An Unmitigated Disaster

A little background on me for my new readers (both of you. God bless ya, LawDog)…

Having worked the better part of thirteen years on a bo-lance spent variously as a street grunt, stuporvisor, educator and critical care medic, within the past few months I went over to the Dark Side.

Now I spend my days working in a hospital ER doing the same things I did on the street, only I get paid more and get to stay dry doing it. I somewhat naively believed that I’d see less BS in the ER, but I have come to realize that 75% of emergency medical care is just thwarting natural selection. We keep the weaker animals in the herd longer, so that they may survive to pass on their inferior genes to the next generation and in so doing, contribute in some small way to the degradation of our species.

Anyhoo, since I’m a medic, I was deemed the person most suited to coordinate and conduct our annual disaster drill.

Sigh…

Note to all those hospital admin types who may occasionally stumble across my little screed in the blogosphere:

1. When it is late December, and you HAVEN’T yet conducted your annual drill, AND

2. The staff know you have been having meetings among department heads over the last month to discuss and plan said drill, AND

3. You change the schedule around to make sure your new Supermedic Disaster Guru is off on a certain day…

Expect the sharper knives in your personnel drawer to figure out exactly when the drill is going to go down.

On the Big Day, several folks came down with Acute Disaster Drill-itis with manifestations of Rectal Myopia. In other words, they just couldn’t see their asses coming in to work on the day of the disaster drill. Those that did show up thought they knew what was in store. Little did they know…

(Insert sinister giggle here)

My middle name is Evil Bastard. Forewarning does you little good when I design a scenario. We’re talking mis–triaged patients, planned communications failures, and the majority of the patients coming in by pickup truck, oxcart or what-have-you, all seasoned by a hefty dose of hysterical family members and obnoxious media. And they were short-handed to boot. It was absolute chaos. Predictably, I was the only staffer who thought it was fun, and I have a mental list of the staff who purposely missed out on the festivities. They’ll have their turn in the barrel in the coming months.

Aside from the little Method Actor who played a hysterical, hyperventilating teenager so well that she actually became a…well, a hysterical, hyperventilating teenager…the kids acting as victims had a blast. Afterwards they all gathered in the cafeteria to pose for photos of their gory wounds (courtesy of Yours Truly and a little theatrical makeup) and made the regular cafeteria diners rather queasy.

Aside from the lessons learned in every drill of this type, we also discovered that your garden variety drug seeking critter will Make Way for a horde of pre-pubescent accident victims, provided said victims have a number of grotesque wounds and foreign objects protruding from their bodies. I may keep a couple of these kids on retainer, just to clear out the ER the next time we have a waiting room filled with variations of “I Have Had The Oochies For A Month But I Can’t Be Bothered With Making A Doctor’s Appointment And By The Way I’m Allergic To Everything But Demerol and Morphine.”

The kids could indeed come in handy.

On a final note, I am pleased to announce the return of Heromedic

Back in the days of UseNet, Heromedic was the hero of the EMS user groups, famous for his C-Spine Injury Sniffing Dogs, Atlas and Axis. Even though UseNet was popular when I was still playing with computers made by Fisher Price, a few of my EMS dinosaur colleagues turned me on to his genius. Go by and check out his site.

Until next time…