Deaf Comedy Jam

We get a lot of patients on the ambulance who are hard of hearing. And there are a lot of accidental straight lines and perfect double entendres thrown out in everyday conversation that are hard to resist. When these two things occur simultaneously, we tend not to resist, and this leads to some escalation where we try to keep a straight face and make one another break or laugh first, without the patient actually realizing what we're doing.

Yeah, it's childish, but, hey, we're childish.

An actual exchange between my partner and I this past weekend.

We picked up a somewhat deaf elderly patient with chest pain, and transported her to the hospital. She first complained of having choked on chicken, and my partner asked a lot of "choking on the chicken" questions, while the Firefighters and I made the obligatory comments about how that could lead to blindness, carpal tunnel, etc. I won that round, since the Firefighters always break first.

Then we did our assessment and drove her to the hospital. I was driving, so my partner was in back treating the patient. When we pulled in to the ER and I opened the back doors, he was looking frustrated at her arms and taping some gauze over a missed IV attempt.

Now, since A Hospital Which Cannot Be Named wants all the work done for them, like lab draws and IV starts or they get bitchy, we hate to bring in a patient without a line established, so he asked me to hop in and take a look at her right arm while he looked for another site on her left.

I jumped in the truck and checked, and, while her veins were lousy, I did find a likely candidate and successfully started an IV, and drew blood.

This is the dialogue which followed:

Me: I'm in.

Him: Good job.

Patient: Oh, you're good.

Me: Thanks.

Patient: But you must hear that all the time.

Me: Once in a while, but it's always nice to hear.

Patient: I hardly felt you put it in.

Him (quiet enough so I heard it but the patient didn't): He hears that a lot.

So I was trying so hard not to laugh that as I finished the blood draw and started to hook up the IV tubing, I fumbled a bit so blood leaked back out of the IV catheter before I could get the line hooked up and running. Not a big deal, it just looks a bit messy. And I mean, like a few cc's of blood, not a lot.

Him: Man, we better have the ER order some O Negative! There gonna need if with you starting IVs today. That never happens to me.

Me: (in my best preschool teacher voice) Well, that's because it only happens when you hit a vein.

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The best version of the game ever was played between me and my old EMT partner Nicole, who was (and probably still is, come to think of it) a drop dead gorgeous blond. We would pretty much just drive around all day trading sexually inappropriate comments and the one who laughed the most, lost. Our partnership was completely platonic. My wife and I had dinner with her and her fiance, and we danced at their wedding.

But our conversations on the truck were consistently sleazy and inappropriate.

One time I was trying to lift the stretcher into the ambulance with a very deaf patient on it.

Lifting the stretcher is routine, but involved. You roll the cot until the head end is in the truck, then lift the foot end off the ground and roll it the rest of the way while your partner raises the wheels. After raising the stretcher, you have to roll it into a yoke and then slide one of the struts into a clamp that closes and locks when the strut hits a tiny retaining pin that keep the clamp open. Add to this the fact that the company was cheap and busy, so we slammed the stretchers into place a lot, and the maintenance was pretty sketchy, so the clamp often failed to lock, or had to be finessed into place.

The ambulance is kinda high, I'm pretty short, plus, this time I was standing in a dip, so I had to lift even higher than usual. So, I'm raising it, Nicole is lifting the wheels, then I need to roll it in, guiding it into place and hitting the damn pin just right which, in this particular shitbox truck, involved a complex slide/pull/shimmy maneuver.

So, I'm struggling a bit.

Nicole: Having trouble?

Patrick: No, no, I got it.

N: Can't get it up? It happens to a lot of guys.

P: No, it's up, I just can't get it all the way in. Happens to me a lot.

N: Well, you gotta work at it. If you put some more finesse into it, it would slide in a lot easier.

P: It's not enough to slam it in. It's all about hitting the right spot.

N: So, you're having a tough time finding the spot? That happens to a lot of guys, too.

P: (tears of silent laughter) I think I'm gonna need you to help me out here....

By which time, everything you say is dirty, since you've put your mind there, and we are emotionally as mature as the average third grade boy.

Thank God we treat a lot of very hard-of-hearing patients.