Let’s call this thread:

Being an EMT in a Pandemic

THERE IS A KITTEN AT THE SHELTER, I REPEAT
KITTEN
AT
SHELTER

Everyone, meet Sushi.

Update on this critical situaton: Sushi is still at the shelter, still unbearably small and soft and precious.

We’ve hit the Fallout New Vegas level of the pandemic

I promise to never make fun of videogame graffiti ever again. (Well...I will continue to mock its placement on buildings since it’s so rarely at arm-level, but the superliminal messages...I was wrong to doubt.)

Also the billboard looks like a compressed jpeg file because it’s digital 🤷‍♂️

I also had another cranky "people are protesting cause they don't wanna work/nobody ever gave ME a free handout" patient yesterday, who was of course a man in his late 70s living on Social Security and actively accessing health services via Medicare.

This shit is getting weirdly normal (at a Starbucks, obvs)

A trend I would love to see take off is going to your local coffee shop and buying a preloaded gift card for them to use when health care workers come in. I feel WAY more appreciated getting free coffee than all the clapping, signs, and random thank yous combined.

I’m currently doing non-emergency ambulance transport, so I get about 1 COVID case a day coming out of a hospital to go home. Continue to be grateful I haven’t caught it yet and I literally pray every day that I don’t, because this shit is hard to see even from the outside.

Please keep wearing your masks.

We seem to have caught up now, but my last couple of shifts (wed/thurs last week) were spent either transporting people whose discharge/transfer had been delayed 1-2 days because of emergency evacuations OR doing emergency evacuations. I vastly prefer the former, for the record. There is something deep in the brain that really doesn’t like driving *into* the big smoke clouds.

My partner and I watched the blue sky disappear throughout Wednesday, and by Thursday afternoon we both just had sore throats and eyes all the time. Work is now giving everyone kn95s in place of surgical masks for our shifts, but my eyes still sting all the time and I’ve had a headache since Saturday.

Having the air quality tank in the middle of a pandemic, in a city where the cops flood downtown with chemical weapons every night, is just...beyond.

Also, the kN95 masks have extremely aggressive elastic loops, and after about 60 seconds your ears start to hurt. The “solution” is to rip the ear loops off a surgical mask and staple them to your kN95.

A pet peeve that is emerging is facilities letting us in to transport a patient, but then not letting us back in to, say, use their public bathroom. I was just in there 120 seconds ago with my gurney, I promise you I didn’t contract covid in the interim!

Some people really love the tiniest scraps of power they have over others, I swear. Also, almost all “regular” bathrooms are still closed, if I can’t pee at your rehab facility, where am I going to go?

Oh hey I haven’t updated this in a while!

I finished out my bid doing non-emergency ambulance transport and for the next 6 months I’m doing a split shift between on site first aid calls and behavioral health transport. Partly for variety in patient care, partly because I wanted a break from some of the more physically grueling aspects of this job.

This is timely on my part because we’re getting the predicted winter surge in Covid cases, one of our major hospitals already has their ICU full of Covid cases, and the state has requisitioned all N95 masks. So our work can only get access to kN95 masks now, not even the recycled N95s. Do kN95s fit as well? Nope! Is everyone at work even more nervous about catching Covid now? Yep!

We remain the only ambulance company in the Pacific Northwest (to my knowledge) that will transport Covid+ patients. That’s both to end of life or other care facilities, but also to other stuff like dialysis which can’t be put on hold for someone to quarantine for 2 weeks while they’re infectious.

Haven’t updated in a while because I at long last got Covid. (I’m fine now.)

This gas station keeps their bathroom keys in a bucket of food grade sanitizer and fishes them out with tongs. I asked if they were going to keep using it after the pandemic. “Everyone asks that, and I’ve asked the boss if we can. I like it.”

The first vaccines are rolling out, and at the hospitals I’ve been at today so far, that means everyone is short-handed because nurses keep disappearing to go get their vaccine shot. Because why schedule people to get vaccinated at some time other than when they’re already working, why would that make sense. 🙃

I got my first dose of the vaccine on 12/31 (it knocked me on my ass, it was like Baby Covid).

PPE shortages continue and it’s starting to take a toll on everyone at work, as seen in the tone of the bathroom graffiti.

Someone made the nurses at one of the Covid-heavy hospitals custom stickers. This is the kind of thing that if they put it in a movie I’d be like “that seems a bit much”