Twenty years ago when I was looking to buy my first house, my realtor didn’t understand why I did not like the home she was showing me that seemed to meet all my specifications: price, location, size. She did not understand that just two months before I had worked a cardiac arrest there. I could still see and smell the man and all his bodily fluids in the cluttered living room where he collapsed. If I bought that house I would have to live with his ghost. Not for me.

Home hunting is hard when you are in EMS. You walk in thinking as I always think when I enter a home, how am I going to get the patient out of here? A stretcher will never fit in that bedroom. Spiral staircase, forget it. Even if you didn’t do a cardiac arrest in particular houses, you did arrests or memorable calls in houses with the same design. You remember the mother screaming in the bedroom. You see patients wedged between the toilet and the sink. Blood drips down the stairs.  You see all the crap that was in your way that you had to move to get the patient out to...

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I wrote a number of months ago about fentanyl induced chest wall rigidity in opioid overdoses.

Chest Wall Rigidity

Fentanyl induced chest wall rigidity is rare in the hospital setting, but it should not be surprising to find it is a factor in overdose outside the hospital given that the amounts of fentanyl being injected are exponentially larger than in the hospital.

A typical $4 bag of properly mixed fentanyl sold on the streets of Hartford can be the equivalent of 1000 mcgs of fentanyl or 10 100 mcg fentanyl vials.  A bag with a hotspot of fentanyl would obviously have considerably more.

Since I wrote that post I had no further instances of possible fentanyl induced rigidity despite doing many ods.  That is until several weeks ago.

The call came in as a seizure in a restaurant that was closely associated with narcotic activity. We found the patient sitting awkwardly at a table at a table, looking almost like he was having a dystonic reaction. He was very stiff. His head was turned slightly to the left. One of...

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