Name: Norm Whitehurst
Occupation: EMT, Assistant Chief
Location: Plymouth, CT
A long time ago, I was in the Coast Guard for ten years, then I worked in television for twenty-five. When that time was coming to an end, I wanted to do something different. For whatever reason, I decided I wanted to try to become an EMT, so I signed up for the course. Jim Dubowsky happened to be the instructor and chief here at Plymouth, and he suggested that I apply, and the rest is history. I’ve been working in EMS for seven years now.
A lot of people don’t see what really goes on in their town. It may look like a small, quaint little town, but what we see as EMTs shows a different side, and it affects you when you realize how many people actually need help and how mental illness affects communities. It gives you a sense of purpose. You want to do something to help, and here we are.
The jump bag, or “first in” bag, contains almost everything that you would find inside the ambulance, so we can begin our care at the scene, whether it’s inside a house or on the side of the road. It probably weighs about thirty pounds. There’s medical equipment, oxygen, trauma bandages, everything we need is in one bag so that we can be more efficient on scene. Time is of the essence. If you have to send somebody back to the ambulance to get a tourniquet with somebody bleeding out on the side of the road, you’ve wasted time. With the bag, you’ve got all that stuff with you, so you can save a life more efficiently.
The bags have multiple pockets. In our upper-outer compartment here, nicknamed the “Oh, shit” pocket, we’ve got tourniquets for major bleeding, shears, emesis bags for the drunks, burn blankets for burn patients, hot packs for hypothermia, and cold packs for heatstroke
Moving on down to the lower-outer compartment, we’ve got some of our diagnostic equipment: blood pressure cuffs of multiple sizes, pulse oximeter to measure blood oxygen levels, stethoscope, thermometers, and a glucometer for blood glucose levels.
Then we go into the outer shell of the bag and you’ve got more trauma equipment such as cervical spine collars for stabilizing necks in both adult sizes and pediatric sizes. We’ve got large trauma dressings for massive open wounds, more burn sheets, and splinting equipment for broken bones.
The really big part of the bag holds several types of bandages, pads, and gauze. There’s a lot of them, enough to basically handle a small disaster. The different types depend on the severity of the wound; the smaller gauze rolls we use to secure a pad in place, but the larger bandages we use for wound packing. Triangular bandages we use for splinting arms. There’s also petroleum and occlusive dressings for chest injuries that penetrated a lung, these seal off the air so it stays inside and doesn’t leak out through the wound. We’ve got saline to clean the wound, sometimes we have patients who got pepper sprayed and this also helps them wash their eyes.
There’s the oxygen tank and different types to deliver it, nasal cannulas, if we don’t need to give an awful lot of oxygen, non-rebreathers to give a higher oxygen percentage, and bag valve masks (BVMs) for an even higher percentage and to assist with ventilations.
Generally, when people are in respiratory arrest/distress or cardiac arrest, we have to put devices into people’s mouths to keep the tongue out of the way. If they’re unconscious, we use OPAs which go down their throat, or if they’re conscious, NPAs, which are basically tubes that we put down somebody’s nose to help them get the oxygen where it needs to go.
We’ve got our medications, all of these are contained in one pocket so that we are able to quickly access them. We have adrenaline and syringes so that we can administer what used to be called EpiPens for anaphylactic incidents, aspirin for possible cardiac issues, glucose for diabetic emergencies, and Narcan for opioid overdoses.
I remember a time when we got a call for an unresponsive male in bed, possibly in cardiac arrest, so we got there and brought in this bag. We assessed him and he did have a pulse, so it wasn’t a heart attack. This particular person had a history of drug use, so an overdose became a suspicion immediately. We checked his eyes, they were pinpoint. He was breathing with snoring respirations, which is not adequate breathing. Those are all signs of an opioid overdose, so we immediately started to bag him with the BVM and oxygen, and administered Narcan. Only one or two minutes later, he jolted up, immediately talking again. Narcan brought him out of it, that’s the power of Narcan. Of course, he denied taking any opioids, but Narcan is a truth serum. It doesn’t work on anything else but opioid overdoses. The good thing about the jump bag is we brought it in, we had everything we needed. It’s got the oxygen, the BVM, and the Narcan, so we’re able to do all that stuff without wasting any time, because he would have died had we not done any kind of intervention.
Noah Roy is a staff writer for Blue Muse Magazine.
Header image courtesy of Noah Roy.
I LOVE interviews. Great topic/object choice. 30 pounds of life-saving stuff…