May 15, 2007 Torturing your preceptor.

So I forgot a kinda funny story.

My first day up in Slave, no calls during the day but I got toned out at about 2000h. We get to the place and the patient is ambulatory but post bypass surgery, and complaining of lower back pain/SOB. So the medic stays with the patient and the EMT and I head back to get the stair chair. It REALLY DOES get used.

So the EMT quickly gets it set up but I notice as we're walking back to the patient that he hasn't latched the lock do-hickey thing that will keep it in place. Granted it's a pretty snug fit all around, I had this horrible image of the patient being brought down the stairs and the stretcher sliding out into non-chair mode, smacking the dude's spin on the stairs...and somehow me getting pinned because I 'should have caught the mistake'. So without any notice I latched it snug as a bug in a leaf.

We (the medic and I) load the patient onto the regular stretcher, into the unit and start getting stuff done...the EMT will be driving. It was a while before we started moving but we're busy so didn't think anything of it...

...we get back to the base, patient is in the hospital's care, unit is cleaned...and the EMT confesses to me that he had to play with the stair chair (on site) for about 10 minutes unable to get it folded up until he finally saw that I had latched it! He thought he was losing his mind.

I got kudos for knowing how it was assembled...but also a little grimace for making him feel stupid. LOL

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

YEAH!!!! Niceley done!!!

Mastabattas said...

This is funny to read now. That same preceptor is one of my closest friends today. I later had the good fortune of calling my partner in the job that followed.