Saturday, March 21, 2009

The hardest part of being a medic for me is...

... when they pull off the band-aid, gauze, sock or various covering, is not exclaiming "holy shit that looks horrible! Damn son! you need to get that taken care of !"
Posted by vkfletch at 7:10 PM

3 comments:

htsgirldrummer said...

Agreed - I've seen that.

March 23, 2009 1:56 PM
Blue Girl said...

You're a medic? No shit! Me too!

One incident will haunt me forever, and it was late in my career, too - toward the end - and in a civilian job. I was the blood banker on in the middle of the night when a trauma was called. I went to the ER and the kid was fucked up. Then one of the firemen said "Hey! Is your name..." and I looked at him and said "Used to be. Who the hell are you?" He told me his name just as they took the bandage off his neck, and I blurted out "Oh my god!" because I used to babysit that kid when I was in high school. And the kid on the gurney freaked out when he heard me say that, saying "I'm gonna die!" and it was brutal trying to get him calmed down. The thing is, it was an "oh my god" neck and he did die.

And I still feel like shit. But I was in a teaching hospital and I went a little easier on the people I was training when they didn't react in an appropriate manner after I slipped up and made that rookie mistake at the end of my career.

March 28, 2009 7:54 AM
vkfletch said...

wow...

I can see how that would stay with you. So far I have been lucky in that all my mistakes have been fixable and most of them just made me look stupid(which you get used to after awhile anyway).

I figured with all the years I worked on animals, humans would be no big deal. I was wrong.

I also figured that nothing could smell worse than a bad case of hoof rot on a hot, moist, humid day. I was wrong there to.

Thanks for sharing your story. Hearing from you guys who have done this for awhile has been invaluble.

March 28, 2009 1:10 PM

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