Buddhist Exorcisms

This may not be the strangest call in the history of emergency medical services, but it's damned sure the oddest one I've ever gone on.

As you may or may not know, my volunteer fire department covers a very quiet suburban area of my county, so for experience, I'll ride with the local EMS service as a third crew member. Let's call them Big City/Big County EMS System.

So, it's Saturday night and two of my buddies are working at Big City/Big County EMS System. Since I have no life, I decide to ride for a while with them that night. Shortly after I get there, the pager goes off and sends us to an apartment complex for a seizure.

As we arrive, we notice that our adult male caller and his mother are obviously new to the country. Their apartment is an interesting combination of Salvation Army thrift furniture and Southeast Asian bazaar.

We enter the back bedroom and find the approximately 50 year old Asian woman shaking on the bed and refusing to talk to us. We ask the son what's happening and find out his English proficiency is slightly less than the illegal alien who refills your chips at your local Tex-Mex restaurant. After a bit of confusion, we find out out that their language of choice is Burmese. Now, where are you going to find a Burmese speaker on Saturday night in a Texas city?

Easily enough, we call our dispatcher who patches us through to a translation service. We lay down a cell phone and put it on speaker phone. Eventually, we learn that the woman's husband just died and she believes his spirit has possessed her. Thumbing through my protocols, I find that our medical director, in his love of Evidence Based Medicine, has not yet added a protocol for possessions. (Nor has he added Haldol to our protocols, but that's another story for another time.) We then ask what we can do to help her. She asks for a Buddhist priest to perform an exorcism.

Now, I'm all for customer service and meeting patient's needs, but that's one thing I can't pull off. We explain to the patient that we don't do exorcisms and start to leave. As we gather up the various bags used by a modern EMS agency, our erstwhile patient enters the living area, where she begins repeatedly bowing and chanting in front of a family altar. We again ask if she wants to go to the hospital before we leave. She replies in her best attempt at English that she just wants to die.

BINGO! She just said the one thing that guarantees a trip to the ER. We quickly confer amongst ourselves and decide that the closest hospital is a Catholic hospital. Surely they have a priest. Priests do exorcisms, right? And hey, Catholic is as close as you'll get to Buddhist on a Saturday night in central Texas, right?

So we tell her to get on our stretcher and we roll her into the northwest campus of Our Lady of Eternal Fundraising's ER. Amazingly, as we give the patient report to the charge nurse, she looks up from her chart and greets the patient by name.

Only in EMS. Only on a Saturday night.

A new top 10 list

For those of you who've never taken an EMS class before, you can stop reading right here. I'll throw some random bait to keep your attention though : Britney Spears, Madonna, NBA, Final Four, March Madness, P. Diddy, Michael Jackson, Anna Nicole Smith

There, now we can get to my EMS rant of the evening. For your amusement and entertainment, I've compiled the Top 10 Bitches, Moans, Gripes, Whines, Cries, and Pisses of EMS Students.

1) You didn't tell us that would be on the test.
2) Can we have a study guide?
3) That wasn't in the study guide.
4) That's not fair.
5) Nobody taught us that.
6) You didn't tell us that would be on the test.
7) Will this be on the test?
8) Why do we have to know that?
9) I have to go early because my daughter has a dance recital/softball game/PAP smear/orbital launch and I'm the only person alive who can get her there. (Thank you for that one, AD.)'
10) I didn't take [INSERT CLASS HERE] in high school. (Usually chemistry, biology, or ANY math class beyond general math.)

Now if you're not in EMS and still reading this, you're probably scared and will never call 911 again. Hmm, maybe I did accomplish something.... Just kidding, y'all....

Seriously, since my friend AD has so many compliments on his "war stories" from the field, I may have to post my one or two really good ones. If anyone's reading this, let me know if you want to read the Buddhist exorcism story before.

Bastrop County : Redefining EMS Insanity

Well, it's that time again. Bastrop County and its contracted private EMS service are again parting ways.
Travis County, Williamson County, and even Fayette County made a committment years ago to fund a third-service EMS system in their respective counties, co-equal with fire and law enforcement.
Bastrop County, in an apparent moment of shortsightedness, made a decision to contract out for EMS service. This is all well and good, so long as there's adequate funding for the company.
Unfortunately, though, Bastrop County has never increased its subsidy to its various EMS contractors since the 1980s. While Bastrop County grows, its Commissioners' Court maintains a rural mentality, still believing they run a rural county whose main concerns are the county commissioners' road and bridge fiefdoms and the local extension agent.
Every few years, the local EMS provider will approach the Commissioner's Court and ask for an increased subsidy. The Commissioner's Court will claim poverty (Interesting for a county with several million in reserve funds to keep the Wall Street bond market happy!) and "reluctantly" let the contractor out of their contract. Then a new EMS company comes in and the same drama repeats in a few years. Bastrop County lost Rural/Metro less than 3 years ago. Now, they are getting ready to lose MetroCare. Sadly, MetroCare did the best it could with the resources that Bastrop County gave them, even sacrificing paid contractual obligations in it's Austin operation to send additional ambulances to Bastrop County to cover an excess of 911 calls.
I'm a fiscal conservative as much as the next person, but there comes a time when fiscal conservatism becomes a cult and strait-jacket. Bastrop County has reached that point. Bastrop County will get the kind of emergency medical care that less than $400,000 will buy. Sadly, consultants with EMS expertise told Bastrop County how to figure out a subsidy that would ensure quality EMS coverage. Claiming the cult mantra of fiscal conservatism, Bastrop County dismissed much of the advice and continued on its same path of a low subsidy. The Commissioners' Court again proved the maxim that insanity is defined as repeating the same pattern and expecting different results.
Texas state law allows a county to create a separate property taxing district called an "Emergency Services District" to provide tax funding for fire and EMS services. This would be a solution for Bastrop County, creating a countywide Emergency Services District (ESD) to fund EMS, but for one thing. The county acquiesced as several volunteer fire departments created a Bastrop County ESD #1 to fund their rural volunteer services. Thus, you have a small fire department in Bastrop County with its own portable trailer to replenish air tanks for firefighters, but a county where a 20+ minute response time for an ambulance is not unheard of. Who's being fiscally responsible now?
What will change things? There are two possible solutions I see:
1) A commissioner's family member will die and could've been saved by timely EMS response.
2) The voters will eventually recognize that an idyllic life in "rural" Bastrop County means being condemned to substandard medical response compared to their neighbors in Fayette, Travis, and Williamson Counties.

Call County Judge Ronnie McDonald, Commissioners David Goertz, Clara Beckett, John Klaus, and Lee Dildy. Demand that they enter the 21st century and fund an adequate EMS program for their constituents. Any public official's primary obligation is to protect the safety of the public. Bastrop County's "good ol' boys" have to hear from you. They need to hear that the constant switching of private ambulance services is unacceptable when every other surrounding county manages to fund an adequate county (and city) funded 911 EMS response.