what a day... and night it has been. had the emed clinical case conference in the morning, followed by a 4 hour tutorial on poisoning in the afternoon. then it was time to head home for a shower and some dinner before reporting for my ambulance run.

i had been told to expect a slow night, but it wasn't that bad. had a total of five calls, and still managed to fit in an ambulance breakdown in the middle of it all. 3 of the cases were because "patient was unable to walk", turns out that they were elderly and had been vomiting which probably explains the lower limb weakness. the fourth patient had a sudden onset of vomiting, and when we went to his place, we found that he was actually coughing out yellow phlegm! not sure how it started but apparently it had been going on for about half an hour before his female "friend" (that's how she described her relationship to him at the hospital) called for the ambulance. the fifth was an assault case which brought us to the fringes of seletar camp. it was the typical saturday night drunken fight between two construction workers, but only one wanted medical treatment for his injuries.

so it was quite a night, especially after the driver found out on arriving at one of the locations that he was unable to engage the reverse gear. a back up ambulance had to be called and meanwhile the poor old lady on the stretcher kept retching and complaining she was feeling giddy. the backup came and left, and we had no choice but to hang around and wait for the mechanic to come and then fix it. altogether we spent three hours in the middle of pasir ris with nothing to do, and that was really uncomfortable because i couldn't really sleep. thank goodness for the radio function on my mobile.

it's been an interesting experience accompanying the paramedics on their runs. whoever came up with the idea of having it as part of our emed curriculum is a genius because there's so much that i never knew about activating the emergency services and rushing a patient to hospital. for instance, it takes less than half a minute for the ambulance to be on its way after the alarm goes off in the paramedics' dorm. fantastic. and paramedics are a wonderful bunch of people. they're funny and crazy during rest time, but when they arrive on the scene their ability to assess the situation and give the appropriate care is commendable.

emed is ending. have to get ready for the end of posting test, which includes a viva section. -groan- i wished emed were longer! i think most of us would like to have at least one more week on this posting, and to have other postings cut short. oh well, but i guess some people on top want to hang onto the super long postings and leave us to crash course our ecg readings during emed. ack.