3 posts tagged “air show”

Ok, I know it's a few days late, but apparently I've been really bad at blogging lately! Here's the 2008 recap:

January

• January 1st: Shadow breaks my nose. Happy New Years!
• January 13th: I get smacked in the nose again at a CERT drill and realize that my nose really is broken.
• January 17th: I started EMT school - so exciting!

February

• February 28th: My first of many encounters with the neighborhood turkies.

March

• March 8th: Houseboat weekend with Brigitte and Amber!
• March 15th: Mather Air Show Day One: lots of patients to practice on!
• March 16th: Mather Air Show Day Two: more patients!
• March 26th: My hospital rotation - a life changing experience!

April

• April 18th: Rivercats baseball game with Dad, Brigitte and Amber
• April 19-20th: CERT Mobex - disaster drill in Clovis

May

• May 10th: Kati graduates from UGA - Mom, Dad and I flew back for a fantastic weekend in Georgia!
• May 13th: NREMT exam - I passed and am officially an EMT!
• May 24th: EMT party - absolutely hilarious - everyone came dressed as some sort of victim... it was great!

June

• June 10th: Metro's CERT team is called up to help out with the local grass fires
• June 21st: Saved my first patient at a CERT event

July

• July 14th: Visited my customer in Houston. Hot and sticky. Ate more steak than a girl should!
• July 20th: Kati moves home from Georgia!

August

• August 8th: Joanna and Chris come to visit!
• The rest of August - Kati and I go to Germany, France, Italy and Greece... it's the trip of a lifetime!

September

• September 14th: Met Mike! :)
• September 24th: Had a close encounter with a tomato hornworm. Had to call Julie in for backup.
• September 26th: Went to the Neil Diamond concert with Kati!

October

• October 9th: Went to the New Kids On The Block concert with Julie, Mindy, Amanda and Chris.
• October 16th: Selected for the Sarah Weeden jury - little did I know it would last two months!
• October 31st: Halloween party!

November

• November 1st: Went to the Madonna concert with Adam and Eva!
• November 4th: Barak Obama is elected president
• November 26th: Thanksgiving vacation at Lake Almanor
• November 15th: Second Annual Friends Thanksgiving!

December

• December 11th: Sarah Weeden trial ends
• December 30th: Kings game with Mike
• December 31st: Mike's New Years Eve Party - LOTS of pig!

All in all, I'd say it was a fantastic year! Who can complain?!

Hope everyone had a wonderful New Year! Mike's party was a blast - they roasted 120 pounds of pig! It took four of them just a few minutes to cut it all up (lots of practice apparently!). Here's a picture of the pig on the spit:

It was insanely delicious! The party was a blast!

As you probably know, today is my birthday. It's been fantastic... it's 2:30pm and I'm still in my jammies! I've watched a bunch of episodes of "ER" (thanks Mike!) and some "Friends" reruns. It's been wonderfully relaxing!

Today did not disappoint either!

First of all, rather than being cloudy and mellow, like yesterday, it was clear and incredibly windy. The ended up grounding parts of the show (the parachuter's, for example) that were too dangerous to do, but almost everything else went up again.

We had some interesting patients come through today - two pregnant ladies who fainted (not at the same time), a diabetic who hadn't eaten all day, someone who had something in their eye (I did the eye wash by myself!), an autistic boy who was given his nighttime medicine instead of his daytime medicine by accident and a woman who was having an allergic reaction to a medication she was on. Today I worked with three EMTs, so it was really great to get their advice and watch them work. They let me do a lot of stuff (hooray for practicing my vitals!) and kept quizzing me with little scenarios. Here's our crew (that's our cool little cart right behind us that we haul people on backboards around in):

I also got to see stuff I didn't yesterday. I finally got to see the helicoptors showing off the guys that hang by a little line to rescue people (my head trauma guy hit the deck about that time yesterday) and I got to take a trip over to the C5:

 

Let me tell you, that is a BIG airplane! They let us walk right through it... it's enormous! The fire captain I was working with said that he was one of the firefighters that flew to New York just after 9/11... and it was on one of these - they were one of four planes allowed in the air. I can't imagine riding in one for that long!

This weekend was incredibly amazing. I'm really sad to see it over - I absolutely love the work we did and I feel like I made a big difference, even if for only a little while in a few people's lives. I will definitely be back at the air show next year and will try to attend anything that CERT medics at! I have tons of pictures from the whole weekend... send me a note if you want to see them!

Today I got to treat my first patient!

Let me start at the beginning. Our CERT team has worked the medical tents for the last two years and the EMS folks love it because it it allows them to go off and do all their other jobs. We love it because we get to practice our medical skills. We got to park at the sheriff's hanger and hang out with just about every law enforcement agency on the planet! After our morning briefing, we headed out to the flight line to our tents. We staffed two this year - I was Medical Tent #2. Here's our crew:

Notice that we have some really cool vests on - they're brand new. We get issued them when we're out on assignment and they hold just about everything! We got radios (the cool kind that have the little clips on your shoulder like the police have) and got to hear the radio traffic all day. The police were out on all sorts of fun stuff... they had their own special little segways that were outfitted with lights and sirens, the motorcycle officers and even the mounted police:

Before the show started, Lucinda and I took a little trip around all the planes that were parked... there were some pretty neat aircraft out there!

 

 

It was definitely cool getting to walk around and see all of the different planes (note my red medical bag... that will come in handy later). It was really neat to go inside the C130 (I can't remember if that's what it really is) - they let us look in the cockpit and go back where all the soldiers sit. When the gates finally opened, we had a few people come by for the normal stuff - bandaids, water, etc. Our first medical patient came in after something flew into her eye. We flushed it out using saline, put on a patch and sent her on her way.

At around 11:15am, we got a real medical call. Someone came running towards our tent yelling that a man had collapsed. I grabbed our trusty red bag (told you it would come in handy) and took off running towards the man. He was a diabetic who had passed out and cracked his head open when he hit the tarmac. I was all goved up and immediately put him in manual c-spine (for those of you who don't know, that means manually holding his head and neck in place until we could backboard and collar him). Mark (who's already an EMT) took his pulse. I talked to the guy and tried to get information out of him, but he was very disoriented. We radio'd for the bike paramedics (we had firefighter paramedics that were assigned to our team - they rode around the show all day on bikes with their equipment strapped to the back). They came and started working on him - taking blood pressure and trying to get him to talk. We decided that we needed to transport him to the hopsital, so we backboarded him. The good news is that my EMT training kicked in and I took control of the backboarding process (for those of you who don't know, the person at the head is always the boss - they're the one holding the most critical part of the body, so they tell everyone else when to roll, etc). I was told later that I had a great instinct and did a fantastic job with the call. We got him boarded, placed on our golf cart (the fire department has it outfitted so that the whole right side of the cart can hold a backboarded patient - we're able to get them out to the ambulence much easier than trying to get the ambulence in to them). I was totally shaking by the time we were done... this is the first real patient I have worked on! I actually liked being at the head because it gave me a chance to listen to the paramedics ask their questions and watch them at work. I asked everything they did! 

I also did get to see the airshow. :) In between all the medical stuff, of course. Here's a video of this really cool plane that can take off and hover like a helicoptor! This is it going backwards... it was cool because it could go all directions!

Here's the Blue Angels:

 

Here's a really cool picture of the Blue Angels... it was overcast for part of today, and the sun glinted off these at just the right time... it looked so beautiful!

What a fantastic day! I can't wait to go back tomorrow!