#fdny ems

[fdny8231]

(via https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uihiGRB0Sag)

[18kgold]

'It doesn't feel worth it': Covid-19 is pushing New York's EMTs to the brink

Struggling with low pay and high stress, New York paramedics and EMTs are reaching a breaking point

This is terribly depressing. And they’ve been working without a union contract since 2018. I haven’t found any public campaigns on the issue, but if you’re a New Yorker, you might write to your City Council members, de Blasio, state reps, possibly Jumaane Williams, asking them to support union pay demands. 

[...] EMS work has long been grueling and poorly paid. New hires in the New York fire department (FDNY) make just over $35,000 a year, or $200 more than what is considered the poverty threshold for a four-person household in New York City. (That figure is on par with national averages.) Employee turnover is high: in fiscal year 2019, more than 13% of EMTs and paramedics left their jobs.

But Covid-19 has added a new layer of precarity to the work. [...] One day last spring, responders took more than 6,500 calls – more than any day in his department’s history, including 9/11. [...] According to Oren Barzilay, the Local 2507 union president, nearly half of its 4,400 emergency medical technicians (EMTs) and paramedics have tested positive for the virus. 

[...] The pandemic has disproportionately claimed Black and brown lives [...] and those disparities extend to healthcare workers. [...] All five of the department’s EMS employees who died of Covid-19 were non-white. 

[... Union representatives] see a racial component to pay disparities within the FDNY. [...] According to the city council’s finance division, 59% of EMS workers are minorities [and] 77% of New York firefighters are white.

[vehicleillustration]

FDNY EMS Emergency Response Squad 1 1987 Ford F-350 

[fdny8231]

(via https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zjBBqGGFkow)

[realmedics-blog]

I worry about the hate sometimes

Being a paramedic isn't hard when you're getting calls where you can see what you're doing actually helps people. Even if it just as simple as talking someone down from the brink of panic by interjecting a bit of inaccessible common sense, you know?

But it's the days and days that go by where you do nothing good. It's the valley of waiting, watching the night stretch long.

It's on the way home from days like this, maybe, where you're on the wind-torn, sleeted, and icy roads, and barely swerve to avoid hitting the car in front of you because you lost control of your vehicle somewhere between the road conditions and exhaustion of driving home at dawn. It's on days like this, maybe, that the asshole behind you in the lane you manage to escape into comes walking up to your window, because it's a red light -- your window that you can't even see through because of the snow drifts and starts telling you off for cutting him off in his utterly capable all-wheel over-compensation mobile.

It's on days like this that your hands shake because it takes every ounce of grace you have not to get out of the car and beat the man into the ground.

And you know that the feelings you have on days like this are an over-reaction, but something somewhere inside of you is eventually going to need to be let out to play.

It's on days like this I try to pray.

[realmedics-blog]

You know

I created this blog based off a half-cocked idea we came up with in medic basic to parody the "Real Men of Genius" ad campaign as it pertained to paramedicine.

Because guys, we do some really fucking stupid stuff. And 80% of it hilarious, granted, but that remaining 20%? That stuff that grips us cold in the heart because dear god, we didn't get in trouble for that? 

And if you, dear paramagician reading this blog right now, have yet to experience the shit-your-pants feeling I just described above (like that time you fucked up a narcotics dosage, or maybe when you had Atropine drawn up and ready to give your APE patient because the shooter now looks exactly Lasix, or wait shit it's 6-12-12. not 12-12-6, on the Adenosine? Here's hoping this dude's heart doesn't stop and stay stopped), you simply haven't been a paramedic long enough. Or maybe you're too stupid to realize you've been in that moment before, and at the time, you just thought everything was fucking gravy. Or you're a sociopath, and what's dead can't get much worse, right?

I digress, though, internet pals, because my point here is simple: know your shit.

Stop laughing off forgetting med dosages and protocols you never use, because that next job is the beta blocker overdose and oh fuck do we carry something for that? Or oh they have a known 2nd degree arrhythmia, they just under hydrated and are a bit hypovolemic, let's take them to Bumblefuck Hospital except oops, that EKG on arrival looks a little more like a complete block now that you're taking a second look doesn't it?

Or ignore me. Be happy in your half-cocked practice, and knowledge that you'll never help someone actually in need of emergency intervention. Maybe you will perpetually handle drunks in Times Square until the day you retire your fatass on a 3/4s because of that stroke you convinced the lawyers came from sitting in your truck 8 hours, not your unchecked obesity and hyperlipidemia. 

Maybe being bad at your job will never bite you in the ass.

Hell, maybe firefighters will be doing your job before your job bites you in the ass, if the Comish gets his way.

This job is still inherently hilarious for all the wrong reasons, and this blog is still mostly here to revel in those reasons, but with some of the stuff that's been happening at work recently, I felt a reality check was in order, because guys really. We can kill people.

And even if we don't get fired for that? We should be doing our level best not to add to the recently deceased -- not brushing our very serious fuck-ups off our shoulder like the mean nothing to us.

[ronkiley]

FDNY EMS 321 on call at corner of Eldridge and Canal Streets.

[ronkiley]

FDNY EMS on call at Beach 86th Street, Rockaway.