On Panic

Slow is smooth, and smooth is fast.

I rarely hurry on a bad scene. I don’t dawdle, but neither do I bark orders and scurry about with a grim expression set on my face. I’m calm, and I’m deliberate. That works for me.

When everyone around you is shitting their pants, stumbling over their own feet and handling objects as if they’ve just gotten their brand new opposable thumbs, it helps to be the island of calm in that sea of panic. People tend to mimic the demeanor of the man in charge.

I’ll crack a joke, or calmly give an order accompanied by a smile and a wink, and people settle down. I’m the paramedic on the call. It’s my job to make things run smoothly.

And likely as not, things do run smoothly. Sometimes not as smoothly as I like, but rarely are they chaotic.

And face it, when Grandpa is dying of a heart attack, the potential for chaos is quite real. People scurry about, frightened, wailing and gnashing their teeth, bordering on hysteria. They panic because they don’t know what to do.

And they calm down fairly easily, because they called me, the man who does know what to do.

But when the frightened scurrying, wailing and gnashing of teeth is being done by the ER doctor and the nursing staff at a metropolitan hospital ER, and they’re convinced they know what to do better than you do, calming things down is not so easily done.

And it’s pretty damned pathetic, really, when the level of care increases dramatically when you wheel the patient out of your ER and into my ambulance. Time to remove the word hospital from your facility’s name, folks. It’s false advertising.

I was taking better care of MI patients twelve years ago with a fraction of your resources and training. And I was doing it in a 5×10 foot space at 80 miles an hour…