Tagged by Expert Witness, and as it seems, I’m the last person in the blogosphere tagged with this one, so I won’t tag anyone else.

The rules of the meme go:

1. Find the nearest book of 123 pages or more. No cheating!
2. Turn to page 123.
3. Find the first five sentences.
4. Post the next three sentences.
5. Tag five other bloggers.

Okay, the nearest book to hand was enthusiastically endorsed by LawDog, and loaned to me from his personal library.*

It’s a bit hard to read, what with all the dog-eared pages, notes scribbled in the margins, and passages of text highlighted in pink, but here goes…

…damn. Pages 118-123 are stuck together. Page 124 is an illustration that looks like Robert Mapplethorpe has found a career illustrating children’s books. Page 125 is…

…eureka! Okay, the first five sentences are partially obliterated by some sort of stain, but sentences 6-8 read:

“But Grandma, what great, big teeth you have!” breathed Little Red Riding hood, her ample breasts straining against the thin fabric of her bodice.

“All the better to eat you with, my dear!” snarled the Big Bad Wolf lasciviously, as he leapt from the bed, ripped off Grandma’s kerchief and gown and stood there naked, proud and erect.

“Oooh Wolfie,” chuckled Little Red Riding Hood throatily, “I do love it when you talk dirty. But do be a dear and put the gown and kerchief back on, and never break character again, mmmkay?”

The title is MILF Goose’s Adult Fairy Tales, and the cover is illustrated with a goose wearing a leather corset, spanking a woodsman who looks vaguely like Fabio.

Odd, but I don’t remember the fairy tales from my childhood quite this way. But I intend to keep reading to look for further discrepancies, and when I’m done, I’ll fire off a strongly worded letter to Naughty Bitch Press.

*Not really, but I just couldn’t resist the dig at LawDog.

In reality the closest book to hand is Special Ops, by W.E.B Griffin. The applicable sentences on page 123 are:

“Yes, Sir,” Sergeant Thomas said.

“Put your heart in it, Sergeant,” Lunsford said. “We don’t want to keep Lieutenant Portet waiting around, do we?”

“No, Sir,” Sergeant Thomas said, visibly fuming.

Personally, I liked the first version better.

I scored a Far Out
90% on the
Quiz by SheGoddess:

Probably because I grew up listening to my brother’s music. It was a steady diet of 70s rock bands. Hell, the first song my own daughter ever sang was Drift Away.

…are EMTs involved in a serious ambulance accident in West Nyack, NY on April 14th.

They need help.

I don’t know them. I only heard of their accident through an EMS news feed.

I also know that just recently I asked you to donate what you could to the family of another rescuer killed in the line of duty. And here I am asking again.

One of their co-workers reads this blog, and asked me to get the word out.

I also know that I’ve let many of my regular readers down a bit over the past couple of weeks. Pain, fatigue, work stress and plain old lack of inspiration have conspired to limit my posting here over the past couple of weeks. In the past month, I’ve lost a girlfriend, begun to rediscover her as a best friend, and had a few job plans fall through. It’s been a bit tough to focus on writing.

But if you could bear with me for a bit longer, and in the meantime click on the link and donate what you can to help these EMTs and their families through the long and expensive road ahead, I’ll get back to posting something worthwhile here very soon.

Please. It’s important to me.

…headed to Myrtle Beach for the South Carolina Emergency Care Symposium in the morning, due to return on the 19th.

I know I’ve been light on the real posts lately, but I’ll try to put something meaningful up here and on Star of Life in the next couple of days.

God knows I’ll have plenty of time between a gazillion plane changes and layovers.

The National Association of EMTs is holding elections for Regional Board members. Voting can be done online, and closes at midnight EDT, April 27th.

What’s that, you say? You’re not a member of NAEMT?

Then today is a perfect time to join.

What you may not know is, the recent bylaws changes allow for direct election of board members by the general membership. That allows you a direct say in electing the leadership of the biggest – and the only truly national – EMS advocacy group we have.

Candidates from several regions have contacted me privately and asked for my endorsement. I won’t go far as to use my blog for that, but I will point your attention to the two I know personally. Both of them are committed and forthright individuals who have the best interests of EMS at heart.

Julie Scadden is seeking to represent Region III. Jules is a street medic at heart, and that’s who she seeks to represent – the interests of the street medics, not the Ivory Tower professional committee members.

Daniel Gerard seeks to represent Region IV. Daniel’s a passionate advocate for EMS and a former president of the NAEMT Paramedic Society.

Read their candidate statements here, and you can find a map of the NAEMT regions here.

On another note, I also have a new column up at EMS1.com.

Enjoy.

Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.

John 15:13

I know it’s National Buy A Gun Day, but if you happen to have a bit left over from Uncle Sam’s gracious repayment of the money he extorted from you in 2007, consider the following…

The Louisiana EMS Memorial Bike Ride, our state’s tribute to our fallen EMS professionals, has extended its registration deadline to April 18th. Go read about it. If you’re from Louisiana, you can still sign up to ride. If riding isn’t an option for you, you can volunteer, or ask the organizers about helping sponsor a rider.

MonkeyGirl tells the tale on her blog of Joe Snow, a local Emergency Response Team member who died while trying to save two kids drowning in a rain-swollen creek.

Joe left two sons of his own behind, two young boys who will be forever deprived of the love and guidance of the father, left with only the memory of him and the pride in knowing what kind of man he was.

It’s not enough.

Joe’s co-workers have held a benefit bass tournament for the past two years, with proceeds going to his two boys, Matthew and Michael.

Swing by her blog and hit the donate button, would you? Even if it’s only a pittance, every little bit helps.

After KatyBeth was born, and we came to realize that she’d have disabilities, learned all the twenty-five dollar words no parent should have to learn, we set about getting her the help she needed.

We applied to all the various governmental programs that she was qualified for, and it didn’t take us long to discover one thing: those programs aren’t about minimizing a child’s disabilities. They’re about managing parental expectations so you can learn to deal with having a handicapped child.

I can boil ‘em all down to this: Sorry your kid’s a turnip. Now buck up and learn to deal with it.

A lot of wonderful therapists worked for these programs, and they were frustrated at every turn by unworkable standards and governmental controls. The Missus and I decided rather quickly that we’d find a private therapist for Katy, even if it broke us.

Enter Melanie Massey.

We’d long heard that she was the best physical therapist around, and she specialized in early childhood development, a niche all too hard to find.

During KatyBeth’s initial evaluation, Melanie bluntly asked us, “What are your goals and expectations?”

We both answered, “Zero disabilities. That’s our goal. Our expectations, we’ll manage along the way. But if our daughter has limitations, we want them to be defined by God’s plan and the limits of human capability, not because we were willing to settle.”

She smiled and said, “Good, because that’s exactly what we shoot for around here.”

To be a good physical therapist, you have to have a healthy streak of sadism in you. You have to be able to find satisfaction in pushing people farther than they thought possible. That’s how you push those limits, and redefine your expectations of what is possible.

Well, Melanie and her staff were the most dedicated and gentle bunch of sadists God ever put on this Earth. They understood that therapy for children is far more than cleverly designed exercises and fancy machines. Their particular brand of magic is making even the most arduous of exercises fun.

There’s a short essay called Welcome to Holland that they give to parents of children with special health care needs. I’ve quoted it here before, but it bears repeating:

I am often asked to describe the experience of raising a child with a disability – to try to help people who have not shared that unique experience to understand it, to imagine how it would feel. It’s like this……

When you’re going to have a baby, it’s like planning a fabulous vacation trip – to Italy. You buy a bunch of guide books and make your wonderful plans. The Coliseum. The Michelangelo David. The gondolas in Venice. You may learn some handy phrases in Italian. It’s all very exciting.

After months of eager anticipation, the day finally arrives. You pack your bags and off you go. Several hours later, the plane lands. The stewardess comes in and says, “Welcome to Holland.”

“Holland?!?” you say. “What do you mean Holland?? I signed up for Italy! I’m supposed to be in Italy. All my life I’ve dreamed of going to Italy.”

But there’s been a change in the flight plan. They’ve landed in Holland and there you must stay.

The important thing is that they haven’t taken you to a horrible, disgusting, filthy place, full of pestilence, famine and disease. It’s just a different place.

So you must go out and buy new guide books. And you must learn a whole new language. And you will meet a whole new group of people you would never have met.

It’s just a different place. It’s slower-paced than Italy, less flashy than Italy. But after you’ve been there for a while and you catch your breath, you look around…. and you begin to notice that Holland has windmills….and Holland has tulips. Holland even has Rembrandts.

But everyone you know is busy coming and going from Italy… and they’re all bragging about what a wonderful time they had there. And for the rest of your life, you will say “Yes, that’s where I was supposed to go. That’s what I had planned.”

And the pain of that will never, ever, ever, ever go away… because the loss of that dream is a very very significant loss.

But… if you spend your life mourning the fact that you didn’t get to Italy, you may never be free to enjoy the very special, the very lovely things … about Holland.

Those wonderful people in Holland that you’d never meet otherwise? Those Rembrandts?

That’s Melanie Massey.

She gave us something more than just a child with greater strength and mobility. She gave us hope, and that’s something that no insurance carrier can put a price on. If they could, I’d be paying the copayment for the rest of my life.

Yet, despite all the hope and joy she restored to so many parents, she still had not been blessed with a child of her own, something we all wished for her.

Well, I see that particular prayer has been answered.

And that just makes my year.

…yesterday was Sedate The Head Injured Drunk But Not Control His Airway Day!

Yeah, nobody told me either.

But Dumbass Paramedic was celebratin’ like a mofo.

911Doc over at M.D.O.D. vents about JCAHO and Press-Ganey:

JCAHO and Press-Gainey and ‘core measures’, I submit, are the health care industry’s version of protection rackets. I stand to be corrected so all you fans of JCAHO and Press-Gainey please do comment here and tell me why I’m all wrong, but here’s the essence of my case…

…JCAHO and Press-Gainey are parasites. They are solutions in search of a problem. With rare exception none of the JCAHO or Press-Gainey folks are practicing physicians. These companies have grown eighteen heads and can not be killed. They are feasting off the detritus of the piles of money that get shuffled around in the medicine game. Unfortunately, hospital CEOs and ER group directors have signed on because, I guess, having some information (however shitty it might be), or some way to put intangibles on a graph (and to show the upward trend), is worth something to someone.

A great rant snipped for brevity’s sake, but it’s worth it to read the whole thing.

We have the same thing in EMS, 911Doc. We call it CAAS.

It’s a prestigious little merit badge to have, and many ambulance services pay handsomely for the privilege. It’s not even a bad idea in the abstract.

But having worked for one company that went through their accreditation process, I can say first-hand that it’s mostly window dressing that has jack shit to do with quality patient care.

Had occasion to think of that movie quote after an exchange of e-mails with Babs. The reasons why we broke up are not important, except to say that lack of love for one another was not one of them.

A lot of our talking over the past couple of months has been at each other, and not to each other. She struggles to explain the changes in her outlook since discovering God, and I struggle to explain why it doesn’t really matter to me that she’s a very different person now, emotionally and spiritually. Lots of misunderstandings there, on both sides.

We may never get back together. We may, but not anytime soon. No one can say right now.

But both of us agreed that we don’t want to lose what we first found in each other – a best friend, a confidante, a kindred spirit. And so, we begin anew the task of learning who the other is, with our eyes wide open this time.

It occurs to me that a good way to start is by doing what I do best – plagiarize somebody else’s best stuff if you can’t come up with anything better on your own:

Sometimes the things that may or may not be true are the things a man needs to believe in the most. That people are basically good; that honor, courage, and virtue mean everything; that power and money, money and power mean nothing; that good always triumphs over evil; and I want you to remember this, that love…true love never dies. You remember that, boy. You remember that. Doesn’t matter if it’s true or not. You see, a man should believe in those things, because those are the things worth believing in.

Wise man, that Hub McCann.

…is, it depends.

If you’re really, really sick..I mean like, need an ambulance sick, you may only have minutes to live.

But we EMTs are the ones most qualified to make that determination. We have hours years of training, and we make the determination that a person is really emergent based upon a finely honed assessment process, years of experience, and something we like to call prognostic indicators…

…the first of which basically states that if a patient begins a conversation with the words “I Googled it,” they are unlikely to die any time soon.

And that’s a shame.

I just entered a request into the computer for a hepatic function test, AP and lateral chest film, and rib views for a kid who had fallen onto a pipe. But the doctor didn’t specify on which side he wanted the rib detail.

So I trudged my sore knees all the way down the hall, poked my head in the door, and asked the kid’s parents where his injury was. The mother thought for a moment, then pointed to an area in the upper right quadrant of the abdomen, right at the rib margin.

Like, right where the liver is.

DUHR.

I scare myself sometimes.

…while we were in Baltimore.

It made me spew, but in a good way.

Q: You know what’s the worst part of getting a lung transplant?

A: The first few times you cough, the phlegm that comes up…is not your own.

tagged by Squeaky.

The Rules:

1. Write your own six word memoir.
2. Post it on your blog and include a visual illustration if you want.
3. Link to the person that tagged you in your post and to the original post if possible so we can track it as it travels across the blogosphere.
4. Tag at least five more blogs with links.
5. Leave a comment on the tagged blogs with an invitation to play…

Okay, here’s mine:

…I have a new column up at EMS1.com.

Enjoy.

Or fall deeply into a somnolent state, whatever the case may be.

…bloggers and readers alike.

EMS1.com is having an essay contest:

Paramedics and EMTs share stories from the field with their colleagues every day. Now, here’s your chance to reach out to other providers from across the nation and share your stories!

EMS1 invites you to submit a short original piece to our 2008 Excellence in EMS Award throughout the month of April. We are looking for a short story, tribute, or essay that exemplifies this year’s EMS Week theme, “EMS: Your Life is Our Mission.”

A panel of industry judges will pick the best stories and an exclusive EMS1.com feature will be written about the winner, who will also receive an award and a $200 gift card.

Whether it’s a detailed submission of a miraculous save or an accolade to one of your colleagues – use the EMS world as inspiration for your story!

Contest ends April 30, 2008.

Now, I know there are some talented EMS writers right there on my blogroll. Rocky Mountain Medic, Firefighter Girl, Baby Medic, Mr. Fixit, JB, just to name a very few…

And yeah, that means you too, LawDog and MonkeyGirl. Just because you’re not actively working in EMS doesn’t mean you’ve left the fold.

I won’t be submitting, as there’s a pretty fair chance I’ll be on the judging panel, but nothing would tickle me more than to see someone from my blogroll win this thing. Write something memorable, and I’ll pimp your story (or your blog) mercilessly from right here.

You’ve got until April 30th.

…but right now I’m just…I don’t know.

The good news for you guys is, this should spur some posts on the blog. The last time this happened, I wrote a fucking book.

…about the quality of folks we often see in the ER…

We received a bomb threat yesterday.

It was written on the bathroom wall, adjacent to the ER vending machines.

It was written in feces.

Gotta be careful who you shake hands with around here, boy.

Just a short note, since we’re in danger of being overrun by the sniffling malingerer brigade sick people here at PGHNSTRACH…

Remember the paramedic textbook I was asked to review, the one that had all the PSH and misinformation about firearms in it?

Well, I got a look at this edition of the text while I was in Baltimore. All the PSH about “automatic weapons”…”high powered assault rifles”…”multiple victims from assault weapons shootings”…”military weapons are more dangerous and powerful than hunting weapons” and similar tripe had been deleted.

Also gone was the blatant propaganda erroneous assertion that gun control legislation as a public health initiative has been successful at reducing gun violence.

The only things left were some factual statements I suggested in place of “Aaaaaaggghhhh! Assault weapons! Bullet hose! Blood in the streets! Bodies everywhere!”

Or words to that effect.

Nice to know that common sense does indeed break out sometimes.