March 20th, 2005...

I started at 8am as I do every Sunday on the river, hoping to get ‘the big one.’ As usual I was disappointed. Its Sunday… not much happens on Sunday. It had been a long day of training and chores that was coming to an end.

I got into bed at about 23:00; at 23:30 the radio cracked out a dispatch for a vehicle accident. Generally I was excited, fumbling around trying to get my turnouts on as fast as possible. We got in the rig and hit the lights. It was raining cats and dogs… some of the hardest rain this season. I got on the radio… “REDCOM 5684 responding!” We were then updated on the situation. Not only was it a vehicle accident but, extrication as well.

Now the level had escalated… this was a ‘real’ call! When we came on scene, we found a vehicle on the side of the road with major damage to the front left corner all the way up the hood and on the roof, all on the left side. On the way in we passed the second vehicle about 50 yards back on its driver side in a nearby parking lot. We all piled out of the rig ready to go.

I ran to the car to begin the patient care stuff while the captain and the volunteer who had showed up, got the extrication equipment ready to go. It was an approximately 65 year old woman with some severe facial trauma, but no other obvious injures. She was fully alert and talking.

We cut the door off and got her into the ambulance in 12 minutes. That was pretty quick I thought. When we were done with her we went to the next vehicle. The man who had been driving was already out of the vehicle and had suffered no injuries except for a few glass cuts on his face. He spoke almost no English but from what we understood it was his fault.

The next morning we got the details of the call from the CHP. I turned out that the woman was a night shift worker at a local hospital, and was on her way to work. When the man crossed over the line coming around a turn and hit her front left side. He then drove up her car which caused the damage to the hood and roof of her car.

The man in the other car was drunk coming home in the opposite direction and crossed the line. She saw him coming and swerved to get out of the way, just managing to miss a head on collision. He was a Hispanic man about 30 years old, drunk, no driver’s license, no insurance, no registration… and he had been using stolen registration stickers for the past 4 years.

- This was the biggest call I have been on yet. I learned so much about the procedures on a scene and got my first real emergency.

posted by Unknown at 7:09 PM