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You will be happy to know that during my lecture today, nary a profane word escaped my lips.

Okay, well maybe one.

Or two.

But they were only little ones.

I swear.

…I’ve always thought there was a certain something honorable in the old saying, “You call, we haul.”

No questions, no ambiguity, no moral quandary.

Call for and ambulance, an ambulance comes. The people on that ambulance will render the same care whether you’re homeless or wealthy, felon or cop, sinner or saint.

That’s what we do.

As loudly as I may occasionally bitch about the rampant system abuse I deal with on a daily basis, that lack of moral ambiguity is what keeps me doing it; I see honor in using my talents without regard to to recompense.

That’s why seeing this is so distressing. Actually, distressing is too weak a word. Morally repugnant covers it nicely.

If any of my fellow EMTs and paramedics out there are members of the International Association of EMTs and Paramedics, why not drop a line to your union leadership and ask them why the hell a labor union is whoring themselves out shilling for Big Pharmacy.

It’s bad enough that Robert Jarvik wasted what credibility he had among the medical community pushing Lipitor. Do you want to waste what little credibility you have among your members and the rest of the medical community?

Not kosher, IAEP. Not kosher at all.

and here’s the proof:

I’d regale you with a tale of heroic derring-do on how I managed to corral the little rabid flying weasel, but it’s late, and I have to sign books and bore people to tears deliver one of my (in)famously entertaining lectures tomorrow.

I do have a new column up on EMS1.com, though.

Enjoy, and I’ll post something worthwhile tomorrow.

Those of you who weighed in on my Wound Ballistics post, many thanks. The skeleton of a presentation is there, and I’m starting to add a little meat. Should have it done soon.

It’s missing a couple of things, however.

Purely for comedic effect, I need a movie clip in mpeg format of an actor being slammed backward by a special effects harness Hollywood bullet impact.

And what I’d really like is the scene from the gun range in SWAT, when Hondo says, “They only roll in John Woo movies…not in real life.”

Can anybody help me out?

“Happy Easter, Ma’am,” I tell her cheerfully. “What brings you to the ER today?”

“I think I have pink eye.”

“Oooookay. Have you been exposed to pinkeye lately?” I try to keep my voice pleasant, and avoid rolling my eyes.

I said try, not succeed. Immediately, she gets embarrassed and defensive.

“Well, my grandson has it, and my eyes have been bothering me for three days since then, and they sent me home from work because pinkeye is so contagious…”

“It’s okay, Ma’am,” I reassure her. “Lemme look at your eyes for a moment.”

They’re both clear. No drainage, no reddening. If you squint real hard, both conjunctivae might look inflamed. That is, if you squint real hard.

“What can they do for pinkeye?” she wonders, “Because this is driving me nuts. I gotta get something for it.”

“Depends on whether it’s viral or bacterial,” I answer. “If it’s viral, we can do precisely…nothing. If it’s bacterial, we can prescribe some antibiotic drops.”

“How can you tell the difference?”

” Drainage, for one. If it’s producing a lot of filmy goop or eye boogers, it’s probably bacterial. The doctor might also be able to tell if he looks at your eyes with a slit lamp.”

“So how fast do these antibiotic drops clear it up?” she asks. “If it’s bacterial, I mean.”

“One average, about one day faster than…doing nothing at all. That is, if it’s bacterial. Takes maybe three, four days.”

“Oh,” she says, crestfallen. “Shit.”

“Yup,” I agree. “Have a seat in Room Four, Ma’am. The doctor will be in shortly.”

I walk back to the ER Nurse’s Station, thankful that my internal censor is working correctly. I want to chase her outside, screaming maniacally, “and don’t come back until you’re actually SICK! This is EASTER, for pity’s sake!”

But I don’t, and I’m proud of myself.

“So what’s the deal with the lady at the triage desk?” Favorite Doc wants to know.

“An emergent, highly unstable case of pinkeye. We must intervene swiftly and aggressively, bringing all our resources to bear upon her affliction, lest her condition deteriorate into…redeye, I guess. All will be lost if that happens.”

“Does she know that – “

“-pinkeye ain’t something you come to the ER for, and that there ain’t much to do for it?” I finish. “Yeah, I think she might have gotten that impression from my demeanor. Perhaps you should tell her yourself, though, and discharge her tout suite, lest her condition cause me to come down with the pink leg for the rest of the shift.”

“Pink leg?” he asks, cocking an eyebrow.

“That’s where the standard red ass has started to spread out, Doc. I’m getting dangerously close.”

I walk in to work today, and there are buzzards circling the Emergency Department.

Seriously.

That’s never a good sign.

If I had but one message I could pass on to my students and my child, what would it be? What lessons am I most passionate about?

Would it be to always remember the ABCs; Airway, Breathing and Circulation? Or Ambulate Before Carry?

Would it be a particularly nifty piece of airway management kung fu?

Would it be some useful tidbit of drug arcania?

Perhaps it would it be one of my homespun homilies, such as “You’re learning to be mechanics on the human body. Strive to understand how that particular mechanism works, rather than be satisfied to be the medical equivalent of the pimply-faced kid standing behind the parts counter at Autozone.”

Or perhaps I’d crib lines from Ben Carlson: “Don’t sweat the small stuff…and it’s all small stuff.”

If I’m teaching pediatrics, it might be, “The best way to establish a rapport with a child is to be a child yourself.”

Or I might choose one of my more frequently used admonitions: “Never stop questioning. Half of what I learned in school turned out to be bullshit. Half of what I’m teaching you today will prove to be bullshit ten years from now. Don’t be satisfied with memorizing what I’m teaching you; question all of it so that your future consists of something more than repeating the mistakes of your predecessors.”

I might remind my students that if you scratch a doctor, you’ll always find a frustrated teacher just below the surface, and to use that to their advantage.

What brings me to these ruminations, you ask? Well Cranky Professor tagged me with a meme, the rules of which can be summed up thusly:

Post a picture or make/take/create your own that captures what YOU are most passionate for students to learn about.

Give your picture a short title.

Title your blog post “Meme: Passion Quilt.”

Link back to this blog entry.

Include links to 5 (or more) educators.

If I were faced with giving my last lecture, what would it be? Would I be as inspirational as Randy Pausch? What on Earth would I say that I don’t routinely say in a hundred other mundane lectures?

Well, I’d say this:

Discover your gifts, and honor them.

I think the noted philosopher Ben Parker said it best when he told his nephew, “With great power comes great responsibility.”

I thought Uncle Ben had said it first, but then I realized he had cribbed the lines from the Luke 12:48:

“…For unto whomsoever much is given, of him shall be much required: and to whom men have committed much, of him they will ask the more.”

Now, perhaps the kid in the picture has yet to discover his gifts, or perhaps none of them involve reading signs.

I don’t mean to get all religious here, but I firmly believe that each one of us is endowed with certain gifts. They may be great, shining talents…or they may be small and seemingly insignificant, even to those who possess them. But to at least some in the world, those gifts are the greatest treasure one could hope to find.

Find yours, and honor them.

How dreary a life must be to have never discovered what you and you alone can offer to the world. How unsatisfying to die knowing that on the tapestry of human existence, you never contributed your own unique stitch.

Find your gifts, and honor them.

One of my best friends was an EMT I trained. I taught his First Responder course. I taught his EMT-Basic course. I taught his EMT-Intermediate course, and he topped out there. He’ll never be a paramedic.

Before he got into EMS, he was a bull rider.

That wasn’t his gift.

He managed a veal barn for several years.

That wasn’t his gift either.

He was a soldier in the Army National Guard.

He served honorably, but that wasn’t his gift.

I knew halfway through his First Responder class that he wasn’t going to set the world on fire as a student. He struggled to pass every test, but he never gave up.

Memorizing and regurgitating emergency medical trivia wasn’t his gift either.

On the first day of his EMT class, I told the students that if they gave me their best, then I’d return the favor. I told them that if they dared insult me or their future patients by giving less than their best, then I’d do my best to see to it that they didn’t finish. He took the challenge personally.

And in taking up that challenge, he discovered his gifts. He may not be the deepest thinker around, but in a world where common sense is increasingly uncommon, he was blessed wit
h an abundance of it. If smart brains were high performance sports cars, his would be the old tractor on the shoulder of the road, chugging along in granny gear.

But just like granny gear, you’d never bog him down.

In a profession where we see people at their worst, he never saw someone as their diagnosis instead of their name. He could hold a tender conversation with the old lady lying on the floor with a broken hip, and never give a hint that he noticed the smell of urine and feces on her clothes. He never met a stranger, and people naturally trusted him. When the scene was chaotic, he was calm. He was generous with his time, his money, and his spirit.

In his words, “I’m just an old rodeo whore. As long as I’ve got a dollar, you’ll have fifty cents if you need it.”

Those were his gifts, and he kept looking until he discovered what they were. Or perhaps he had always known, and in EMS he found a means to honor them. It doesn’t really matter.

When people finally recognized what a talented EMT he was, when he stood on the dais and accepted his award as National EMT of the Year, it wasn’t an accolade he had sought. The $1000 gift certificate to Bass Pro Shops meant more to him than the plaque and the magazine write up. He didn’t much care if anyone else saw him as gifted.

He saw it, and that was enough. His words on the dais were testament to that:

“I feel like I’m the luckiest man on this Earth. I’ve found what God put me on this Earth to do. For that I’m thankful.”

He discovered his gifts, and honored them. I didn’t endow him with them. If I contributed anything at all, it was to give him the tools to honor them properly.

And you see, that’s my gift. I’ve got a talent for seeing potential. I could do it with dogs, and I can do it with people. In some people, the potential to excel, or even succeed, as an EMT is not there. I gently help those people understand that failure doesn’t mean that they have no gifts, only that they have undiscovered ones suited for pursuits other than medical care. And sometimes, I plant a foot in their ass because I see their gifts, and it pisses me off that they refuse to honor them.

I’m a lucky man in that God has blessed me with a number of gifts. I say lucky because I can’t take credit for them. I did nothing to earn them. All I can do is nurture them.

I master skills rather easily. I honor that gift by teaching those skills to others, and showing patience when they struggle.

My brain is able to process and store new information very easily. I retain things. I pass that information on to my students, because to honor knowledge is to pass it on freely. To hoard it makes it a secret, and secrets are valuable only to the person keeping them.

I have a talent for distilling complex subjects into easily understood terms. Perhaps it’s simply a gift for effective communication, but I honor it by packaging it for people like my old partner, who never understood twenty-five dollar words.

I have a gift for making people laugh. Sometimes I have a gift for making people cry. When I’m at my best, teaching is less a lecture than it is a performance, and everyone knows that learning is best accomplished between fits of tears or laughter. And so your laughter or tears is the best honor I can imagine.

I have a gift, however small, for words. It’s one I discovered late in life, and one I’m still learning how to use. I try to honor it in whatever I write, including this blog.

I have been gifted with a perfectly imperfect child who has taught me the meaning of courage and resilience. I honor that gift by being the best father I can, and by helping her discover her own gifts. I try to help her understand that although God gave her two limbs that work poorly, His gift was the indomitable spirit that will help her discover more about life than she ever thought possible.

I have been gifted by the love of a beautiful woman. I honor that by honoring her. I don’t always succeed at it, but I try every day to be worthy of her. If that makes me a better man, then the circle is completed. She gifts me with her love, and in return I become a better companion, lover and friend. I think that’s what God intends when he brings two people together.

So if I had to pass along one last bit of advice, confer one last bit of insight to my students and my child that would serve them beyond the borders of a classroom or an ambulance cab, I’d tell them to challenge themselves, because that’s the only way they’ll discover their true gifts. And once discovered, spend their lives honoring them.

Have you discovered and honored yours?

I tag:

Don Gwinn

Mrs. Who

Chas Clifton

Nancy

Tall Cool Drink of Water

…biker stock, that is.

Aside from being a WW II veteran, business owner, pilot and generally irascible, demanding old bastard, my Dad was a biker.

By the time I was born, Dad had long since stopped riding. Running a small business and providing for a wife and five children will make you put away some things, even the pursuits that you loved. Riding a hog was one of those.

Before WW II, and for years afterward, my Dad was a Harley mechanic. Seventeen years, in fact. Just like an old pilot can hear the drone of a Wright radial engine and straighten his stooped back to search the sky for the B17 that he knows is out there…

…Dad’s head would automatically turn to the sound of a lumbering, big-displacement engine. The model number and year would flow from his lips as if by magic, and usually he’d be right. Quite an impressive feat, to my seven-year-old years.

“Harley flat head 74,” he’d say wistfully. “When they’re tuned right and idling, you can count every stroke. Sounds like they’re ready to stall, but they never do.”

And likely as not, if the owner were parked somewhere, he’d stroll over and say hello. He didn’t look the part, but it only took a few seconds of conversation to establish that he was a fellow member of the bugs-in-your-teeth fraternity.

The owner of the local bike shop had a sideline business restoring old bikes. Nortons, Indians, the odd Triumph here and there…but mostly Harleys. He’d occasionally call Dad and say “Norman, I’ve got such-and-such a year model here, and the manuals don’t say anything about this part for that particular year’s model…” or maybe “…this damned bike is giving me fits because I need some tool nobody at the factory has ever heard of…”

…and likely as not, Dad could give him chapter and verse about whatever obscure part he couldn’t find, or why some component was changed halfway through that particular model year. Often he’d run down to the shop with me in tow, just to bring old Gerald the very tool he needed, or show him the correspondence with Harley Davidson that led to the changing of said component, based on the feedback and advice of some guy named Norman from Howard Griffin Harley Davidson in Monroe, Louisiana.

He didn’t look like the stereotypical scooter trash, but my Old Man always identified with the burly bearded guys in leathers. He was one of them, and they respected him as an elder in their brotherhood. I got to know some of those men, and it impressed me greatly as a child to see how such imposing men venerated my father, even though he no longer rode. I also discovered along the way that most bikers only looked scary.

When I got older, the bug bit Dad hard, and he bought my uncle’s bike and started riding again. The man that grew up on Nortons and Harleys now found himself riding a old geezer’s rice rocket Honda Goldwing. He was even embarrassed to ride it, at first.

But the Road Barons still welcomed Dad and his GL 1000 right alongside their Harleys at the local biker bar – the ultimate sign of respect, in my estimation.

Dad’s fondest wish, those days when he was helping old Gerald turn wrenches in his shop, was to chop my little Honda SL 70, outfit it with ape-hanger bars, dress my little ten-year-old self in leathers and boots, and have me sidle up to the bar at the Third Rail and bark…

“Barkeep, I’ll have a milk. And make it a double!”

Just the thought of it was enough to make him dissolve in a fit of giggles.

I grew up and apart from Dad before we could make that happen. I wish we had, though.

But the point of my whole trip down memory lane is that reading this today, my first thought was that Dad would have approved of what they’re doing.

Bikers Against Child Abuse is a worthy organization with an admirable mission. If you approve of what they do, do my friend Strings a favor and go leave some favorable comments.

The five charities with the most favorable comments make the finals. The overall winner gets $10,000 donated to their charity.

Sounds like an easy way to aid a good cause for just the trouble of registering to leave a comment.

Edit: For some reason the link won’t work from my blog. Just click through to Pirate With a Permission Slip and follow the instructions.

…at Star of Life.

Enjoy.

Rogue Medic manages a dig at the sanctimonious asshat esteemed psychiatrist Dr. Deboral Peel, while at the same time offering his take on the intelligence of people who suggest that the TASER is dangerous and equates to a torture device:

Medic, R., Peel, D.

An observational study of the effects of TASER vs Glock.

The subjects in the TASER group stated that they were grateful that they were not in the Glock group. The subjects in the Glock group did not respond, representatives of the estates of the Glock subjects expressed some displeasure with the methodology employed and the results.

Journal of Lambasted Leather, 5150, pp. 10-13.

Heh. I like that.

I need your help.

I’m developing a lecture, anywhere from 1-2 hours in length, that I’m thinking of calling Wound Ballistics: An Idiot’s Guide to Firearms Injuries.

I’m going to cover all the standard stuff – velocity, bullet expansion and fragmentation, sectional density, penetration, wound channels (temporary and permanent), cavitation, yaw, tumbling and all that noise – while at the same time trying to dispel some of the common firearms myths out there.

This is not intended to be a RKBA or political screed in any way. It’s supposed to be an educational offering for EMS and ER providers in assessing and treating gunshot wounds. I’m trying to give practical, real-world knowledge to people who wouldn’t know a ballistic coefficient from a barrel shroud.

If that happens to demystify firearms in general and refute the bullshit prevalent in most media reports, so much the better.

The idea occurred to me after doing a paid review for the new edition of a prominent paramedic textbook. I was given the thoracic trauma chapter to review, and I was struck by the impression that the chapter’s author a) didn’t know beans about firearms, and b) seemed to take his teaching points directly from the Brady Campaign’s press releases. To make matters worse, some of the information on terminal ballistics was just flat-out wrong.

More distressing was the fact that such misinformation had already been promulgated among many thousands of paramedic students through previous editions of the textbook. I got to reading other EMS and nursing texts, and the pattern repeated itself. The misconceptions weren’t limited to one author, or one publisher. The textbooks are full of fuzzy or incorrect information, and blatant hoplophobia thinly disguised as public health education.

So it is to this end I seek your assistance.

To the Gun Bloggers:

1. In your view, what are the most common myths among the firearms community about “stopping power” (now there’s a fuzzy term if ever I’ve heard one), penetration, velocity, caliber, bullet weight and construction, firearms accuracy and reliability? If there are other points of contention I haven’t mentioned, by all means let me know.
2. In your view, what are the most common myths among non-firearms enthusiasts about the same subjects? What are the biggest misconceptions among non-shooters about the destructive power of firearms?
3. Aside from the obvious (the ability to put multiple rounds through a bad guy’s left ventricle while under extreme stress), what do you feel are the most important determining factors in rendering someone quickly and decisively dead or incapacitated? I’m talking about the tools here, folks – the weapon and its projectiles – not the training and mindset of the shooter.

To The Med Bloggers or health care providers (and I especially want to hear from the ones who hate and fear guns):

1. What scares you about firearms? About gunshot wounds? Anything in particular?
2. For those of you who are knowledgeable about firearms, have you ever heard or read something about firearms, in an educational setting, that made you groan and roll your eyes? Ever see something blatantly incorrect or biased in a textbook or continuing education lecture? I’d like to hear your personal anecdotes.
3. What do you think are some of the most commonly held misconceptions among emergency health care providers about gunshot wounds? An example: “A .22 is deadlier than a .45, because it ricochets all through the body cavities like a squirrel in a cage. A .45 just punches a big hole and only damages what’s in its direct path.”
4. Do the terms “assault rifle” or “sniper rifle” hold any particularly ominous connotations for you? Do the terms “deer rifle” or “hunting rifle” conjure the same fear?
5. In your estimation, what type of weapon renders the most serious wounds: rifle or handgun? What caliber, or does the caliber even matter to you?
6. What, if anything, were you taught about wound ballistics when you received your initial medical education? If you received none initially, how about in continuing education

If any of you Gun Bloggers know of some decent video of various bullet strikes on ballistic gelatin (or even real live flesh), I’d love to see it. I’m looking for something that can easily be exported into Powerpoint, and I’m not having any success with Youtube videos. Apparently they require serious geek skillz at encoding video that I do not possess.

Also, I’d love to hear your opinions on this article.

I await your comments.

AD: “Nice guitar, Mongo. I didn’t know you played.”

Mongo the Mental Health Tech: “Mongo get new Fender Stratocaster for Christmas. Mongo like.“

Favorite Doc: “Know any songs, Mongo?”

MMHT: “Mongo know Smoke On The Water. Wanna hear?”

[strums out a few chords of the song]

AD: “Not bad, Mongo. Know anything else?”

MMHT: “Nah, Mongo still learning. Crazy people no give Mongo enough free time to practice. Mongo just pawn in game of life.”

Favorite Doc: “Well, you got the hands for it, Mongo. Those are guitarist’s hands. Or a pianist’s.”

AD: “What about me? I’ve got big hands and long fingers, too.”

Favorite Doc: “Your hands were meant for different gifts, AD. Like clearing the fecal impaction in Room Four, for instance. Why don’t you go dig out the doo doo that you do so well?”

AD (sighing): “I always get the shit details.”

…when I predicted it would be a short speech.

Mr. Hyatt came in, hooked up his computer and spoke on the Virginia Tech shootings for 25 minutes. Then he simply left. That’s for a 60-70 minute closing keynote address, by the way.

No question and answer session, no explanations, no justifications, just a dry recitation of the facts*, nothing more than anyone could have gotten from the TV news or print media. He did not address campus security issues before or after the shooting, nor was the CCW issue or any gun control legislation even mentioned.

I wasn’t there to see it, but my spies tell me that it was a boring, uninformative, and singularly dissatisfying presentation, and that a quite a few people were walking out before the twenty-five minutes were even up.

I also learned that Mr. Hyatt has retired from Virginia Tech. Apparently, his job now is to fly all across the country and give lackluster speeches about what happened at VT back when he was asleep at the wheel still running things.

At well over $1,000 bucks a pop, no less.

Gosh, it’s nice to know that something good came from the tragedy, ain’t it?

{/snark}

*carefully whitewashed, laundered, obfuscated, folded, spindled and mutilated.

…I can do better than that.

911Doc of M.D.O.D. writes of his blog’s recent mention on NPR (kudos, by the way):

Site traffic day before NPR mention = 598
Site traffic day of NPR mention = 634

KICK ASS!

As we say down in Loozyanna, “Sheeeeeeit. That’s all the bump they got from National Proletariat Radio? That ain’t nuthin.”

If you guys have never read 911Doc or any of his compatriots on M.D.O.D., I urge you to head over there en masse and give ‘em a read. Witty, insightful, scathingly sarcastic and downright funny, I’d love to work with any of these guys.

So y’all give ‘em a look. Tell ‘em AD sent you. Make their sitemeter spin like a fan. If we don’t at least double their daily site traffic, I’ll be crushed.

You know, because just once I’d like to know the Godlike power Glenn Reynolds must feel when he bestows an Instalanche on one of us minor players in the blogosphere.

Hell, I’d even settle for a Tamalanche or a Lawdogalanche. I’m easy to please.

…for you folks who though I was making a tasteless joke at the expense of the students who died at Virginia Tech:

“Pretty tasteless joke. I’ve come to expect better.”

I wasn’t joking, folks. I really want to know if anything that Virginia Tech has done, before or after the shooting, has made their students safer.

I’m not making light of the shooting and the deaths that resulted. And despite my opinion on gun-free zones and the legislative initiatives VT has supported since the shooting, I’m not going to heckle or harass Mr. Hyatt about victim disarmament gun-free zones.

For one thing, it would be rude. That lecture is his forum, not mine.

Second, it would be counterproductive. For all I know, he may say things I agree with. That’s why I’m going to try attending his lecture, if my flight home allows.

But the honest truth is, when it comes to protecting your children on college campuses from a psychopath with a gun and a vendetta, their security is a sad, sad joke. It was before the shooting, and it still is now.

None of the measures they’ve supported would have stopped Cho Seung Hoi. An armed student in one of those classrooms might have.

If you think I was being lighthearted, I have only to direct you here. That pretty much sums up how I felt about it then, and still feel about it now.

I apologize if any of you felt I was making a joke of the tragedy.

I was not.

The only joke (and an unfunny one) is that the campus is probably no safer now than it was before the shooting. That’s all I meant.

But I do know when I’ll be back again.

That’ll be late Saturday evening. Till then, I’ll be in Sioux City, Iowa, speaking at their EMS conference.

I just noticed on the program that one of the speakers will be James Hyatt, Executive Vice President and C.O.O. of Virginia Tech University.

The title of his presentation? Campus Security and Emergency Preparedness.

The program doesn’t say whether it’s supposed to be informative or humorous, but in any case, it oughta be a short lecture.

…that I am more than happy to grant.

Kurt Blake is a 14-year-old boy who suffered a severe head injury on March 8, 2008, during a skiing trip to the Porcupine Mountains in Michigan. He was airlifted to St. Joseph’s Hospital in Marshfield, Wisconsin, where he remains in critical condition.

Kurt’s still comatose at the moment, but he has regained some respiratory effort and reflexes, although he still requires mechanical ventilation.

You don’t have to be a parent to imagine the emotional devastation this has wrought on his family as they watch a formerly healthy, athletic young man struggle for life in a PICU bed.

If you’re of a religious persuasion, please pray to the deity of your choice for this young man’s speedy recovery. If you don’t pray, good thoughts and warm wishes are also welcome.

In any case, stop by the blog and give ‘em some support, okay?

…teaching some fledgling lifesavers how to do artificial ventilations with a bag-valve-mask and how to insert advanced airway devices. I’m critiquing the technique of one of them, when I hear this precious little voice from the corner,

“One one-thousand…two one-thousand…three one-thousand…four one-thousand…five one-thousand…BREATHE…”

I look over, and KatyBeth has picked up a spare Ambu bag, and is doing her best to ventilate a CPR manikin. She’s holding the bag in place with her right hand, and gamely trying to squeeze the bag with her Lucky Fin.

I call out, half-jokingly, “Tuck the bag under your arm and squeeze it that way, Sweetie. It’ll work better.”

I’ll be damned if she didn’t actually get a few decent breaths in.

“Aawwww, how sweet!” one of the students gushes. “Just like her Daddy!”

“Yep,” I beam proudly, “so let that be a lesson to you. My five-year-old with cerebral palsy and only one good arm has given more effective breaths than you have in the past five minutes. So quit telling me how tough this is and get your butts back to work.”

*sigh*

There’s nothing like being shown up by a toddler to make a student work harder.

From comments in a recent post:

“There’s a difference between spanking and beating a child with a stick.”

Duhr.

“If you have to beat your children (or your dogs) with a stick to control them, then you aren’t parenting and you shouldn’t have a dog.”

Go back and read the post. Heck, go back and read the whole blog. Then, consider the following:

hy·per·bo·le /haɪˈpɜrbəli/ Pronunciation Key – Show Spelled Pronunciation[hahy-pur-buh-lee] –noun Rhetoric.

1.	obvious and intentional exaggeration.

2.	an extravagant statement or figure of speech not intended to be taken literally, as “to wait an eternity.”

met·a·phor /ˈmɛtəˌfɔr, -fər/ Pronunciation Key – Show Spelled Pronunciation[met-uh-fawr, -fer] – noun

1.	a figure of speech in which a term or phrase is applied to something to which it is not literally applicable in order to suggest a resemblance, as in “A mighty fortress is our God.”

2.	something used, or regarded as being used, to represent something else; emblem; symbol.

That is all.

Who knew such an apt term could ignite such hysteria hand wringing Ivory tower proselytizing moral indignation among Methadonians – er, methadone patients – and healthcare providers alike?

Guitar Girl, RN has stirred up a hornet’s nest of criticism on her blog regarding her description of a methadone junkie she caught stealing hospital supplies.

Oh, I’m sorry. How terribly insensitive of me.

I mean to say wayward, disadvantaged suffering soul powerless against his addictions and stigmatized unfairly by a jaded and cynical health care populace who should not only tolerate his thievery and drug abuse but also embrace and encourage it with our tax dollars and our loving, caring hearts because it is a disease after all…

We’re healers, you see. It’s downright wrong and unprofessional of us to express frustration at the abuse of our healthcare system. It’s wrong for us to unfairly label and stigmatize the abusers. It’s wrong for us to vent that frustration on our own blogs because some self-righteous assclown may get offended.

You see, we are not tolerated emotions beyond compassion and empathy. Emphasize personal responsibility and accountability for your actions? Get out of healthcare, Bub. We’re givers here.

Aside from demonstrating the fact that the abuse of the emergency healthcare system has no shortage of enablers from within the system itself, it’s instructive to see several brave, anonymous commenters go out of their way to castigate a blogger on her own forum, and then have the unmitigated gall to call her rude.

Would that they simply sent out a clarion call to all the other self-righteous trolls in the blogosphere, pooled their money, and started to reform the healthcare system from within.

You know, open their own hospital or something, and staff it with like-minded people who dance around happily all day singing Kumbaya and never tire of absorbing torrents of abuse from the people they treat. Chief among their job qualifications would be the inability to distinguish the difference between a person’s blog persona and their professional behavior.

They could even hire Patch Adams as their chief of staff.

I mean the fuzzy, gentle, lovable Robin Williams version of Patch Adams, not the real quack.

Hopefully, it’ll keep ‘em too busy to troll our blogs.

If nothing else, Guitar Girl has also managed to do something I could not. She has enticed Rogue Medic to enter the blogosphere.

I frequently joust with the Rogue Medic on a number of internet forums, and I’ve had the pleasure of making his acquaintance at a conference or two. Many things we agree on, and a number of others we do not, but he’s a good guy.

He’s intelligent, acerbic, and scathingly sarcastic, with a talent for debate.

He also has a propensity to ceaselessly flog dead horses on occasion, but I have to admit that few people wield the flog with such flair and artistry.

Y’all go say hello and welcome him to the blogosphere. Bake him a cake or something.

Just don’t ask him what he thinks of the state of EMS education or the role of physician medical directors.

Please, I’m begging you. Don’t ask.

Stole this one from Cookie’s Oven. It would be funnier if it weren’t so true.*

Cue outraged screeching of the ADHD Brigade in 5…4…3…2…1.

*Disclaimer: I believe ADHD is a legitimate medical diagnosis. Your child may even have ADHD. If your child struggles with ADHD, then you have my sympathies. If your child has ADHD and excels despite it, then that child has my admiration as well.

That does not change the fact that a huge percentage of children are misdiagnosed with ADHD when they actually suffer from Chronic Hickory Deficiency.