City Of Los Fresnos

I had been in Southern California for several years before moving to Texas. I knew no one there, but was recruited for the job.

 

We were called to a home on Christmas Eve for a child with a fish hook "impaled" in his thumb. When we arrived, everyone was excited. The parents were scared, and the kid was crying. His brother had gotten a fishing pole for Christmas and apparently tried a cast in the living room and caught his little brother. Okay, so no one is going to die here. The truly odd thing is that the pole was propped up against one end of the couch, and the kid with the fishing hook in his thumb was at the other end of the couch, but the line was pulled tight as if someone was reeling him in. I stood there for a second, trying to figure out what it was that I wasn't understanding.

Had someone moved the pole closer to the kid or the kid closer to the pole or cut the line if they really couldn't figure it out, the tension would be off the line. I chose option A. Once I moved the pole closer to the child, the tension was off the line and the hook nearly fell out of his thumb. It had stuck his thumb but not to the barb. All he needed was a Bandaid and would have survived even without that, but kids like Bandaids.

There were at least eight people in the house, including three adults, and no one could figure out that if you accidentally hook a kid on a fishing line, don't try to reel him in.

 

I could have been wealthier if I had stuck with one thing, I suppose, but I would get bored doing the same thing for too many years. Come to think of it, that's probably why I have moved to different parts of the country, too.

 

One winter, in the late 1980s, we had a hard freeze in the Rio Grande Valley. That was the first freeze they had experienced in more than 20 years so they weren't at all prepared for it (since then, they have had one in 2010 and again this year - so much for global warming). Aside from all my water pipes breaking, we had a fun time. For two days, the roads were completely iced over, including the freeway. They had no stockpiles of salt or sand.

Combined with the fact that no one there knew how to drive on ice, we had one accident after another. We had only two ambulances in Los Fresnos and, since everyone else was busy too, we couldn't depend on getting backup from anyone. We literally went from one motor vehicle accident to another. By the time we got to the hospital with one set of patients, we knew where our next call was because they were backed up. We had plenty of equipment, just not enough ambulances to transport everyone immediately. There were even times when we would stop at a second wreck while transporting a patient from another wreck, and then we'd have to explain to the hospital staff that they came from two unrelated scenes.

Fortunately, the fire department was very well trained, certified in EMS, and knew what we needed and where it could be found, so by the time we got to a scene, the fire department had the patients all ready to go, including all the information we needed. Plus, we had certified volunteers who'd help at the scene, or triage people who did not want to be transported. We had scene times of one minute or two minutes. With no time to eat, we'd be grabbing candy bars from the vending machines at the hospital.

We literally had both of our ambulances out on calls for about 48 hours. Sometimes, we'd trade out crews at the scene of an accident so someone could get a meal or some sleep.

Coming back from the hospital, I exited the freeway and could see that someone exiting from the other direction was going too fast to make the stop, so I pulled over and watched. He slid on through the stop sign, hit another car that was approaching the freeway, and they both slid into a couple of other cars. That made for a great response time as we were on the scene before the accident occurred.

Mostly, MVA's don't require a lot of thinking. The trauma is usually pretty obvious and treatment is straight-forward. However, we were called to see a woman who had hit a house. She hit it hard enough to break through the brick wall. At first, we thought she had slid off the road and struck the house. She was unconscious so I couldn't ask but the accident wasn't making sense, given that her car had gone up the driveway before hitting the house, and someone who was unable to slow down in order to turn into the driveway would have missed the drive, yet someone who had turned in the drive shouldn't have been going fast enough to hit the house with such force. Then I learned that it was her house.

Compounding the confusion was that, despite it being a hard hit, she was belted in, and the car seemed to have absorbed the impact better than her house did. It seemed odd that she would be completely unconscious, as she was, so I guessed that she was probably suffering from a medical condition. I was thinking diabetes since that could lead to confusion and even unconsciousness, but her blood sugar levels were fine.

As it turned out, she had suffered a stroke. She somehow managed to turn into her driveway but then she hit the gas rather than the brake and was probably unconscious before she hit the house. There was very little trauma involved.

 

We were called out to the home of a doctor who worked in the emergency room of one of the hospitals we transported patients to. As an ER doctor, he was particularly obnoxious. Everyone hated transporting patients to that hospital when he was on duty because he made it his job to find something to complain about, regardless. On this occasion, however, he was highly intoxicated, and he had cut his thumb off on a table saw. Unsurprisingly, he was even more obnoxious as a patient. He was delaying transport as he was micromanaging everything that I was doing so I had to tell him that while I didn't question his knowledge or skills as a physician, he needed to understand that he was now a patient and an intoxicated one at that. I heard that they were able to reattach his thumb but I never saw him in the ER again. He was probably at a reasonable retirement age.

 

On one call that I went on while working in Los Fresnos, we responded to a motor vehicle accident. As I remember it now, the car had gone off the road in a brushy area, rolled over, and the driver, a woman, was outside of the vehicle when we arrived. It was a very dark night, and the woman, who had some severe injuries, kept asking about her baby.

"My baby, my baby... is my baby okay?"

We didn't see a baby, although there was a car seat in the backseat. I called for another ambulance, and the fire department, sheriff's deputies, and constables were already on the scene. We had a forty-minute transport time to the nearest hospital so I didn't want to spend too much time on the scene. All the way into the hospital, the woman kept crying for her baby, and all I could do was assure her that we had at least twenty people looking for her baby.

They spent a couple of hours searching the brush for this baby. The fire department arranged to have the car carefully moved in the event that the baby was under the car, but no baby. It turned out that she had left the baby with her parents, and there was no baby with her when she ran off the road.