Getting tired......

What up. OK so quick update on the course. Thing are moving long at an increasingly rapid pace. We're into medical situations now and we (at least myself for sure) are getting saturated. With pre-hospital care as a paramedic you have a set of protocols that dictate how you treat someone based on certain criteria. At first it was pretty simple but as we move along there are more and more protocols to remember and it's starting to get hard for me to remember every little thing about them. You can only give Ventolin if they have a history of this but can't if they're allergic to it, or you can give ASA for chest pain if they don't have any of these 4 things and nitroglycerin if they don't have these 4 things and their blood pressure is above this. This is actually the easy stuff for me. I know that I can manage a patient fine in a practical setting regardless of what it is so long as we've been taught it. The problem I have is with the studying at night. I prioritize like so: practical is most important since in my mind premium care for you patient is vital. Whereas knowledge, ie. knowing what causes acute renal failure is secondary, since in my practical mind set I should only have to know the signs and symptoms of ARF and how to treat it. This causes a problem since I spend all my "spare" time concentrating on the practical aspect of this phase when I should be devoting the majority of it the theoretical portion as there is a lot more to cover.

Anyway the course is going fine. According to the instructors they haven't seen a course get out as early as us (which is still around 4:30-5:00PM) consistently in years. I have to admit it's pretty cool to be here and be a part of it. I was talking about this with my girlfriend last weekend when she asked me if we (the course) were generally a cocky group of guys and I had to explain to her why we aren't. In the Navy I'll openly admit that I was confident and borderline cocky and I think it was because of the environment I was in. The majority of the people aren't physically fit, let alone to my standards and less than half are proficient at their jobs let alone excellent. So someone who IS fit and DOES excel........ it's hard not to get an exaggerated opinion of oneself. But here on this course it's easy to stay humble because you are challenged every day. You are surrounded by people that are in better shape and more knowledgeable than yourself in any given aspect. The instructors are second to none and are critical of the students' performance at all times. And just in case we can't keep ourselves in line they constantly remind us "you're doing good........ BUT don't let up". It's weird to hear stuff like that from them but when it happens I feel like a dog whose been given a treat for good behaviour.

Anyway that's about it. Tomorrows another day and I need to get back to studying instead of procrastinating which is why this entry is so fuckin' long.

Peace.

Halfway pt. 2

So you probably watched the video by now and seen how Christians arm bled when I pulled the needle out. That was my bad of course since I didn't have any gauze ready to put over it. Besides that the course is going along swimmingly. It's hard to believe that we're already halfway through medical phase, 50% closer to being a paramedic, and a long ways off from being a SAR Tech. We still have para phase, dive phase, mountain ops, sea ops, winter ops (avalanche rescue) and of course, arctic ops. So all the cool shit is yet to come but it's important to realize that all that stuff is just a vehicle to get us to the scene so we can administer medical care. We should be starting our hospital time in local ER's in the next few weeks so that will give us some much needed practical experience. I'm already nervous about it though. It's easy to stick needles in SAR candidates since they will suffer through anything, but I imagine it's a different story when you're dealing with some crabby hag or drunk guy who's pissed off for a dumb reason. Typically nurses are extremely caring and understanding but I'm anxious to see what happens when you stick 16 intense dudes in that setting and let them play with needles and stuff.

So all in all everything is going as planned. The pic here is of selection back in Feb 08. If you recall we had to survive with no food for 4 days in the mountains north of Jasper. One of the tasks we had to do during that time was build a ground-to-air signal fire in the event you see an airplane. The smoke has to reach tree-top level in a minute or less or you fail. Good times that I'm glad I'll never have to do again!

Halfway through med phase update pt. 1

One more tick in the box.

Thanksgiving marks another part of the course behind us. The past 3 days has been spent testing the course on the medical knowledge we've accumulated so far. Wednesday was a written exam and Thursday and Friday were practical exams. We were tested on our ability to follow the patient assessment model for limb injuries (in this case a broken leg) as well as CPR and defibrillation. We've had plenty of time to practice and the tests were pretty easy by the time we actually did them. Everyone passed all the tests with no serious problems.

On a bright note Ewa is back from her 7 month deployment with the Navy. I drove down to Victoria to meet her when she got back and we spent the week up here in Comox at an oceanside cabin. She has a ton of pictures from Malaysia, Dubai, India, Japan, Spain, etc..... It looked like a pretty good deployment but I'm just glad she's back!

Vehicle Extrication