Okay…”
AD: (sixty seconds and one gentle hip check later) “I got this, Doc. Grab the BVM and get ready to check breath sounds.”
New Doc: (very sheepishly) “Sounds like you’re in. Thanks for the backup. You made that look easy.”
AD: “Even a blind pig finds an acorn now and then, Doc. And you will have plenty of opportunities in the future to back me up, usually when my puckish wit and lack of an internal censor gets me in trouble.”
AD: “Nitroglycerin drip? Already running.”
New Doc: (confused) “But we just got these labs back! How did you -”
AD: “Know she was in heart failure and acute pulmonary edema? Because her family said she’s on a low sodium diet, and she just treated herself to five pounds of boiled crawfish. Plus, the fact that her blood pressure was 240/120 and her lungs sounded like a coffee percolator…”
New Doc: “Oh. Yeah. Well…you need anything else from me?”
AD: (handing him a list) “Well, you could write orders for all this stuff.”
New Doc: (eyes bugging out) “All this??? You’ve already done all this stuff?”
AD: (just a touch smugly) “Yep, and if it’s not too much trouble, you could also get started on arranging a transfer to Big City Memorial.” (turns to walk back to the treatment room)
New Doc: (stage whispering to Laid Back Male Nurse) “Is he always like this?”
LBMN: (chuckling knowingly) “Just let him do his thing, Doc. Check in on him every now and then and make sure he isn’t performing surgery or something. Sometimes he gets a little…enthusiastic.“
I am cursed. That is the only explanation I have for why we are running our third call in Ignorant Thicket in less than 24 hours. Somehow, I have offended the EMS Gods, and they are punishing me for my transgressions.
It’s just past 7:00 pm, and the sun is already down. The strobes are making those weird flashbulb patterns on the pine trees. I know an epileptic medic back in north Louisiana, and I wonder briefly how he deals with the strobes and rotating lights. I idly lean forward and flip a phantom switch on the console, and a huge strobe mounted somewhere on the grill starts flashing. It’s incredibly bright, bathing everything in front of us in a harsh white glare. I trade a look with Lasson.
“How long has that strobe been there?” I ask.
“Ever since I started working up here with you,” Lasson shrugs. “I never knew it worked.”
“Neither did I. The switch wasn’t labeled,” I point out.
“You know,” Lasson says, “I once had a jumpsuit like that. I wore it for six months before I found all the pockets. Seemed like every time I reached for something, I found a new one.”
The call was dispatched as a generic “unknown medical emergency,” which in Ignorant Thicket means it will be a demonic possession, a toddler swallowed by an alligator, or some redneck with his penis caught in a bear trap. Whatever we find will be memorable, of that I am sure.
The address to which we were dispatched turns out to be a house trailer on stilts on the banks of the Shit Creek. The stilts are tall enough that whoever lives there parks his truck and bass boat under his house. This person apparently recycles his empty beer cans, tossing the empties out of the sliding patio doors at the rear of the trailer. It’s quite an impressive mound, at least seven feet tall. There must be ten years’ worth of empties in that pile. Then again, this being Ignorant Thicket, it might be a week’s worth.
Lasson and I leave the stretcher on the ground, hoping fervently that our patient is ambulatory. We don’t have a stair chair, and until now I really haven’t seen the need for one. We grab our equipment and lug it up the steps. For once, there is an immediate answer to our knock on the door.
“Come on in!” a man calls. Inside, there is a slovenly man lounging in a recliner, television remote in hand. He is wearing a tee shirt emblazoned with a silhouette of a revolver and the words Gun control means hitting your target. He jerks his thumb toward the hallway. “Inna back,” he grunts. “My momma’s sick.”
Lasson and I squeeze past his chair with our gear. He makes no move to get out of the recliner, or even to lower the footrest to make room. In the rearmost bedroom of the trailer, there is a fat woman lying in the bed with her head propped up on so many pillows that her chin is touching her chest. There is a puddle of vomit on her flannel nightgown, and she’s doing the death rattle, every breath a gurgling heave for air. The stench of alcohol on her breath is overpowering. She has a home nebulizer machine lying on the nightstand, and an impressive array of pill bottles scattered around.
I jerk the pillows from under her and tilt her head, and her breathing improves only a little. Lasson curses and sprints for the rig to retrieve the one piece of equipment we left downstairs – the suction unit. I try to rake vomit from her mouth with my fingers, but there’s not all that much in there. While I am waiting on Lasson, I grab a BVM and bellow for the man in the living room.
Jesus Christ! Didn’t we just run this call?
“Sir!” I yell. “Could you come in here please?”
I start ventilating the woman as best I can, considering I am wedged between her and the headboard on a full-motion water bed. I wind up folding one leg lotus-style and propping her head across my knee, holding a mask seal with both hands and squeezing the bag under my right arm. Maybe every other ventilation goes in. The man strolls into the bedroom and props a hairy arm on the door frame.
“Yeah?” he asks. I look at him expectantly, but he just gives me a blank stare in return, as if it’s nothing unusual to see a total stranger performing artificial ventilations on his mother.
“Uh, you want to tell me what happened?” I prompt. I feel the entire trailer shudder as Lasson pounds up the steps.
“I put her to bed about five,” he says. “and then I couldn’t wake her up for supper, so I called y’all.”
Lasson bursts into the room past him and hands me a suction catheter, already attached to the unit. I stop ventilating briefly to suction, but get precious little fluids out.
“You called Podunk Ambulance, or you called 911?” I ask.
“Podunk Ambulance,” he answers. “She has a membership.”
Well, that explains why Ignorant Thicket Volunteer EMS isn’t here. Dispatch didn’t bother calling them.
“So she’s been this way for about two hours?” I ask. “What kind of medical history does she have?”
“Naw, since five this morning,” he corrects me. “We were up all night celebrating my birthday.”
I have run this call before. She’s been lying here for hours.
“Well, how was she when you put her in the bed?”
“About like now,” he gestures toward the bed. “We killed about a fifth of Crown Royal between us,” he adds proudly.
How touching. There’s nothing that says ‘I love you’ better than matching your grown son, drink-for-drink, to celebrate his birthday. Apparently she wanted to show him she could still drink him under the table, just like when he was a little sprout.
“You were telling me about her medical history?” I prod.
“Shit, I don’t know,” he shrugs. “She got lotsa problems. All her medicine is right there,” he says, pointing toward the table.
Lasson hands me a laryngoscope and an endotracheal tube, and starts gathering the medications from the table.
He’s reading my mind. Befor
e I can ask for something, he’s already got it done.
I quickly intubate her and inflate the cuff on the tube. I bag gently as Lasson auscultates her chest and epigastrum. He nods in affirmation.
“You’re in,” he tells me. “Lungs sound like she’s aspirated a lot, though.”
“Well, let’s get ready to move her,” I tell him.
I begin pulling the fitted sheet from the bed while Lasson puts her medications in a plastic bowl that, unless I miss my guess, was a Cool Whip container in a previous life.
“Bronchodilators, potassium, oral diabetic meds, Lasix and Prilosec,” he tells me.
Well, that tells me enough. She’s got asthma or COPD, non insulin-dependent diabetes, and maybe hypertension or CHF.
Lasson tosses the sealed bowl onto the bed, and we bundle the woman in the bed sheet. I look at her son.
“Sir, I need you to get one end of the sheet,” I direct. “We’re going to carry her to the ambulance on the sheet.” He holds up his hands and shakes his head.
“I got a bad back,” he protests. “I’m on disability.”
“Look, she needs to be in a hospital right now, and my hands are full. Either get one end of the sheet, or let her die right here. Your choice,” I tell him flatly. I don’t trust this cretin to bag her while Lasson and I do the grunt work.
“All right, all right,” he sighs heavily, grabbing the sheet bundled around his mother’s head. We move gingerly out of the trailer, bumping into walls and knocking over things, sweating and cursing, but eventually make it down to the stretcher. Miraculously, we’re all in one piece, and my tube is still patent.
We deposit the lady on the stretcher, and the man straightens up and groans, massaging his back. I have a hard time working up any sympathy. If there is any justice in this world, a fraud investigator just caught that on videotape, I think spitefully.
“Are you going to follow us to the hospital?” I want to know. He shakes his head.
“Naw, just have ‘em call me,” he says, unconcerned. Without another word, he turns around and trudges back up the steps.
In the truck, Lasson checks a quick blood glucose, and the monitor reads “LO,” which for our machines is less than forty. Lasson gets out IV supplies while I open the drug kit with one hand. I toss a box of 50% dextrose onto the seat beside him. He gets a line quicker than I could have, and administers the D50. The woman doesn’t come around immediately, so he backs out of the rig, slams the doors and drives us back down the rutted, potholed road to the main highway. When he reaches the blacktop, he hits the lights and siren and puts the hammer down.
In twenty minutes, we’re at the hospital in Big City. Dr. Abrams, the physician who was on duty when I brought in the old man, greets us at the nurse’s desk. He’s usually an asshole to anyone wearing a Podunk uniform, which is understandable if not terribly professional. He’s the medical director for Corporate Greed EMS, one of our competitors. For some reason, Abrams usually cuts me a break. I suspect it’s because he’s a good friend of Samir Saleh, and because I let him know quickly that I would reciprocate any nasty attitude he had.
“Every time I see you, you’re bringing me an intubated patient,” he greets us gruffly. I grin at him, and give him the story. He listens patiently, then grunts, “Didn’t you just bring me this patient?”
“That’s what I was thinking,” I grin. “But this one is a female,” I point out.
“In Ignorant Thicket, how can you tell?” he replies. “Put her in Room Two, please.”
A few minutes later, I’m sitting at the nurse’s desk, drinking a Coke as I write my report. Abrams flops down in the chair next to me and touches me on the arm. “The old man died about an hour ago in the ICU,” he tells me. “I worked the code, but he was pretty much gone anyway.”
“What was wrong with him?” I ask.
“Subarachnoid hemorrhage,” he tells me, “plus the aspiration pneumonia, and sepsis too. Train wreck,” he concludes tiredly.
“And this woman?” I ask, nodding toward the room.
“Aspiration and alcohol toxicity, of course,” he rolls his eyes. “You want a square in the blood alcohol pool?” he asks teasingly.
“No thanks, Doc,” I chuckle. “Podunk doesn’t pay me enough to gamble.”
“Then quit and come work for us,” he replies, getting up from the chair and walking away.
Later, I tell Lasson about the conversation. “Abrams tried to recruit me,” I tell him. Lasson says nothing, just raises his eyebrows. “How much do their medics make?” I ask.
“I have no idea,” Lasson answers, “but if you quit and leave me alone at this fucking place, I’ll hunt you down and kill you in your sleep.”
Heh.
I suppose it’s only sinful if you’re sodomizing a pig.
Put his back feet in a tall boot, Mohammed. They kick really hard.
Or so I’m told.
From Tam at View From The Porch, we have this exquisite excerpt from a good rant.
Instead of a handy, portable weapon that requires no great amount of strength to operate, we are instead advised to attempt to take on a 250lb rapist with a teasing brush or a handful of keys. Brilliant plan, that. “Well, sir, we couldn’t revive her, but her assailant should be easy to spot in a lineup. Judging by what she had clenched in her hand in her last moments, his hair should look fantastic.”
But damn, she’s good. Is it any wonder she has legions of admirers?
Disclaimer: The woman pictured is not the woman in the following story. The woman in the story wasn’t nearly as attractive and classy as this chick.
We get another call in Ignorant Thicket the next morning. Well, it’s technically morning – it’s three o’clock – but in my opinion, any call that gets me out of bed up before I am ready to roll out of bed, take a shower and eat breakfast, is in the middle of the fucking night. It’s not the next day until I roll out of bed, take a shower and eat breakfast, regardless of the date I put on the run tickets. The old man we took to Big City Memorial earlier was admitted to the ICU, and the staff doubts he’ll make it.
We’re heading to a shooting. Corporate Greed EMS was also dispatched, but we should arrive at the scene first. We’re both about equal distance from Ignorant Thicket, but I have Lasson (aka Farting Partner, for you folks playing the Home Game) and a gas-burner ambulance, and straight roads all the way. Lasson takes full advantage of this fact, and puts the hammer down.
At this hour, I tend to sleep until we get to the scenes when I don’t have to drive, rationalizing that if we do get into a fiery crash, the last thing I want to do is see it coming. I’d rather wake up in the ICU, or in some ethereal place, preparing to justify my actions to the Great Medical Director In The Sky.
Since both services run EMS calls in Ignorant Thicket, the police call them both when they need an ambulance. The first one to get there gets the patient. If Ignorant Thicket Volunteer EMS gets called directly, they automatically call Podunk Ambulance for transport. Eddie Thibodeaux has threatened his troops with death if they ever call Corporate Greed, primarily because he knows that with Podunk, his crews only have to put up with condescension and rudeness 50% percent of the time.
We arrive on scene to find Eddie Thibodeaux applying bandages to a woman sitting on the stoop of an old house that looks vaguely familiar. She is wearing an old tank top liberally spattered with blood. She is not wearing a bra, and her pendulous breasts are clearly visible through the armholes of the shirt. She is totally oblivious to the fact that her tits are hanging out however, instead focusing on giving Eddie an alcohol-fogged narrative of recent events. She has abrasions all over her arms, and her neck, chest and abdomen are peppered with hundreds of bloody little holes.
Shotgun, obviously. Looks like birdshot. She looks like she’d go about two hundred pounds. Don’t these people know that you’re supposed to use buckshot on big game?
“Shumbish shot me, thash what he done,” the woman slurs. “I ain’t done nothin‘, neither,” she adds indignantly.
Sure, lady. You were just sitting here on your porch, drinking a wholesome glass of milk and reading the Bible, when some nearsighted bird hunter mistook you for a quail. Happens all the time. You should have been wearing your fluorescent orange tank top.
“Hey guys,” Eddie greets us absently, and then looks suspiciously at FP. “Who’s this?”
“Sorry,” I say, and make the introductions. “”Lasson Cocodrie, meet Eddie Thibodeaux. You met his daughter and son-in-law yesterday afternoon.” Lasson and Eddie nod to each other warily.
“Recognize the place, AD?” Eddie asks, inclining his head toward the house.
“Wait a minute,” I say, remembering. “This isn’t-…”
“Yeah, it is,” he confirms. “This is Ricky Gaston’s mother.” He turns to the woman and explains, “This is the paramedic who took care of Ricky.”
“Oh, thash wunnerful,” she says. “I’m sho happy to meechu. You shaved my shon’s life. My name ish Donna,” she offers her hand and bats her eyes at me. I smile back at her.
“Pleased to meet you, Donna. I’m AD. This is my partner, Lasson. He’ll help Eddie get you bandaged up, and then we’ll get you to the hospital. We’ll get these bloody clothes cut off you, and get you covered up with a warm blanket, okay?”
“Shounsh good,” she agrees, her head lolling drunkenly. She appears to be having no difficulty breathing, and her color is good. None of the pellet holes are bleeding significantly, but with this many unnatural openings in a body, you sometimes can’t tell just how bad the injuries are. I get a quick set of vital signs as Lasson and Eddie apply more bandages and tape. We’re not going to get them all, but if we can cover the worst of them quickly, I’ll be happy.
Donna’s heart rate and blood pressure are fine, and her breathing is unlabored. As I listen to her breath sounds, she reaches up and runs her fingers through my hair. I recoil a bit, and look carefully at her.
“Yer cute,” she says adoringly. “I like you. Yer sho gentle, an’ sho kind to me…are you married?” she asks drunkenly. Lasson and Eddie are biting their lips to keep from laughing.
“Well, since you ask,” I answer, feeling my cheeks blush, “I actually am -… “
“-…single,” Lasson finishes, grinning at me evilly. “He’s a single man.”
The bastards are enjoying this.
“Oh, thash jush wunnerful,” she enthuses, “I need a good man, thash gentle, an’ kind…do you think I’m purty?” Lasson and Eddie are making strangled, croaking noises now.
“Well sure, I guess so. I mean, if I was-…”
“I think I’m purty,” she continues as if she hadn’t heard me. “I’m a purty, healthy, shekshy woman, an’ I need a man who needs a purty, healthy shekshy woman…” she trails off, and then puts her hands down the neck of her tank top, pulling out her bloody breasts and holding them up for inspection.
“I got purty titties, don’t I? Purty, healthy, sheckshy titties…” Lasson and Eddie immediately flee the area, leaving me alone with Donna and her purty, healthy, shekshy titties. I can hear them around the corner, howling with laughter. I look around nervously, wondering if anyone else is looking.
Somewhere, Alan Funt has got to have a hidden camera on me…
“Uh yeah, they look healthy to me,” I tell her, blushing even more as I hear Eddie and Lasson break into hysterical laughter again. “Why don’t you tuck them back in, and let’s get you in the truck, okay?”
“Thash fine,” she agrees readily, smiling at me. I offer her my hand and help her stand up. She sways unsteadily and links her arm in mine. She leans against me as I walk her to the truck, rubbing her breasts against my arm and smiling naughtily. I sit her on the stretcher, tell her to stay put, and slam the doors. She crosses her arms across her chest and pouts.
I find Lasson and Eddie leaning against the side of the house, breathing heavily. When they see me, they break into renewed peals of laughter. “Very funny,” I tell Lasson sarcastically. “Do you think you could find the time to drive us to the hospital now?”
“I don’t know,” he says doubtfully. “Are you sure you two don’t need some time alone together?”
Eddie is now on his knees, arms wrapped around his sides, laughing hysterically. I shake my head and leave him there, and climb back into the rig. Presently, Lasson gets up front and starts driving for Big City. Donna is lying back on the stretcher with her eyes closed, but opens them when I start putting a nasal cannula on her. She snorts and grabs my hand, shaking her head wildly, then relaxes, clutching my hand to her bosom. I gently extricate my hand and finish looping the cannula under her ears. I get IV supplies from the cabinet, and wrap a tourniquet around her arm.
“Donna, I need to start an IV on you, okay?” I ask her. She nods in assent, holding out her left arm. She has some good antecubital veins, so I grab a 16-gauge catheter. I look around for the alcohol prep but can’t find it, so I rest her arm on my knee as I twist around on the bench seat to look behind me. Immediately, she snakes her hand up my leg, grabbing my crotch. She is smiling and running her tongue across her lips.
I beat a hasty retreat, backpedaling along the bench seat until I am huddled in a ball at the extreme rear of the truck.
Find your Happy Place. Find your Happy Place… The truck swerves slightly, and I look up to see Lasson’s eyes in the rear view mirror. His shoulders are shaking violently. Donna just keeps licking her lips seductively, patting the bench seat next to the stretcher.
I slowly, gingerly climb off the seat without taking my eyes off her, and firmly grasp her left hand. I quickly swab her arm, bang in the catheter, hook up the line, secure it, and firmly place Donna’s hand on her own lap. It is quite possibly the fastest IV I have ever started. Donna just adopts a hurt expression, poking out her lower lip and batting her eyes. I carefully make my way past her and take up a position on the jump seat directly behind her.
“So Donna, tell me what happened,” I say. “Who shot you?”
“It wush my hushband,” she slurs. “Or maybe hish brother.”
Some family you got there, Donna.
“You don’t know which?” I ask, less surprised than I should be. “Why did they shoot you?”
“It wush one of them,” she confirms. “One wush holdin‘ the flashlight, and one wush shootin‘ the gun. I wush outshide in the bushes.”
Well, they do say blood is thicker than water.
“You were hiding in the bushes? Were they chasing you?”
“Naw,” she replies. “I wush slashin‘ their tiresh.”
Of course! Why didn’t I know that?
“Why were you slashing their tires?”
“Caush they pushed me out on the road, after we left the bar,” she explains as if I’m dense. She holds up one arm, and pulls down the hem of her jeans with the other. “Thash how I got theesh shcrapes. Shumbishes beat me with a pool cue, too.”
“Why didn’t you just call the police?” I ask.
“Didn’t have no phone,” she explains. “Nearesht phone wush at home. I found ‘em at the housh when I got there, sho I deshided to slash their tiresh.”
Well, that clears things up. I can’t imagine why anyone would want to throw you out of the car. You seem like such a classy lady…
We
spend the rest of the trip in silence. , and Donna manages to keep her hands to herself and I am supremely grateful. At Big City Regional, one of the nurses wants to know why I didn’t start bilateral IVs. I play dumb, telling her I couldn’t find a suitable vein. I am not about to tell her why I was reluctant to lean over Donna so I could start an IV in her right arm.
I ask Donna the requisite questions to fill in the blanks on the billing form, and when I ask for her phone number, she grins wickedly.
“Are you gonna’ call me shumtime?” she asks coyly.
“Maybe,” I allow, extending the clipboard. “Sign here, please.”
She signs an illegible scrawl, and hands the pen back to me. “You better call me, shweetie,” she reminds me. “What did you shay yer name wush again?”
“Lasson,” I tell her. “Lasson Cocodrie. I’m in the book.”
“Get the stretcher close to the bed, now. And watch the gap there!”
“Yes Ma’am,” Part-Time Partner says mildly. His smile is strained.
“And he has a catheter, too. Do you know how to deal with a catheter?”
“Yes, Ma’am.”
“Now, you shouldn’t access his infusion port under any circumstances. Only the doctor. A few months ago, one of you ambulance drivers messed up his infusion port and he had to have it replaced. Spent a week in the hospital with an infection – “
“Yes Ma’am, we’ll be careful,” PTP interrupts her. His smile is considerably more strained, and the words are just a little terse. I give him a warning glance and shake my head imperceptibly. PTP has a temper worse than mine.
Dragon Lady hovers nervously nearby as we maneuver the stretcher near the bed. The man lies motionless beneath the covers, his eyes hooded. He looks out of place in the room. Muted lighting highlights wall cases full of mementos. There are ferns, tasteful paintings. A massive desk adorned with a leather blotter, richly upholstered high-backed chair sitting empty behind it. Warm, rich colors. Next to an overstuffed chair sits a side table holding a pipe rack filled with Meerschaum pipes. Books, hundreds and hundreds of books. The room itself bespeaks brandy and cigars, intellectual conversations concerning politics and religion – the sanctum sanctorum of an academic. I can imagine a professor sitting here, relaxing with a pipe and a brandy snifter while he plans tomorrow’s lectures, jotting his notes in a leather bound journal as he smokes.
Which, I suppose, is an accurate image. Or was, I should say. Stanley Harkins was an economics professor at the local university for over thirty years. I had seen him around campus during my years there, a slight, unassuming man who favored tweed coats and a battered old leather satchel. He puttered about campus with an absentminded air, smoking that pipe and walking briskly about his business as if he were perpetually late for a class.
But looks were deceiving. Professor Harkins was neither absentminded, nor was he ever late for anything in his life. He was the professor you took pains to avoid when scheduling classes. Decent grades were easier to get from other professors who didn’t share Stanley Harkins‘ standards of student performance. For a physically unimposing man, he struck fear into the hearts of many a business or economics major.
And now here he lies in a rented hospital bed with a bedside commode sitting next to it. They look obscene in this place. They speak of decay and death, and this room, despite the lighting, does not.
So why is he here, instead of a bedroom? More room, better light. Why not let him die in his own bed?
My answer lies in the surroundings. When we entered this house, we negotiated a gauntlet of expensive, tasteful furnishings. Elaborate rugs over hardwood floors. Bright and cheery window treatments, elegantly upholstered chairs and divans. Monet reproductions on the walls. All very beautiful, and all very…feminine.
This room is not like the rest of the house. This room is anything but feminine, and then I begin to understand. This is His Place.
If I were dying, I’d want it to happen where I was most comfortable. I’d want to be surrounded by the things I loved. And apparently, Dragon Lady understands that.
And so I swallow my retort as Dragon Lady reminds us again to watch the furniture and tells us how to operate our stretcher and be careful of the Foley catheter and make sure the heel protectors are in place and wedge two pillows under his hips because he’s so frail and…
“…and mind his skin!” she snaps. “His skin is so fragile, and he’s allergic to that silk tape, and last time one of your ambulance drivers grabbed his arm and – “
“Actually Ma’am, we’re EMTs,” corrects Part Time Partner, just on the verge of nastiness. Dragon Lady stops abruptly, taken aback.
“So you’re EMTs,” she says condescendingly. “And what exactly does EMT stand for?” she asks with exaggerated courtesy.
“Eggcrate Mattress Technician,” I say, deadpan. “That’s what makes us uniquely qualified to care for your husband.” Dragon Lady’s eyes widen and her mouth opens soundlessly as she tries to digest what I’ve just said. I can see her thinking, did he really just say that??
“Her bark is much worse than her bite,” comes a dry chuckle from the bed. “Although her bite can be pretty nasty, as some of your more unfortunate colleagues have discovered.”
He’s right about that. The crews don’t call her Dragon Lady for nothing.
“You’re new, but he’s not,” Stanley looks at me speculatively, and nods toward my partner. “Did you just start working here?”
“Actually, I’ve spent the last couple of years as our Education Director. We have a medic out with a back injury, so I’m filling in the odd shift here and there.”
“Aaahhh, a fellow teacher as well as a practitioner of the healing arts!” he says, winking slyly. “A real Renaissance Man.“
“Not really,” I allow, “But I did stay at a Holiday Inn Express last night.” He reacts with an outright guffaw. There is still plenty of life in Stanley Harkins‘ laughter, if nowhere else.
I steal a glance at the Dragon Lady, and she is smiling at her husband. Suddenly her face doesn’t seem so severe. The worry lines soften and she starts to resemble the bride in the wedding photo on the wall in the foyer, smiling adoringly at her groom.
Stanley sticks a bony hand from beneath the covers. “Stanley Harkins,” he says warmly. His grip is firm, belying the frailty of his body.
“Ambulance Driver,” I say in greeting. “Nice to meet you, Professor.”
The skin hangs from his arms in folds. Every rib stands out, and his abdo
men is horribly swollen with ascites. His skin is slack, yellowed with jaundice. Stanley Harkins is dying of hepatic cancer, the daily radiation treatments not keeping pace with each new outbreak of cancer cells. First his liver, then his intestines. Pancreas too. Who knows where else. There are blue ink markings over the upper right quadrant of his abdomen, a macabre set of crosshairs courtesy of the radiation lab.
Despite all this, his voice remains strong, and there is light in his eyes, yet we need look no further than the eyes of the Dragon Lady to see worry and despair. She has been married to this man for nearly forty years, but she’ll be a widow within a month. And she knows it. She meets my gaze as I pull the fitted sheet free of the mattress.
“Okay Mr. Harkins, brace yourself!” I say heartily as PTP and I bunch the sheet around him. “One, and two, and three!” On my count, we lift Stanley bodily and place him gently on the stretcher. The move looks much less coordinated than it is, and Dragon Lady’s hand flies to her mouth.
“Be careful!” she scolds. “You almost dropped him!”
“Don’t worry Ma’am,” I reassure her. “We have a strict company policy. We only drop patients on Mondays. Makes it easier to track the complaints.”
“I’ll bet it does!” Stanley chortles. “And what is today, I wonder?” he asks mischievously, already knowing the answer.
“Monday,” PTP answers solemnly, with a wink at Dragon Lady. She blinks a couple of times, looks at her husband, and starts giggling. Her shoulders shake with laughter, and he reaches out a trembling hand to brush back her hair. She closes her eyes and leans over, touching her forehead against his. He chuckles and plants a soft kiss on her forehead before she straightens up. Her eyes are moist.
“Mrs. Harkins,” I say softly as we move the stretcher away from the bed. She looks at me questioningly. “We’ll take good care of him, I promise.”
Unless you take the time to talk to them.
Over the next month, Stanley Harkins and I did a lot of talking. My class schedule pretty much assured I’d be available for every one of his radiation treatments. We talked about his academic career, we talked about hunting, training dogs, EMS…whatever subject struck our fancy. I learned his wife’s name was Mirriam, and that they had married shortly after World War II. I learned his son’s names, where they lived and where their careers were headed. I explained the pharmacodynamics of the medicines he was taking, and he explained how the Fed sets interest rates, the stock market, hedge funds, whatever. I may have even grasped some of it.
And in our daily trips in and out of his house, I learned to call him Stan and her Mirriam. I learned that she wasn’t a Dragon Lady at all. In fact, she had a pretty raunchy, twisted sense of humor, as did Stan. When she laughed, it would start as a girlish giggle and grow into a snorting, belly-rolling drunken guffaw. I made it a point to make her laugh as often as possible. Trading lame jokes with the Harkins took some of the drudgery out of the transfer routine.
No EMT I know likes doing transfers. I said as much to Stan one day, not long after we met.
“Perfectly understandable,” he agreed. “You can’t have gotten into emergency care for…this.” He waves his hand toward his feet, gesturing at his frail body in what can only be described as disgust.
“No, definitely not,” I grin ruefully. “But it pays the bills, so I stay with it.”
“Why?” he asks me with a piercing look. I can imagine him giving the same look to a hapless student who blurted out the first answer that came to mind. It’s a look that says, defend your position. I sigh and try to explain.
“Stan, they sell you on the idea of heroically saving lives on every other call, but the reality is calls like this. Or hemorrhoids at 3 am. Or people who have been sick for a week, but are too lazy to go see their own doctor. It’s draining.”
“You haven’t answered the question,” he chides. “Why do you stay in it, if it’s so draining?”
“Maybe because I’m a hopeless idealist at heart. Maybe because I still think that the chance to make a difference is just one call away. Maybe because even though I bitch and complain about how boring it is, the reality is, I like it. You call, we come. No uncertainty, no ambiguity. You call, we come.”
“And now we come to it,” he says knowingly. “You dislike ambiguity. You are a very direct person. There’s no subterfuge about you.”
“Oh, but there is,”I disagree, “when it suits my purpose. I’m a chameleon. I can be whatever it takes to treat my patient, get the history I need…whatever. Most of my patients and co-workers have no idea who I really am.”
“No, I wouldn’t say so,” he muses. “A perceptive person might gain a pretty good idea of exactly who you are.”
“I doubt it,” I snort. “I’m an amateur actor, professional interrogator and occasional crisis manager. But definitely not the hero I wanted to be when I took my first EMT class.”
“I don’t know,” he says cryptically, “I’ve found that heroes are often the most unlikely of people, found in the most unlikely of places.” He says nothing more, closing his eyes and dozing for the remainder of the trip.
I made seven more trips with Stan. Each day saw him get progressively weaker. He’d spend most of the trip dozing, his chest barely moving under the covers. I had to use the pediatric cuff to check his blood pressure. He woke only when we were moving him from one bed to another. We’d still joke with Mirriam, and she’d laugh politely, but there wasn’t much mirth in it.
On the morning of the last day I transported him, as I was rolling him out of the den, I noticed a shadowbox tucked into a niche between rows of bo
oks. In it was a picture of Stan as a young man, an army lieutenant with his arm slung across a buddy’s shoulders. His cap was perched at a jaunty angle on his head, and he wore a broad grin. The light of the devil danced in his eyes. A young soldier in the bloom of health, all full of piss and vinegar and the invincibility of youth.
I stopped rolling the stretcher as PTP and I examined his medals. Most of them were campaign medals, but there were a few in there we could recognize – Expert Rifleman’s badge, Purple Heart, Silver Star and Bronze Star. An Airborne patch and sergeant’s chevrons. PTP and I traded a look. Stan didn’t wake up during the trip to the cancer treatment center.
On the ride home, he was awake, but tired and listless. I sat at his side, checking his blood pressure. “Saw your service medals in the den, Stan,” I said mildly. “I never knew you were in the military.”
“You never asked,” he retorted. His voice is cracked and faint, and I have to lean close to hear him, but there is still the hint of that devilish grin hovering around his lips. “Started out as a buck private, went overseas as a sergeant, won a commission as a Second Lieutenant not long afterward.”
“Direct commission, like you earned the promotion on the battlefield, or you went to OCS?” I press. This is a story I’d like to hear, and Stan doesn’t have many stories left.
“Doesn’t matter,” he rasps. “The Army was good to me. Retired as a Lieutenant Colonel.”
“And a hero, Mr. Modest,” I remind him teasingly. “I saw your Silver Star and Bronze Star. Like you said, you meet heroes in the most unlikely places.”
Stan said something in reply, and I said nothing else for the remainder of the trip. I didn’t know what to say. We were told that evening that Stan and Mirriam had canceled further radiation appointments, and Stan had made arrangements for hospice care. He died maybe a week later. I didn’t go to the funeral.
But I remember what he rasped in my ear that afternoon on the way back to his home. I remind myself of it whenever I question what it is that I do, and why.
“No, you’re the hero,” he had told me. “My hero, at least.” I straightened up and looked at him questioningly, and he motioned me to lean back over.
“Because you make my wife laugh every time you come over. She hardly ever gets to laugh any more.”
Yeah, I’ll take that.
There is a man in Ignorant Thicket who will not get off the floor. We don’t know if he has fallen, or if he has passed out, or even if he is alive. For all I know, he could just like the view from the floor. What we do know is that our dispatcher, based on her in-depth, thirty-second conversation with the 911 caller, knows exactly what is wrong with him. He will not get up off the floor, that’s what’s wrong with him, and if we will stop calling her and asking stupid questions, and drive to Ignorant Thicket as fast as humanly possible, Everything Will Be All Right.
We arrive at the address right behind Gene and Beth Comeaux of Ignorant Thicket Volunteer EMS. We all approach the mobile home, crowding together on the small porch among the potted ferns and wind chimes. We pound on the door, but no one answers. Someone is obviously home however, because we hear the sound of a vacuum cleaner inside. I open the door and stick my head in.
“Hey!” I shout over the vacuum cleaner. A middle-aged woman looks up from her cleaning, startled. “Did you call an ambulance?” I shout. She nods vigorously and waves us in, still vacuuming.
In the middle of the floor is a thin little man, wearing nothing but his briefs. He is barely breathing, his mouth opening spasmodically like a fish. There is a small puddle of vomit on the floor next to his mouth, and he has a highly suspicious looking brown lump in the seat of his briefs. The woman pays him no mind, calmly vacuuming the floor around him.
“Uh, Ma’am?” I ask. She keeps on vacuuming, so I ask louder, “Ma’am! Could you turn off the vacuum cleaner, please?” She switches off the vacuum and turns to face me. Gene and Beth roll the old man over onto his back and begin BVM ventilation.
“What?” she asks irritably.
What do you mean, ‘what’? You called us, lady!
“Is this the man we were called for?” I ask pointedly. “What happened?”
“Lazy sumbitch won’t get off the floor,” she snaps testily, “and I got cleaning to do.”
“Ma’am, how long has he been like this? For that matter, who is he?”
“He’s my good-for-nothing, alcoholic, lazy husband,” she informs me. “He’s been there since about eight this morning, I’d say.” She gives him a little prod with her foot. “Get the Hell up, you lazy sumbitch!”
“Since 8:00?” I ask incredulously. I check my watch – 4:00 in the afternoon. “You mean he’s been laying here like this for eight hours?” I explode. “What is wrong with you, lady?”
“Ain’t a Goddamned thing wrong with me,” she answers, “except for having to put up with his worthless ass. He’s a lazy sumbitch, that’s what’s wrong with him.”
I kneel next to the man, and check his pulse. Farting Partner has the intubation equipment set up, and is attaching monitor leads. I can’t feel a radial pulse, but the monitor shows an odd rhythm. It looks like ventricular bigemeny, but at second glance, the PVCs seem to be falling very late in the cardiac cycle. I decide that I’m looking at two rhythms, superimposed on one another – a profound sinus bradycardia, and a ventricular escape rhythm. I get the pacemaker pads out of the monitor pouch.
I’ll pace him, and that ought to bring him around. If I can get his pulse and blood pressure up, hopefully his breathing will improve.
I’m in the process of attaching the pads when the woman starts up the vacuum cleaner again. The monitor screen goes haywire.
“LADY, WILL YOU TURN THAT FUCKING THING OFF??” I shout at her. “I AIN’T GONNA TELL YOU AGAIN!”
Shocked, she stares at me but turns off the vacuum cleaner, and the monitor screen clears.
“Looky here, you little-” she starts to say.
“Ma’am, your husband is dying,” I interrupt as I apply the other pad and start dialing up the current. “We need you to get his ID, insurance cards and medications, right now.”
She glares at me a moment longer and stomps off. With the increasing pacing current, the old man’s chest muscles start twitching violently, but eventually I am rewarded with the characteristic wide QRS complexes that indicate electrical capture.
I try to feel a carotid pulse, but I can’t tell if I’m feeling an actual pulse or his neck muscles twitching. FP grins at me though, as he palpates a quick blood pressure.
“Ninety palp,” he says, looking relieved. The man isn’t breathing any better, however. Beth and Gene are doing effective BVM ventilations, but his lungs sound nasty, with coarse crackles in the upper fields and large airways. I consider just transporting and having them ride in with me to ventilate the old man, but decide against it.
He needs a tube now. It’s almost twenty minutes to Big City General Hospital, and it looks as if he’s aspirated already.
I intubate the man without too much trouble, and as I am taping down the tube, I look up to see the old woman handing cards and a bag of medication bottles to FP. She looks a little more concerned than before.
“Is he gonna be all right?” she asks uncertainly. I look her squarely in the eyes.
“I have no idea,” I answer honestly. “He would have had a better chance if you had called eight hours ago.” I don’t even attempt to keep the accusation out of my voice. I want her to realize her callousness probably killed her husband. I want her to be overwhelmed with guilt. I want her to be sorry, but I’m not sure she ever will be.
Gene helps Farting Partner and I load the stretcher, and Beth climbs in the back with me for the trip to the hospital. She ventilates while I attempt to start an IV. He doesn’t have the best veins in the world, and much to my chagrin, I have to stick him three times. I wish I was one of those people who could get blood from a rock, but I’m only average when it comes to IV cannulation.
e="font-style:italic;">On the bright side, some times I feel like I could fall down the stairs and accidentally intubate people on the way down.
I rarely have a problem getting a tube, and quite often I’ve intubated the patient when the doctor couldn’t. All those fancy airway skills aren’t doing this old man much good though, and Beth is starting to look a little uncomfortable. I motion for her to switch places with me, and she smiles gratefully.
“Thanks,” she grins. “My hands were getting tired.” Beth Comeaux has tiny hands, and has to use both of them to squeeze a BVM, a task she has been doing for twenty minutes. She had a hard time learning how to ventilate a manikin in EMT class, and she only got her patch three months ago. This may be the first real patient she has ever bagged.
“Check his pupils for me, would you?” I ask, handing her a penlight. She does, and looks up at me, frowning.
“Right pupil is fixed and dilated,” she says grimly. “Left one’s a little sluggish. Does that mean what I think it means?”
“Yep. He probably had a stroke, intracranial hemorrhage, something like that.”
“You suspected that all along, didn’t you?” she asks admiringly.
I taught Beth’s EMT-Basic course, as well as Gene’s EMT-Intermediate course. I wrote their medical protocols, and I browbeat Samir Saleh into agreeing to be their medical director. They think I’m the all-powerful Paramedic God of All I Survey, bless their impressionable little hearts. I hope they never learn the truth.
“Honestly, I had no idea what was wrong with him,” I confess. “Sometimes you never find out, but you do the best you can, and hope it was the right thing.” She looks doubtful, as if this is news she would rather not hear.
“Not quite like class, is it?” I ask her.
“Harder,” she confirms with a rueful grin. “I didn’t think anything could be tougher than your EMT class.”
“Now you know why I gave you those crazy scenarios in class, don’t you?” I challenge. “It was to prepare you for days like these.”
“Nothing can prepare you for days like these,” she retorts. “These people never cease to amaze me.”
“Hell, you grew up there,” I snort. “These folks are your people. You ought to be used to it by now.” I smile, reliving the image of the woman calmly vacuuming the floor around her husband’s body.
It shouldn’t be funny, but I start chuckling and it becomes contagious. Soon Beth and I are laughing hysterically in the back of the rig.
“I can’t believe she just kept vacuuming,” she chortles, “until you yelled at her, ‘Lady, will you turn that fucking thing off?’ She’ll probably file a complaint.”
“Fuck her,” I say cheerfully. “Let her complain. As far as I’m concerned, she was criminally negligent. She ought to be in jail.” Beth nods in agreement.
“Only in Ignorant Thicket…” she muses.
“Yeah,” I agree, “only in Ignorant Thicket. Say, did I ever tell you what a Ignorant Thicket girl says after having sex? She says -… ”
“I know, I know,” Beth says, rolling her eyes. “She says, ‘get off me Daddy, you’re crushing my cigarettes.’ It’s Daddy’s favorite joke.”
This time, I’ve voluntarily gotten splattered. Stole this from El Capitan at Baboon Pirates, who stole it in turn from Ellison, who stole it from…
…oh, who the hell cares. Point is, I found it interesting, so I’m doing it. Play along if you’d like. The idea is to place in bold type the books you’ve read from this list of 100. If there are others you’ve read by the same author, include those under the original, without the author’s name in parentheses.
1. The Da Vinci Code (Dan Brown)
2. Pride and Prejudice (Jane Austen)
Sense and Sensibility
3. To Kill A Mockingbird (Harper Lee)
4. Gone With The Wind (Margaret Mitchell)
5. The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King (Tolkien)
6. The Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring (Tolkien)
7. The Lord of the Rings: Two Towers (Tolkien)
8. Anne of Green Gables (L.M. Montgomery)
9. Outlander (Diana Gabaldon)
10. A Fine Balance (Rohinton Mistry)
11. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (Rowling)
12. Angels and Demons (Dan Brown)
13. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (Rowling)
14. A Prayer for Owen Meany (John Irving)
15. Memoirs of a Geisha (Arthur Golden)
16. Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (Rowling)
17. Fall on Your Knees(Ann-Marie MacDonald)
18. The Stand (Stephen King)
19. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (Rowling)
20. Jane Eyre (Charlotte Bronte)
21. The Hobbit (Tolkien)
The Silmarillion
22. The Catcher in the Rye (J.D. Salinger)
23. Little Women (Louisa May Alcott)
24. The Lovely Bones (Alice Sebold)
25 . Life of Pi (Yann Martel)
26. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (Douglas Adams)
The Restaurant at the End of The Universe
27. Wuthering Heights (Emily Bronte)
28. The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe (C. S. Lewis)
The Chronicles of Narnia
29. East of Eden (John Steinbeck)
30. Tuesdays with Morrie (Mitch Albom)
31. Dune (Frank Herbert)
32. The Notebook (Nicholas Sparks)
33. Atlas Shrugged (Ayn Rand)
34. 1984 (Orwell)
35. The Mists of Avalon (Marion Zimmer Bradley)
36. The Pillars of the Earth (Ken Follett)
37. The Power of One (Bryce Courtenay)
38. I Know This Much is True (Wally Lamb)
39. The Red Tent (Anita Diamant)
40. The Alchemist (Paulo Coelho)
41. The Clan of the Cave Bear (Jean M. Auel)
42. The Kite Runner (Khaled Hosseini)
43. Confessions of a Shopaholic (Sophie Kinsella)
44. The Five People You Meet In Heaven (Mitch Albom)
45. Bible
46. Anna Karenina (Tolstoy)
47. The Count of Monte Cristo (Alexandre Dumas)
48. Angela’s Ashes (Frank McCourt)
Tis
49. The Grapes of Wrath (John Steinbeck)
50. She’s Come Undone (Wally Lamb)
51. The Poisonwood Bible (Barbara Kingsolver)
52. A Tale of Two Cities (Dickens)
53. Ender’s Game (Orson Scott Card)
54. Great Expectations (Dickens)
55. The Great Gatsby (Fitzgerald)
56. The Stone Angel (Margaret Laurence)
57. Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (Rowling)
58. The Thorn Birds (Colleen McCullough)
59. The Handmaid’s Tale (Margaret Atwood)
60. The Time Traveller’s Wife (Audrey Niffenegger)
61. Crime and Punishment (Fyodor Dostoyevsky)
62. The Fountainhead (Ayn Rand)
63. War and Peace (Tolstoy)
64. Interview With The Vampire (Anne Rice)
65. Fifth Business (Robertson Davis)
66. One Hundred Years Of Solitude (Gabriel Garcia Marquez)
67. The Sisterhood of the Travelling Pants (Ann Brashares)
68. Catch-22 (Joseph Heller)
69. Les Miserables (Hugo)
70. The Little Prince (Antoine de Saint-Exupery)
71. Bridget Jones’ Diary (Fielding)
72. Love in the Time of Cholera (Marquez)
73. Shogun (James Clavell)
74. The English Patient (Michael Ondaatje)
75. The Secret Garden (Frances Hodgson Burnett)
76. The Summer Tree (Guy Gavriel Kay)
77. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (Betty Smith)
78. The World According To Garp (John Irving)
79. The Diviners (Margaret Laurence)
80. Charlotte’s Web (E.B. White)
81. Not Wanted On The Voyage (Timothy Findley)
82. Of Mice And Men (Steinbeck)
83. Rebecca (Daphne DuMaurier)
84. Wizard’s First Rule (Terry Goodkind)
85. Emma (Jane Austen)
86. Watership Down (Richard Adams)
87. Brave New World (Aldous Huxley)
88. The Stone Diaries (Carol Shields)
89. Blindness (Jose Saramago)
90. Kane and Abel (Jeffrey Archer)
91. In The Skin Of A Lion (Ondaatje)
92. Lord of the Flies (Golding)
93. The Good Earth (Pearl S. Buck)
94. The Secret Life of Bees (Sue Monk Kidd)
95. The Bourne Identity (Robert Ludlum)
96. The Outsiders (S.E. Hinton)
Rumble Fish
97. White Oleander (Janet Fitch)
98. A Woman of Substance (Barbara Taylor Bradford)
99. The Celestine Prophecy (James Redfield)
100. Ulysses (James Joyce)
Damn, that’s all? Only one of the Bronte sisters listed? No Cervantes? No Theodore Dreiser? Melville? Bram Stoker? Mary Shelley?
Philistines.
No Heinlein, or Roger Zelazny? What about Ernest Gaines, one of my favorite authors?
What about the poems of Pablo Neruda that I love to quote to chicks when I want ‘em to think I’m all romantical?
Pretty incomplete list, if you ask me.
And in the “Maybe Not Literature With a Capital ‘L’ But Still Damned Entertaining” category, add to that everything written by the following authors:
W.E.B. Griffin
Peter Hathaway Capstick
Tom Clancy
John Grisham
Robin Cook
Patricia Cornwell
Michael Crichton
Stephen Hunter
Anne Rice
Larry McMurtry
…and about a gazillion others. Tel
l ya what – if you decide to pick up this meme, add to it any authors whom you have read all their works. Add your Must Reads to the list. Think of it as the Blogosphere Book Club.
*grin*
1917-2007
Louisiana lost a legend yesterday. In 56 years as Grambling’s football coach, Eddie Robinson took a tiny, all-black college to international fame and recognition, and along the way, shaped the lives and careers of a couple of generations of young black men. And he did it in the heart of the South before, during and after the peak of the civil rights movement, when being a young black man was no easy thing.
Ask any of his former players or the people whose lives he touched, and the common refrain would be, “He taught more than football. He taught me how to be a man, and succeed in life.”
Aside from his success on the football fields, the winning seasons, the titles and championships, the hundreds he sent to the NFL, the four NFL Hall of Famers, his players had a graduation rate that would make any current college coach envious. He taught them dignity, responsibility, and the value of hard work – lessons any good father would teach his sons, and lessons that many, many of Eddie Robinson’s boys would not have gotten otherwise.
Sports writers will wax poetic today about the kind of man he was, and do so in far more eloquent words than I. But I’ll say this: Eddie Robinson was a credit to his race.
The human race.
Rest easy, Coach.
Okay, Dad Gone Mad goes on the list of daily reads. If you liked Boobs, Injuries and Dr. Pepper, you’ll love this guy. I’m rolling here, people.
More posts from Yours Truly coming tomorrow.
That is all.
…but only during the hours of 8:00 am to 5:00 pm, and not on weekends, holidays or golfing Wednesdays. Paying patients only, Medicaid not accepted. Admittance conditional upon positive wallet biopsy. And not if you actually need emergency care or anything unprofitable. Not valid in some states. Enter at your own risk. Some patients may check in, but they don’t check out.
Give it a few years, and signs like the one above will be replaced with signs like this one:
A physician-owned specialty hospital called 911 for a critical patient who developed breathing problems after spinal surgery. I’ve run more than a few calls like this. An excerpt from the article:
The episode occurred at a small hospital that is owned and run by doctors — one of roughly 140 such hospitals around the country, with nearly two dozen more under development, that are set up to specialize in certain types of procedures like heart surgery, back operations and hip replacements.These hospitals have been assailed for cherry-picking the most profitable procedures from the nation’s 4,500 or so full-service hospitals.
Critics have argued that the doctors have a financial incentive in sending patients to their own facilities, even when those patients might be better off having their surgery in regular hospitals.
Now I may be shooting myself in the foot here because I make a fair bit of money teaching certification courses at small specialty hospitals like these, but the article shines a spotlight on the ugly issue of money and health care. In my opinion, specialty hospitals are not good for our health care system.
Emergency Departments are colossal money losers just about everywhere you look. Lack of access to primary care, coupled with the paltry reimbursement from Medicaid that in many cases is far less than the actual cost of the care provided, forces a disproportionate number of the poor and uninsured to use hospital Emergency Departments as their primary health care portal. I don’t have statistics, but my experience tells me that the vast majority of these ED visits are clinic-type ailments that could and should be handled by the patient’s primary care physician, if they had one. But EMTALA places the financial burden of care for these people squarely on the shoulders of the hospital Emergency Department and by extension, the poor underpaid sap with “MD” following his name who is unlucky enough to be working there.
Most full service hospitals subsidize their Emergency Department losses with revenue streams from profitable areas like outpatient surgery, endoscopy and the like. Teaching hospitals can do it on the cheap because they have a steady supply of slave labor in the form of medical residents still learning their profession.
But these specialty hospitals siphon away the profits from the larger hospitals without being required to provide expensive emergency care services. In some cases, like the one cited here, there isn’t even a doctor on-site 24/7. Wood paneled rooms and the newest gee-whiz medical technology don’t do you a lot of good when your surgeon is sleeping at home in your moment of dire need. Give me an on-site doctor over a mint on the pillow every time.
Even Podunk General Hospital, Tire Repair, Nail Salon and Crawfish Hut has a doctor on-site 24/7, and we’re constantly wondering where the money for our next box of gauze is coming from.
What to do about the situation, I don’t know. The marketplace drove doctors to these specialty hospitals. You spend upwards of twelve years of your life in school learning the healing arts, sacrificing your sanity, time with your family and half a million bucks in tuition, you deserve the right to seek the highest compensation for the service you provide. In many cases, short-sightedness and lack of respect from the hospital administration were the culprit responsible for driving the physicians away. In other cases it was pure economics.
But the fact remains that our hospital system is starting to resemble a shriveled husk of buildings and infrastructure, while the people who keep the system propped up are starting to leave for greener pastures. The few dedicated ones who remain (Docs, nurses, mid-level practitioners and your humble scribe) are feeling the added burden. It’s only a matter of time before this whole house of cards collapses.
Congresscritters, either overhaul EMTALA and find a way to make primary care more accessible for patients and profitable for providers, or pass legislation requiring specialty hospitals to operate an Emergency Department.
Take your pick, but something has to be done.
And while you’re at it, it would be nice if the Medicare reimbursement for ambulance transport actually came close to covering the cost of ambulance transport. Otherwise, within a few years we’ll have nice, shiny, well-staffed hospitals and lots of very sick patients with no way to get there.
Having only done this for a few months, I’m not sure of the blogosphere linkage etiquette. On the one hand, it’s flattering that people like my humble screed here enough to link me. On the other, the blogroll threatens to get too long to be manageable.
Now, if I enjoyed the popularity of my blog daddy Lawdog, or inspired the worship that Tam gets, I’d have to keep the list pared down to just my recommended reads.
But, being the shameless narcissist and approval whore that I am, I shall continue to maintain two distinct blogrolls.
Blogs I Read Every Day are just that. They’re folks I find interesting, funny or inspirational. Some, like the Lawdog, inspired me to start this blog. Others have been readers since Day One, and we kinda grew on one another. Others still, I just find interesting. I recommend them all.
The Reciprocal Blogroll consists of those folks who were kind enough to link me, and whom I visit regularly, but not every day. Some post more often than others, and some may be interesting only to me. They’re an eclectic bunch, to say the least. For you folks who link to me and I haven’t reciprocated, my apologies. I’m making a concerted effort to only include links to those folks who post fairly frequently.
So without further ado, I hereby announce the addition of John Shirley’s Wandering Thoughts. A number of additions have been made to the Reciprocal Blogroll as well.
Enjoy. I do!
We now break from our regularly scheduled snark and quasi-humor to bring you this valuable Public Service Announcement. Bob at The Eagle’s Nest tells us a personal tale of his disquieting glimpse of his own mortality – the frightening specter of The Big C.
I urge any of you who have relatives over the age of fifty to have them read Bob’s tale. It ain’t pleasant, but it could save a life.
Seriously.
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