I Should Never Have Gotten Out Of Bed

I'm sure that everyone has had one of those days where it seems that everything just sucks. Well, I had one of those days on Friday. Friday I was scheduled to do a hospital rotation for my EMT class. The hospital was North Suburban Medical Center in Thornton. For those of you who don't know, I spent the majority of my life for three years either in a hospital or on an ambulance so the idea of spending 12 hrs of my free time in hospital emergency room and not getting paid for it really sucked! So got up at 6 a.m. and drove the 30min to the hospital. When I arrived I was assigned to follow around a nurse named Tawana who had a huge attitude and an even bigger ass. Basically I was treated as a nobody, a tag along, and an idiot. After what felt like 4 hours I looked at the clock and only 20 minutes had passed since I had arrived. This is going to be the longest day of my life, I thought.

I already new that nurses use very little critical thinking in their line of work. They are a lot like servers at a restaurant. They greet you when you come in, bring you stuff, and check on you every now and then. When you are ready to go, they check you out/bring you your bill. It was so terrible. Then I hung out with tech (EMT that works in the ER) for a bit and she told me how cool her job was there. I told her I had worked as an EMT for a few years so if I didn't seem super excited to be there, don't take it personally.

After a few more millennia passed, an ambulance brought in an 80 year old cardiac arrest patient. They were doing CPR on her when they arrived. At this point I had to pretend like I was excited and eager to see what this was all about. The truth is, I haven't done CPR a lot and there is a reason for that...I hate it! It sucks, it's smelly, and there is a good chance that you'll get vomit all over you. So when the EMT says, "so are you ready to try CPR?" I thought to myself, "are you an idiot? I just told you that I was an EMT for 3 years!!" SO I politely said, "I don't really need to do CPR unless you really want me to" and she looked at me, a little pissed off, and said "Yes I do want you to..You're a student!" So I began smooshing on this poor old lady's chest and it was very, very smelly and I almost lost my lunch.

After a few more agonizing hours I did something a little devious. I made up an excuse and got the hell out of there. 6 hours was about all I could take and I felt like if I didn't get out of there it was only going to get worse.

I realize that it sounds like I really didn't give the experience a chance and that I had a bad attitude right off the bat but that isn't true. I started off giving the situation the benefit of the doubt. I knew it was going to suck but I knew that there were positive things to be gained as well. Perhaps some day I would be working in that ER or maybe the nurse I was to shadow would be really cool or maybe I would meet some people that were really nice. Well, none of that happened and it was totally the opposite. The truth is, I tried really hard and got absolutely nothing for my efforts. Anyways, I probably should have just stayed in bed :)