Pucker Factor

You know, I'm a pretty placid guy. At this stage of my career, nothing much fazes me. Give me a bad scene, and I'm usually the island of calm in the sea of chaos.

I'm not one to transport lights and siren, either. I think the woo woo box and cherries tend to create more problems than they solve, and I usually only use them if the patient's condition is time sensitive and there is nothing I can do to stabilize it. If The Borg didn't require me to turn the damned thing on when responding to an emergency, it'd get used maybe a dozen times a year.

But when my patient is Gravida 7, Para 4, carrying twins at 28 weeks gestation, and she tells me she didn't carry any of her surviving children past 30 weeks, and the contractions are now three minutes apart… two things occur to me:

1. It's time to stop screwing, or learn to use contraceptives.
2. I can't get you out of my ambulance fast enough.

Medics, when you have such a situation on your hands, once you've established your IV, maybe given a little supplemental oxygen, given them a big bolus of fluid to perhaps slow those contractions, and administered whatever you have in your drug box that can be used as a tocolytic, it's time to use the Rickey Butts* Labor Management Technique^TM:

Take a sheet, roll it lengthwise, thread it between the patient's legs, grab both ends…

… and run to the front of the rig, screaming for your partner to drive faster.

*Named for the inventor of the technique, a friend and medic who knew less about about birthin' babies than Butterfly McQueen.