The Stolen A/C Unit

this story happened way back when i was a student. i was doing a ride along and i was with FE and, i think, SM. we got a chest pain call at like 0400 in a horrible trailer park. we pulled up and in the darkness could see a tiny african-american woman sitting on her steps. we talked to her for a couple second and placed her on the stretcher. as we were strapping her down a man appeared out of the darkness on a bike. he had a small window a/c unit under his arm. the unit was, more than likely, recently in a window that was not his. he got off the bike and started aggressively asking us where we were taking his woman. she told him she was having chest pain and we said we were going to take her to the hospital. the guy said that he was going with her. when we told him he wasn't going with her he started to mumble to himself and got louder and louder. he was obviously a very unstable person just from his movements and the way he looked at us and the things he was mumbling. as we started to pull her towards the ambulance the bike guy pulled out a very large fillet knife and began to yell at us. we loaded the pt into the ambulance as the bike/knife guy wandered around the ambulance talking crazy talk. the three of us could have easily beat the shit out of him, he was very scrawny and malnourished, which is why he never came at us. we called for police the second he pulled the knife and they arrived shortly and took him into custody. all i had that night was a metal clip board to protect me. that was the last night i ever worked with out a weapon of some kind on me and in my bag on the truck. this city is rough and i'm not gonna let some crackhead take me out.

Adventures in Vehicle Maintenance (Part II)

about a year ago i was working with JS (the male JS) and we were driving emergency traffic and he took a corner fast. not that i was worried, i had full trust in his driving. the weird thing, that hit my mind, was the fact that he was washing the windshield at that time. i was confused at this timing, what with the high speed mixed with the wiper fluid and wiper blades. it ended up that JS was not a psychopathic nut job, it was actually radiator fluid that was flying up onto the windshield and he was trying to keep the old beast on the road. we have a lot of overheating ambulance fails in the summer down here. also, the turbo on the Fords like to pop on these hot days.

4,202...

that's how many calls we had in the month of May. we average 8 ambulances on the road at any one time (around 12 during the day and 6 at night) and only one hospital. we take people to BJ and the army hospital but that is probably only less than 10% of our calls. gonna be a warm summer and it's gonna only get worse. any medics out there need a job?