Last week the Chancellor announced a one year spending review. Governments generally like to set out their spending plans over a four year period. We have not been in this position now for just over three years which makes planning quite challenging. The COVID health and economic emergency and the Brexit deal make longer term planning quite hard.

The main headline you may have noticed was the pay freeze which will affect all staff earning more than £24K. I know how incredibly hard you have been working this year as part of the COVID emergency. I do recognise this has been a health-led emergency and how health service staff are rewarded is important. Carving out groups is difficult and divisive. A pay freeze is a pay cut in real terms and I am disappointed at this outcome for you all. Incremental progression is unaffected.

The announcement continued the commitment to the Police Uplift Programme. The force will have more than 500 additional officers by March 2021. The...

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I had some trepidation about taking an Anti-Black Racism course (which was offered free to employees at our hospital, and all students, faculty and staff affiliated with the University of Connecticut) but I was enthused to engage and learn so I could better understand what is going in America and how I could can better help change this country into the country that I love.  Trump had a slogan Make America Great Again, but after hearing a Bruce Springsteen sound tracked campaign ad encouraging people to vote in Pennsylvania, I reimagined that slogan into Make America Recognizable again.  This comes from the song “Streets of Philadelphia” about a person with AIDs who because of the way he is treated/shunned, loses nearly everything, and is now “bruised and battered, unrecognizable to myself.”  I have felt that America has been unrecognizable to my vision of it – a land that is a world leader and is an example for others of democracy, rule of law, truth, human rights and compassion for its less fortunate.  We...

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I follow COVID ACTNOW daily for a look at how the epidemic is progressing or retreating.  It looks now like it is advancing so severely that they have had to add a new color/category risk level to their map.  Previously red was the worse you could do and it signaled critical – “Active or Imminent Outbreak.”  Things have gotten so bad, they have had to add dark red, signifying SEVERE outbreak.  I only pray we don’t reach the next likely level — black, meaning – DEAD, APOCALYPTIC, BEYOND HOPE, DEFEATED, WASTELAND.

God Bless America and wear your damn masks!

It’s Black Friday.  When thinking of Christmas gifts, consider supporting EMS authors.

My new book, Killing Season: A Paramedic’s Dispatches from the Front Lines of the Opioid Epidemic,   is coming out on April 6, 2021, but if you order two books (or spend $50 now, you can get them for 40% off under a special promotion.  Use code HHSA when checking out at the Johns Hopkins University Press Bookstore.

My first two books, Paramedic: on the Front Lines of Medicine and Rescue 471: A Paramedics’s Stories are still available both in print and as ebooks.

I have two works of fiction available as ebooks.

Diamond in the Rough tells the story of a young EMT’s wayward journey through EMS. It takes place in Hartford in the similar setting to my first novel, Mortal Men: Paramedics on the Streets of Hartford.  The book has caused some controversy because the EMT narrator is a thief, who steals from his patients.  He, of course, eventually pays the price for his actions, but he does, despite his crimes, manage to find some...

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I wrote this post on Thanksgiving 2005.  

***

It’s Thanksgiving morning. I awake at 5:10, shower and dress, then open up the garage door to see a couple inches of snow on the ground. It’s beautiful, but I hate winter, hate the cold weather, hate driving in snow.

When I get to the base, I can see from the tracks in the snow by the ambulance doors. The night crew is out on a call. Ten minutes later I hear them clear with a presumption. I sit in the office and drink a diet coke while I read the morning paper.

This week a thirty-year-old female cop in one of the suburban towns was murdered by her ex-boyfriend, a state cop. We had two cars on standby while they looked for the shooter. They found him a couple hours later, also dead. The paper said he parked his car at a park, and then walked over to her house so she wouldn’t see him. He lay in wait for her and when she returned from work, he ambushed her, shooting her three times, twice in the chest and once in the head. He was supposed to turn himself into court today on a police...

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This week I received in the mail, special glasses I ordered from the back of an old comic book.  They enable me to see COVID.  He is a tiny little green monster with a coat of suction cups.  He is not just one fellow, but an army of millions of little green monsters.

I sit in the ambulance and watch COVID soldiers pour of of the man’s nose, which keeps sticking out from his sagging mask.  Other hordes of green mercenaries slip out from the bottom and sides of the mask, even a few blow right through the mask.  Some of them float about in the air like spacemen in zero gravity. Many bounce off my face shield but others find purchase with their suction cups.  They stick to my gown and my hair and my pant legs which are too long for the gown that does not fit me. I try not to breathe too much as I do a 12-lead ECG, and put in an IV giving him fluid to try to rehydrate him. The green men begin to accumulate on the floor and pile up upon each other and the green man level rises like a flood, above my boots, and up my pant legs, till I was...

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Friday night in the city on a dead end street.  Light beams out of the ambulance’s open back doors.  Inside the EMT spreads a clean white sheet on the black stretcher mattress.  He hits the exhaust button on the wall, and then exits from the side doors. My masked patient steps up into the back where he lays down on the stretcher.  I stand in full PPE gear, and take in a last breath of the fresh night air and then enter the compartment.  I sit on the bench seat.  The EMT closes the door and it is just me, the patient and COVID, under the bright fluorescent lights.