I see that Sophie is listed as "Good for Inexperienced Caregivers: No." Is there a story there?
It makes me feel really tough that I can deal with dog poo when brave volunteer rescue person linnea cannot. Thank you, because it is not every day - in fact, it is hardly any day - that I get to feel that way. Hey, I am so tough that I can take the dogs out in the backyard with my breakfast in one hand and pick up their poop with the other hand.
See, I've cleaned up monkey poop - it's hard to impress me. Although I did turn down a temporary job with great apes recently. Somehow after all this time working with nice clean little frogs, I was not enthralled by the idea of getting up at the crack of dawn so gorillas could throw feces at me.
omba is my hero. It would be so cool to work as a zoologist. The medic stuff isn't so bad, you just have to be mentally prepared and have a full arsenal of PPE (personal protective equipment) at your disposal.
I think that I just haven't been exposed to very many patients who involved feces outside their body, so even the thought of it just skeeves me out. Childbirth, miscarriages, blood, open fractures, motor vehicle accident that involved a 45 minute extrication to get the pt out, only to have him be all blue and floppy and dead from traumatic asphyxia/cardiac tamponade... suctioning blood and teeth from the airway of a semi-conscious dude who'd had his face halfway beaten in... drunk patients who'd been on a three-day bender vomiting nearly-pure-alcohol (ETOH is our abbreviation), taquitos remnants, and bile... i can hang because i had PPE for all those calls. none of those could hold a candle to having to clean up 6 piles of steamy sunbaked dog poo in a 92 degree Colorado day armed only with 2 garbage bags and a garden trowel. *hhuuurrrrghhh*
One of my friends who runs Fire here in rural Colorado had a story for me that made my
toenails retch.
**If the above stuff made you queasy, then stop reading right here, dude.**The fire department got called out to a trailer on a really hot summer day one August. Outside there is a terrible stench. The neighbors are holding their noses and point, "He's in THERE." They attempt to enter, but the smell is so bad that their paramedic vomits and they have to retreat to get SCBA (self contained breathing apparatus). The entire trailer is a shithole, littered with dog feces, thousands of beer cans, rotting food, cigarette butts, newspapers, and all other types of detritus. There are ants and flies around the whole place, but they notice a huge trail of ants leading to the bathroom. Uh oh.
Outside, they suit up and return to the trailer with full PPE and SCBA. In the bathtub there is a man who is covered in swarming black ants and flies. He is covered in his own shit and vomit and is either dead or unconscious. The medic pukes again inside his mask and has to go out to rinse and put on a different mask, and he is tailed by another firefighter to pull a preconnect hose from the rig. My friend is standing there, PRAYING that this is going to be a dead call so they can hightail it out of there and let the coroner's office deal with the whole mess. He triple gloves and reaches in to find a carotid (neck) pulse. FUCK, THE DUDE HAS A PULSE. They have to do an emergent move (move the patient out of imminent danger as quickly as possible), so they hose the patient off and remove him to out-of-doors, where they hose him off again before they can start patient interventions. Thank baby Jesus that I wasn't on that call.
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Topic: Not Dying! (Read 35153 times)