Book Gang

Spent the night at my fire station exchanging books with my gang.

Seriously a night with my crew AND books...Life is good my friend.  Happy Reading Everybody!

Firehouse Book Club

As if my firehouse wasn't awesome enough, a sort of impromptu reading club has spontaneously formed.  A core group of us from various battalions and such have started reading, sharing and recommending books to each other.  Eventually it gets to the point most of us have read the same book and then we gather around the dinner table excitedly talking over each about our love/hate/eh of the books until we are interrupted by a call.

It is awesome to walk  into my bunk and find a book on my bed, or get a text that a new book is waiting for me in my locker, or have an eager fellow EMT/Firefighter flag me down in the hall with a new "you HAVE to read this" book in hand.  This is my favorite thing about reading, you can ALWAYS find somebody else who shares that joy, and to find several someones in a place I love who share this literary passion of mine is just insanely wonderful.  I hope you all find the same sort of serendipity in the places that you love.  Happy Reading Everybody!

Week Of Learning...But No Posting

Soooo...I'm gonna be away again.  This time it is for work though, so not really my fault.  I am actually quit excited about it 'cause it's a yearly conference where all of us EMT's get together and learn new ways to poke people full of holes among other things.  We also all get to go out drinking and share our war stories.  Unfortunately, between trying to squeeze a couple of shifts in before I
leave and not actually being here at all, posting will not be happening this week.  Instead I will re post some of my favorite posts for your enjoyment.  Hopefully I will also get a chance to sneak a couple of chapters in during any down time I may have.  Back to regular posting next week, I promise.  Until then enjoy these older posts and try not to judge my progress to harshly.  Happy Reading Everybody!

Reading And Riding

As crazy as life has been, I have actually been able to squeeze in quite a bit of reading.  In fact my To Be Rambled About pile is starting to rival my To Be Read pile.  It's weird because I am absolutely exhausted and feel like I have been doing NOTHING but riding my various ambulances in some capacity or another but in reality I have started and finished at least 6 books in the last three weeks.  This my friends is why I always have a book, or e-reader on me.

It's amazing how much reading can get done while waiting on nurses, dispatch, traffic (not when I'm driving of course) or the rare occasion when I get a lunch break.  I can read a quick short story, or a chapter while my partner finishes a report, or when one of my students is working on a quiz.  It all adds up to lots and lots of books read in little tiny chunks.  Now this is not anywhere near as satisfying as sitting down and really reading, but it is enough to keep my sanity and enough to get my reading list finished.  Now if I could just find time to ramble about them :-)  Happy Reading Everybody!

Book Therapy

After a VERY long week, me and two of my fellow EMT girls got together to try and insert a breather into our hectic life.  We spent some time eating, drinking and rehashing all of our recent calls like we normally do, but this time it just wasn't helping like it normally does.  One of the girls suggested we hit 2nd and Charles as we were right next to it all ready, and upon learning one of us had never been there hightailed it across the street as fast as we could.  Upon arrival at this utopia, I instantly headed for the classics, I have just finished a book (more on that next post) that set me

craving the classics and so I decided to update my shelf.  The other two drifted over and what ensued was a two hour discussion on when and where we had read certain books, what they meant to us, why we loved, hated or eh'ed them.  We proceeded to buy each books that we thought they should read and also added to our own shelves.  It was awesome, and in all honesty one of the best therapy sessions I have had in a long time.  It is so great to have friends who love to read, love to discuss, and love to share.  The most shocking part of this whole trip was we did not discuss work, or the fire station or anything even remotly medical related the whole time we were in the store, or on the way home and if you ask any of our significant others...or just anybody who has spent more then 10 minutes with any of us, they will tell you that NEVER happens, that we are ALWAYS talking about our calls and patients (in a totally HIPAA compliant way of course).  It was exactly what I needed and just goes to show that books are seriously the worlds most perfect things.  Happy Reading Everybody!

EMT Bookworm

No sleep, that about sums up my life lately, but that's ok, that is what I signed up for.

EMT By Day

Of course in my world it is more like EMT by nights and weekend, book lover all times in between, but you get the idea.  Time to finish up the day job, read a couple chapters and hit the sack.  Happy Reading Everybody!

What A Weekend!

As always seems to happen on Monday's had a great post planned and folks, I love you all, but I am just to tired to even spell my own name right now.  That being said the reason I am so tired is a good one.  Had weekend duty and ran my little hiney off, while hanging out with the awesomest crew ever!  We also had our installation night (where we promote officers, hand out awards, and drink more then is probably good for us).

EMT Field Guide

I was honored to receive EMT of the year for our department (yeah I've gotta brag a little) and then turned right back around and staffed some more :-)  I really love what I do, and books make those late nights a little easier.  So if you have a first responder in your life give them a hug and a Barnes and Nobles gift card (or Starbucks, we really like coffee too!).  Going to go hunt down coffee now.  Happy Reading Everybody!

Asleep In The Stacks

So I being the genius that I am decided to pull another double shift at the fire station, with my big girl job in between, on my birthday, yep I'm a smart one :-)  All kidding aside it was actually a lot of fun.  It is awesome that I love my "volunteer" job enough to go sleep deprived for a week, just to have the opportunity to boss my unit.  That being said I am a wee bit tired

May be exactly how I am feeling right now!

All in all it has been an exhausting couple weeks, but my Baby Sis comes in tonight, so instead of sleeping we will be scaring ourselves silly with good old fashioned horror movies, followed by a day at the wineries and a meander through the bookstore...and then maybe I will attempt to get some sleep.  Hope everybody has a great weekend.  Happy Reading Everybody!

Lights And Sirens Baby

In addition to my regular weekend duty shift at the fire station, I get to do something special...

I Drive An Ambulance

Yep, that is right folks, between this weekend and next weekend I get to learn how to drive this giant box full of patients, medical toys, and of course my frightened yet supportive crew down the highway with lights and sirens ablaze.  Ok so maybe it will mostly be me cursing traffic and stuck at the stupid light that won't give me the green arrow, but hey it will still be fun. Hope you all have a fun and safe weekend.  Happy Reading Everybody!

Explaining The Unexplainable

Read an interesting short story yesterday in the collection Ruby Slippers, Golden Tears.  The story is called The Fox Wife by Ellen Steiber.  What really caught my interest (besides it being a good little story) is that she says she was inspired by medical accounts in Japan in 1892.  She took these records and married them with the kitsune lore in Japanese culture.  The point of this being that before people knew about certain illnesses, especially of the mental variety, many times they were attributed to something magical.  Since I find the human body and mind fascinating, and I love reading I decided to do some digging around and see if I could find some other common threads in the illness/magic realm  (yeah that didn't quit make sense to me either).  As I was digging around, I found many instances where historians, doctors, researchers and bloggers with too much time on their hands have found lines linking folklore, fairy tales, and legends to real life diseases, illnesses and injuries.  Here are a few examples.

Changelings/Autism- It is amazing how closely the symptoms of autism (especially the more sever forms) match up with old descriptions of changelings.  Imagine that you have this lovely child that seems to be perfectly healthy, then one day you start to notice your once loving child refuses to be touched.  The child pulls away from it's family, has outbursts over the oddest things, seems to hyper-focus on seemingly pointless tasks.  With no frame of medical reference, it would make sense to feel that your child had been replaced by a strangers baby.  Other illnesses that tend to manifest in childhood may also have contributed to the changeling myth.  What I personally find so fascinating about these clear descriptions of autism (excuse me while I climb my up on my soap box for a moment) is that it seems to point towards autism being around for a lot longer then people think.  I know many a child that has not been immunized because somebody convinced them that autism wasn't around until we started immunizing our kids, or that autism is new and contingent on pollution and environmental factors.  While certain environmental factors may play a role (we still don't know a lot about autism) stories about changelings and their dead on descriptions show us that in all probability kids have been afflicted with autism for much longer then anybody realizes, and definitely long before immunizations (getting down of my soapbox now).

Epilepsy/Demonic Possession - Anybody who has had, or witnessed a seizure can tell you it is pretty terrifying.  As an EMT I have dealt with many many many seizures and every time it hits you how crazy it looks.  We know for the most part what causes seizures, but can you imagine back before we had a name and a cause for it, seeing a person just start contorting, flailing, uttering strange sounds, eyes rolling into the back of their heads.  It is no wonder that people were convinced an evil spirit had taken possession of a loved one.  It got even worse when a person had a disease like epilepsy that caused seizures on a regular basis.  It's one thing for a person to suffer one seizure (caused by a high fever or extreme illness), but then be "rid of the demon" and never have another episode.  It would be quit another back in the day to continue these seizures even after a ceremony to excise the demon.  This also lead to a lot of unnecessary incarcerations and even deaths.

Ergotism/Witchcraft-Who would have thought something as innocent as rye flour could be a possible cause for the hysteria of the Salem Witch Trials?  Among the usual jealousy, over zealousness, and greed which is really all a group of people really need to persecute their fellow man, a theory that a crop of rye may have been infected with a fungus that when consumed produces some very interesting effects.  There is an LSD like hallucinogen affect for some people.  A person could suffer from debilitating stomach pains, akin to being stabbed in the belly (which many "victims" of the "witches" described during the trial"  There may be sores, neurological issues, and mania.  Any time a large number of people had unexplained pain or illness, they just attributed it to witchcraft, because really what else could it be.  The biggest problems came when there was no obvious cause for the pain, if I accidental cut myself and see it bleed and feel the pain, it is not witchcraft, if my stomach feels like somebody is stabbing it, but I don't see any marks or can find no cause, then it might be witchcraft. It is interesting to see in history how people can take even the most minor of things and blow them out of proportion.

Oh man there are so many more of these especially when you start dealing with things like schizophrenia, OCD, porgeria, just so many illnesses that we now if nothing else can name as a scientific disease.  This is why it is so important to keep writing stories and keep reading books, it gives us a glimpse into the past and shows us that we are dealing with some of the same things today as people did hundreds of years ago.  It will be int resting in 100 years for future humanity to read our books and stories and say "hey I think they were talking about (insert name of some undiscovered ailment here), can you believe this is what they thought it was?"  Humans have a need to have an explanation for everything, especially when things go wrong. Before we had science and wide spread education, people used magic to try and explain the unknown. Thinking over some of the more contemporary books I've read, I think this generation tends to write about more intangible illnesses, mostly of the mental variety.  Liar is a good example of a modern folk lore take on a potential mental illness.  It is written in the same feel and style as a way to explain something that may not yet be explainable.

What diseases/illnesses do you recognize in your favorite folk tale?  What diseases do you think future generations will look back at us and shake their heads over?  Do I read way to much into simple stories?

You Did WHAT Now?!?!

Every time I have weekend duty at the station I always have a few people I want to nominate for the Darwin Awards.  Seriously the stuff people do is just insane!

The Darwin Awards

Do you know someone you would like to nominate?  Have you ever been witness to a Darwin moment?  How many times have you heard a story and said "really...REALLY?

Don't Drive With Your Eyes Closed!

I have started volunteering as an EMT at the fire station so if my posts make even less sense then usual you will understand that they are coming from a severely sleep deprived brain! In the last couple months I have learned a lot of very important things.

Medicmadness

1. Always have at least one good book handy, you never know when you are going to have some down time.
2. If you are bored and want to go on a call, order food, you will almost always get a call right when you can smell how good your food is, also the hungrier you are the longer the call will take.
3. Please don't drive with your eyes closed, I don't know what it is around here, but when I run about a zillion car accidents a day I can come to no other conclusion then about 25% of the population drives with there eyes closed.

Life, Death and Everything In Between

Confessions of a Trauma Junkie

EMT