Category: Death and Dying
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My New “Worst Call Ever” Has Arrived
Ask any EMS or other public safety professional what stereotypical trope in conversation they hate the most, and they’ll probably tell you not to ask “What’s the worst thing you’ve ever seen on a call?” – and for good reason. We don’t like revisiting those calls. We don’t need to trudge them back up into…
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Revisiting Mental Health…. Again…. and Again…
I wrote about the Code Green Campaign back in 2016 in my post about calling a code on our mental health. I was talking about how some of my “ghosts” haunt me, revisit me, remind me of some of the worst calls I’ve ever been on. It happens to me frequently. At night. During the…
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Lifesaver? Hardly.
This lifesaver pin was presented to me to celebrate my first CPR “Save” – when, early in my EMS career, I worked as part of a team of EMS professionals to apply CPR (Cardiopulmonary Resuscitation) to a Sudden Cardiac Arrest victim, and this resulted in the patient having their pulse restored long enough to be…
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The People Who Make Up My Life
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how people move in and out of my life. Quickly. Slowly. Suddenly and abruptly. Gradually or almost without noticing. The amount of time they spend in my life, in my physical presence seems completely unrelated to the amount of time they remain in my conscious and subconscious mind…
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Knowing When You’ll Die
Firstly, I’d like to apologize for not posting to the VEB blog for a couple months. The holidays kind of ran away from me and I have been particularly busy at work. Thank you for remaining a reader and subscriber, to those of you who are still with me. This post is a sermon I…
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How We Used to Die
An excellent piece I read a while ago and then lost the link before I had saved it. How do you handle elderly patients in cardiac arrest? Are these calls difficult for you? I often wonder if anyone has spoken about quality of life vs. quantity to the family members crying out for help for…
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A Bad Day in EMS
What does a “bad day” in EMS look like? First you have to ask if it’s a “bad day” for the EMS provider…. or for the EMS recipient. As a provider, I’ve had all kinds of days. I’ve had days where I feel appreciated by my employer, the general public, my coworkers, and my patients.…
Ventricular Escape Beats 