So how horrible are the EMT runs usually ?

People mistreating kids or the elderly. Heck, people mistreating each other.

I don't mind gore or various bodily nasties, but people can really do some sick stuff to each other.
 
ped calls suck, 3rd degree burns suck more.
 
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You've never been depressed before than. It is very crippling. I know that when one of my family friends husband died, she had to be on antidepressants everyday for a very long time otherwise she would not have been able to function at all. That is when suicide seems like a great choice instead of endless daily misery.
 
Deliveries; don't know why they bother me; but they do and I have delivered 3. You can keep them.
 
Anytime you identify with the patient too much it's a bad call.

A year of coroners' pickups will enable you to say to yourself "I can do this; I already DID XYZ and I'm ok".

The suicides made me sad for a few minutes except the one who tried to also burn down his apartment house. That was sad AND dumb.
 
Perhaps the worst calls are those you can relate to on some sort of personal level?

The older male cardiac arrest who looks just like your own Dad.

The pedi-arrest of a child the same age as your own.

The young male hanging when you've had a brother hang himself

etc etc.

Thankfully we don't see a lot of that stuff. My shift yesterday comprised of a woman who knicked a varicose vein shaving her leg, a fall with no injuries, a frequent flyer false chest pain and an elderly lady with a a UTI and or LRTI
 
ChorusD said:
Suicides...

I just can't grasp how someone makes that decision.
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Clearly they aren't in a rational state of mind. And even that notion is arguable, considering "rational" is subjective.
 
I went on a call as part of my clinicals to a hotel fire. A labrador was found dead. I ended up crying near some bushes. Other than that I don't really get upset. And maybe that is why I was good at my job. I didn't become a vet for a reason!
 
johnrsemt said:
Deliveries; don't know why they bother me; but they do and I have delivered 3. You can keep them.
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I know why i dont like births...THAT SMELL
Besides the one dead hanging that baked in a shed, the smell of OB is the worst smell ever

Everyone i know who has never delivered get amped for every OB call
Everyone i know who has delivered runs away from every OB call
 
OP:
use of the words "EMT", "horrible" and "usually" in one sentence is hard to grasp..:rofl:
 
Peds, gore, burns, eyes, DOA, bloated body in the sun, none of that really gets to me, at least not for long. What gets to me is the look on family members faces as someone they love suffers or dies.
 
I totally agree with you on that one!! oh and vomit!! cant handle vomit!! anything else but that......yuck!! I make my partner take those! :ph34r:
 
Only thing that ever got to me was a lung cancer patient with a trache, he kept coughing and the smell that came out... I imagine that's what dead lungs smell like..
 
Veneficus said:
The worst things I have seen are not injuries or illnesses, it is man's inhumanity towards others.
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I couldn't agree more. Senseless acts make me shake my head in disgust. No one's life is valuable than another.
For me, its knowing the patient/victim personally, ie. the gas station attendant you see every time you fill up your rig, only later they are your full arrest patient. I've always found it difficult to look at them knowing them as someone other than your patient.
Even when its the frequent-flyer who calls a hundred times (drug seeking) to get more pain meds. That one time you are called for them and they are assaulted to unconsciousness, it reminds me that we are all human.
Thankfully, these calls are few and far between.
 
The worst calls for me have all been in a dispatch center, so a little different:
- First times (infant, and adult) giving CPR instructions over a phone were horrible, all I wanted to do was reach through the phone. For the infant i literally sat there going through the motions on an invisible pt while doing it.
-MCI's and fires with entrapment: I never like to hear the sound of horror is a first responders voice, or the desperation in the voice of someone trapped where I just can't help
-The worse I've had in my opinion though was a gentleman who found his father deceased after having refused medical treatment a few hours earlier. He was dead, but not dead enough to be able to not issue CPR instructions (decapitaion, decay, exsanguination). The caller opted to do CPR, knowing it was futile, for about 16 minutes until we could get an ambulance to his remote location...It was just painful to listen to and have to put someone through
 
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