Divemedic

Change

Exciting news- As of today, I am an MBA-holding graduate. I have completed my MBA. I have requested a meeting with hospital administration concerning my future with the hospital. Ever since I let it be known that I am looking for work and have an MBA, a BSN, and multiple board certifications, recruiters have been blowing up my email with pitches about why I should work for them. I have agreed to six different meetings with the administrators of other hospitals in the coming two weeks.

I am going into that meeting with my hospital’s admin holding all of the cards. I’m going to attempt to leverage this into a major opportunity. Big changes coming.

By Divemedic, ago

Collector

He calls himself the “collector” and hates them, even though he was never a slave, he doesn’t know anyone who ever was a slave, and that family he hates so much? None of them ever owned slaves, or ever knew anyone who ever did. He even admits that the family he hates so much is broke.

This is class envy- blacks hate you and want you dead.

By Divemedic, ago

Citizens vs. Subjects

One of the things that a dictator does, is ban those it intends to rule from having or using weapons. That’s been true for centuries. For example, Great Britain had the 18th century disarming acts. Scottish citizens had laws passed against weapons in 1715, 1716, 1725, and 1746.

  • Disarming Act of 1715 (Highlands Services Act): Enacted after the 1715 Jacobite Rising, this act of Parliament aimed to disarm Jacobite clans in the Scottish Highlands.
  • Disarming Act of 1716: Officially titled “An act for the more effectual securing the peace of the highlands in Scotland,” it outlawed specific weapons like broadswords, pistols, and guns in designated parts of Scotland.
  • Disarming Act of 1725: This act was passed to more effectively enforce the previous disarming efforts, with Major-General George Wade leading efforts to confiscate weapons.
  • Act of Proscription 1746: Passed after the 1745 Jacobite Rising, this act further strengthened the disarming efforts and also included the famous ban on Highland dress, such as kilts and tartans, as a way to suppress Highland culture.

In 1776, the Great Britain outlawed weapons in Massachusetts. That is why the Second Amendment exists. Technology changes, but people and despots do not. The founders were well aware of that.

By Divemedic, ago

Quiet

I’ve been quiet for a few days. The old saying that you can’t fill someone else’s cup if your own well is dry has been true for me this week. Let me explain:

As you all know, I work three days a week. Day one, I had four rooms and a parade of really sick patients in them. One of my patients had leukemia and didn’t know. The doctor and I had to tell her. Still other patients had a host of problems- one guy had a 100% blockage in two cardiac arteries, another had lost so many fluids from a week of diarrhea that his blood pressure was only 70/42. A long day.

The second day saw me treat two coworkers: one a doctor who had a seizure at work. The second, a fellow nurse with SVT and a heart rate of over 200.

The third day was by far the worst. We had a critical incident. Let me explain. EMS brought in a woman who was in cardiac arrest. She was also 38 weeks pregnant, and had been down for about 40 minutes when she came in. I was the team leader.

When you work a cardiac arrest in the emergency department, what we call a “Code,” there are numerous jobs.

  • There is the recorder, whose job it is to write down every single lifesaving act we take, drugs given, etc. That person also is the time keeper. Things like “Two minutes to the next pulse check, three minutes to the next dose of epi,” things like that. This is always an RN.
  • There is at least two compressors. Their job is to perform chest compressions, and there are two so they can switch places when they get tired. Literally anyone who works in the ED can do this job.
  • A Respiratory therapist, who is in charge of ventilating the patient and maintaining the patient’s patent airway.
  • One nurse or paramedic who is in charge of IV access.
  • A doctor, who is in charge of making all decisions.
  • The team leader, who runs the defibrillator and handles all of the drugs. This is always an RN, and usually a well experienced, senior one. They work with the doctor to ensure that the patient gets the proper treatment.

One of the sights that I will never forget is what that lifeless baby looked like when they cut her mother open to rescue her. Another sight that I won’t forget is looking across the patient and seeing the nurse who was the compressor continuing to do her job as tears poured down her face. It was heart wrenching.

In total, we worked on that mother and her baby for over an hour.

We wound up getting mom’s pulse back. We lost the baby. We still had six more hours to go in our shift, and we still had patients to take care of. The most jarring thing about it was that you would walk out of a room where you just spent an hour trying to save a dead baby, only to hear your patient demand a turkey sandwich. Codes involving the death of a child are always hard. In fact, it was one such call years ago that had me seeing a shrink for a couple of years.

Emergency nurses are some of the most jaded people I have ever known. They are used to seeing tragedy on a daily basis. It isn’t unusual for us to work several codes in a shift. What is unusual is to work a code on a child or on a pregnant mother. In fact, we only do that once or twice a year. Add to that, many of our nurses are recent or expecting mothers. Adults dying? That hasn’t bothered me in years, but when a child dies, it’s like a little piece of you dies with them. It’s heart wrenching and it takes weeks to get over it.

For the rest of the day, you would enter a medication room or a storage closet to find a nurse in there crying. Two of the nurses were doing so poorly that they had to be sent home for the day.

Me, I did OK for the remainder of the shift, even though I was on the verge of tears. I held it together and went home. As soon as I saw my wife, that was when it hit me. I sobbed like it was my own child that I had lost, and did so for about 20 minutes. Then I drank some booze and went to bed. I didn’t speak very much to my wife for a couple of days. I didn’t blog, except to post some posts that I had already written and was saving for later. I ate very little.

I feel better now, but you can’t imagine how hard it is to hold a dead baby. I still see that child’s face at night. The only thing that enables me to sleep is the knowledge that we did our job well, and managed to save the mother. I can’t think of a single thing we could have done differently that would have made a difference, and that is what will enable me to go back to work.

By Divemedic, ago

Hey Miguel-

Please contact me by email or commenting to this post. I am unsure if it was you who posted a recent comment, or it was an imposter. The link in one of the comments attempted to download a file that was blocked by my antivirus because it was infected with a virus.

By Divemedic, ago

Propaganda

Here is my answer, too long for Twitter’s format:

When I graduated from high school, the school I graduated from was one of two in the entire county. Everyone from the east side went to one school, everyone from the west side of the county went to the other. We all attended the same classes, taught by the same teachers. I can’t see how there is any difference.

After high school, I joined the military and did six years there. When I got out, I was broke, but willing to work. I tried making it for a couple of years as a business owner, but we were soon technically homeless. My family and I lived in the storeroom of my business and we bathed in a 48 quart ice chest.

I took what little money we managed to scrape together and used it to rent a UHaul, then moved back to Florida. When I got there, I took a job in residential construction that paid $7.45 an hour. I spent 8 hours a day in the Florida summer heat, running electrical wire through roughed-out houses, taking home $950 a month to support a family of four. Our rent was $350 a month. The government told us that we wouldn’t qualify for public assistance as long as we were still married, so we got none.

Over the next 5 years, I moved jobs every time there was an opportunity to make more money: I worked at the airport repairing ground support equipment, at Disney repairing the electronic control systems on dancing chickens, at Sherwin Williams on paint manufacturing equipment, and at a stainless steel mill repairing stainless steel pipe manufacturing equipment. There were ups and downs. A few times, they hired me as a maintenance worker because they had a lot of broken equipment and then fired me as soon as I fixed everything that was broken. Still, I didn’t give up.

Each time I changed jobs, it was for more money. Over that 5 year period, I went from $7.50 an hour to $12 an hour, and finally to a salary of $30,000 a year. Then Bill Clinton signed a “most favored nation” treaty with China, flooding the market with cheap stainless steel, making it cheaper to import stainless steel products than it was to manufacture them, which put my employer out of business.

Finally tired of being laid off, and decided to take my volunteer firefighting occupation full time. I went to school, by working odd jobs during the day, and going to school at night. I graduated the fire academy and got hired. While I was in school, my wife and I got a divorce. Divorce is financially devastating, and the child support added up to about two thirds of my take home pay.

This was the poorest time in my life. I lost my car in the divorce, so I was running to work for a month before I could save enough for a bicycle. I lost 40 pounds that summer. After six more months of saving, I managed to buy a car at a buy here/pay here place. Now that I had a car, I was able to get a second job as a janitor, and then a third job as a lifeguard, to make ends meet.

I got a 4 year degree while I was at the fire department. I bought a house and got married for the second time. Then the mortgage failures of 2009 hit and I was soon filing bankruptcy.

Then my second wife filed for divorce. I left firefighting and became a teacher. Then I left teaching because it sucked and went back to a “bridge” program to leverage my paramedic skills into nursing. I got another Bachelor’s degree, and now I am about to finish a Masters.

But hey, none of that was due to hard work and perseverance. It was all luck and ‘white privilege’ that got me here.

By Divemedic, ago