6 Horrifying Things I Learned as a Paramedic

If it's hot outside, we can expect more street violence and way more dangerously drunk people at night. A lot of criminological evidence suggests that crime peaks during the summer. Emergency workers and the opening of Die Hard: With a Vengeance back up those conclusions, and what is this world coming to if you can't trust Die Hard?

I'm based in a large city on the West Coast, and often work the late shift in a bad part of town -- not that my city is overflowing with good parts of town. Last winter, we got a call for a shooting. We get an update en route: unknown age male, shot in the head. We assume he'll be dead when we arrive, but he wasn't. This kid -- he looked maybe 15 -- was still breathing, even after multiple shots to the head, chest and both arms. He had like eight bullet wounds in total. There was literally brain matter on the ground, but nope, he was still breathing.

We package him up, bring him to the hospital ... and he dies during surgery. Sorry, reality is a bummer. He was just walking home when two guys hopped out of a car and went Rambo on him. That next week, his brother was shot dead nearby. It was tragic but not at all surprising. You learn quickly that if there's one shooting, there will probably be another soon. Shootings travel in packs. It's another reason you pay attention to the local news: if there's been a shooting or stabbing in your neighborhood, odds are more are going to follow.

Speaking of traffic, we're as fucked as you if there's a gridlock. If the intersection is completely blocked with cars and has island medians, we just shut down and wait for the light to turn green. Only in the direst circumstances can we drive against the flow of traffic. It does satisfy the action movie lobe of your brain, but it's also damn near suicidal. People instantly forget how to drive when they see lights and hear sirens. They just slam on their brakes or pull into the lane we're supposed to occupy. There's a reason crashes are one of the leading causes of death for EMS workers.

It is department policy to leave our ambulances on all day. Rather than risk draining the battery and begging for jumps in a Walmart parking lot while some poor old lady dies across town, we just leave it on. The doors to the ambulance are locked, of course, but there's a dummy switch hidden on the body that opens the door. The only problem: homeless people and drug addicts tend to see a lot of ambulances, and if they pay any attention at all, they quickly learn where that switch is.

One crew went on call for a lady who had fallen out of her chair. She declined to go to the hospital, and when the crew walked out to get paperwork, they noticed the ambulance was missing. The paramedic got on his radio and asked dispatch, "Where's my location?"

Dispatch had him at a nearby intersection, which is apparently where a local hobo had decided to take that ambulance on a joyride. He'd gleefully sped off and then crashed into a bunch of parked cars before finally hitting a wall. The hobo didn't steal anything inside the ambulance (we do lock up the drugs, after all), and we never wound up figuring out who did it or why, other than the possibility that Franklin had a four-star-wanted level and needed to get to a checkpoint, fast.

When you do it right, you feel the ribs pop and hear the cracking. It is extremely tiring to basically crush another human being with your bare hands. It's an experience -- one of the few things you can do to a dead person to improve their outcome. But you have to do it fast for there to be any odds of success. So whenever we get on scene for a cardiac arrest and someone is performing CPR ahead of us, it's an incredible leg up on our work. That person's odds of surviving to see another birthday skyrocket.

What about that whole making out with a dead body thing? Doesn't happen anymore. Hands-only CPR is the standard now, largely because people hate the idea of mouth-to-mouth and worry they might catch something. There were a lot of fears that the stigma of it might lead people to avoid giving chest compressions. So because people are squeamish about kissing strangers, the rules for first aid are now completely different.

If you think that's lame, here's something lamer: all that fear of catching an infection from giving CPR is based on something insanely rare. There are only 15 documented cases of people being infected while performing rescue breathing. We are not using every method in our employ to save lives just because kissin' corpses is gross.

But even the most jaded EMT isn't immune to compassion. We turned the sound off for the benefit of the dead guy's memory and his grieving wife. No spouse walking back to an empty living room for the first time should have to listen to the porn that killed her husband. That sounds like the premise to a Korean horror flick.

Unfortunately, if that guy had been using a porno mag, we wouldn't have been able to do anything, especially if it was a coroner's case. We can't touch anything or else we get in a lot of trouble for disturbing a possible crime scene. So if you die doing something very incriminating, we may not be able to tuck your proverbial dick back into your pants.

We have an older guy in our territory with a bit of a meth problem and a bit of a fascination with "sounding" (that's when you shove stuff down your pee hole; good luck unlearning that, suckers). So we get a call for a possible 5150 (involuntary psychiatric hold). We find him sitting in a car, his head back, a peaceful look on his face. What's going on?

"I'm in pain."
"What's wrong?"
"Can I just get in the ambulance?"

We get him in, and the story comes out: he'd smoked up, broken his wire-framed glasses, and proceeded to jam them inside his penis. Stop screaming.

It gets better.

He'd done this so often that he had scar tissue blocking his urethra. Doctors had to make a hole at the base of his penis for him to pee out of. So basically, he had a hole straight into his abdominal cavity. He broke those glasses, shoved them down the hole, and, in a stroke of genius, decided to fish them back out with a pair of tweezers ... which also got lost in there.

Fighting back laughter, I asked:
"What'd you do with the lenses?"
His answer: "I think they're in my ass."

For more insider perspectives, check out 5 Horrific Things You Learn Preserving Brains for a Living and 5 Things Your Doctor Really Wants to Say to You (But Won't).

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