Exactly how it's supposed to work

Rarely, there are times where the calls I run restore my faith in the system, even if only temporarily.

We arrived onscene and found our patient looking pretty crappy. He was complaining of chest discomfort and nausea, among other things. We didn't waste any time in getting him on the stretcher and into the ambulance. He was placed on the monitor, and a 12-lead was also run as soon as we were able. His nausea got the better of him and he vomitted. As quickly as we could manage, he got a diesel drip to the hospital. Our onscene time was between 5-10 minutes total.

On arrival at the hospital, we spent just long enough in the ER to have a STEMI chart grabbed, timer started, and for a nurse to come show us the way to the cath lab.

I kid you not when I say that we moved the patient from our stretcher onto the cath lab table, and were kicked out of the room.

I made a comment to my partner about wishing we could stay an watch, because it had to be a interesting procedure. Well, one of the nurses said to just go into the observation room and watch, stating that it's only a 15 minute procedure. Don't have to tell me twice, we moved our stretcher to an out of the way place, and went to watch.

All I can say is wow. It's so very neat to watch. Our guy had a right inferior block. The stint was placed and he converted back to a normal rhythm right before I left to go put my truck back in order.

Total time from initiation of 911 to stint placement was at or just shy of an hour. I'd have to pull the report to be sure, since we don't track arrival to the ER in our station logs.