So it's been a few months since I've last written anything about work. The past few months though have been super busy for me. My friends and I recently moved in to a new house together, who are also my coworkers. It's nice living with them. Two of us work night shift, the other works day shift. And then we're still looking for another roommate. But even though it's a large 4 bedroom house, it's nice having the house to yourself sometimes because of our different time schedules.
Today is my day off and I went to the district fire department and signed up to be a volunteer fire fighter. What they'll do is pay for half of my EMT-Basic training, and then they train me, and after 6 months they'll reimburse me if I pass everything and do well, so essenttially the training itself breaks even, then I'll be on my way as an EMT and/or working as an ER tech!
Working at the hospital now almost 10 months has changed me quite so in my views of how things really work in the world. I've seen the craziest of the crazy in the ER and in the hospital. One event that went down that was really big for me was a month or so ago.
A 25yo male was brought in my ambulance after family members called saying he was in the basement "thrashing around". When he came in around 1am or so, he seemed to be all right. About an hour or so of his stay in the ER he began to become very, very restless. He started rummaging through the drawers and we told him to stop, and he did. Then he'd touch the equipment on the wall and we'd tell him to stop, and he would. But then he would get up and do it all over again and we'd ask him to stop. And repeat. He seemed to have been forgetting what he was told. Every shiny object attracted his eye. Now, he wasn't do anything really of any concern, it was just annoying. He then would ask to use the phone and we told him he couldn't, and we took the phone out of his room. When you're brought in for a mental health evaluation involuntarily, your civil liberties are pretty much gone until you can be fully evaluated. A lot of people don't understand that even after you explain that to them. I mean, why not, you are in a hospital. Doesn't make much sense because you're not in jail. But that's just the way it is. Outside contact could actually make situations worse because we don't know if whoever they want to talk to might come and bust him out, or if they were the cause of their problematic situation.
Then he was just pacing around the room very fast, which makes everyone else anxious because pacing is not a normal behavior and usually leads to irrational thinking. He then came out of his room and started to grab the phone at one our desks. We took the phone from him and escourted him back to his room. He then pushed his way back one of the other guards and started to bang on the backhall door and leave, which are locked and require key-card acess.. He was escourted again to his room, but when he was turned around to go back to his room he dropped himself to his knees then laid criss-crossed, dead weight to the ground. The guard tried to help him back up and the man began to slap my guard in the face and when my manager ran over to help control him, he kicked my manager in the chest. That's when it becomes a Code Grey. So I ran over to the wall and pressed the Code Grey button and helped carry the man back to his room and laid him out on the gurny. About 2 seconds later, 8 or 9 people come rushing in to help restrain this guy who was now fighting very much and not relaxing at all. No one was hurt badly during this scuffle so all was okay. This guy was not right in his mind and was going through a very extreme manic episode. He said in his mind he feels normal, but he knows that he is not normal to everyone else. He was thinking of a million things at once and would talk about topic to topic very fast. He was then moved to one of the little white rooms to cool off for the night. I went home that morning.
Unfortuntely, I was working a Swing shift as well. So, worked 0000 to 0830, then had to be back from 1600-0030. When I got to the office at 1600, a Code Grey went off, so we all ran down from the security office to the ER. When we get there, I see the same guy from before, but he was now on the ground with a guard on top of him and nurse. We were told he was leaving soon to the mental hospital, and he had been calm and cooperative all day, but he then tried to escape and was taken up against the wall to restrain him. He continued to fight and then was taken to the ground, that's when the code was pressed. So as I rush in to assist, the guard had gotten one of the patient's hands in cuffs, and as he went to cuff his other hand, the patient tried to bite at staff and missed and then put his pinky in his mouth and began to bite down really hard so he couldn't be cuffed. We started to pull his hand out of his mouth but he was biting down really hard and doing that would have made it worse for him. There was blood splattered on the floor from his pinky and he broke a tooth out of his mouth. By now there were about 15-18 people in the hall trying to get this guy under control. About 6-7 people sitting on top of him, now myself and another guard are trying to get his pinky out of his mouth. We tried putting our fingers in between his jaws on pressure points and get his mouth open. I even plugged his nose with my fingers so it would make it difficult for him to breathe. He just kept biting and biting and more blood was seeping through his teeth.
Eventually he let go after about 5-6 minutes of biting down as hard as he could on his finger. When he took his hand out of his mouth, the end to the middle of his pinky was dangling off. I had to rip his clothes off because of how we was tangled in it was making it hard for us to cuff him still. I then got the bed ready for the restraints again and they all picked him off the ground. I strapped his legs in first, we then took the cuffs off and put the wrist restraints off. Injected him with a antipsychotic sedative and began to sew his finger back up. As soon as this happens, another code grey is called to the floor. I'm already out of breath from this excitement, I now have to run to the other side of the hospital and up 4 flights of stairs. I feel like I'm going to pass out as I reach the floor, I run down the hall to see 3 staff members huddled around a patient, I come running to see what's going on. It's a very small little old woman who was being stubborn and didn't want to go back in to her room. All at once I wanted to cry from laughing and I also wanted to slap someone for wasting a code grey call on that after what we all just went through. Two other guards arrived a minute after and I told them to take over so I can go back to the ER to calm down and debrief.
I later found out that his finger became infected and had to be amputated.
Poor guy. He was so out of his mind, he literally chewed his own finger off.
I hope I don't get in trouble for writing this story. I think I'm just going to write that after ever story. "I hope I don't get in trouble". But still, that was probably the craziest thing I've had to deal with thus far.
I'll write more either later today or tomorrow (hopefully), but for now I'm going to enjoy the day off and play some Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2.
