There are two things you can do if you see an ambulance on the back of a tow-truck…
1. Avoid sudden onsets of chest pain
2. Stare, point, and laugh
I am pretty sure everybody that passed us by on the busy Highway 12 last week did exactly that.
At 1330hrs my partner and I were resting comfortably in our station playing a relaxing game of Rummy. Our tones go off and we are dispatched to take a psychiatric patient from our local hospital to a facility two hours away in the Bay Area. We responded to the hospital, and had the patient loaded up on our gurney and ready to roll about an hour later at 1430hrs. My partner and I have done dozens of these transfers before, and we were thinking this one was going to be like all the others. We were wrong.
I was driving along happy as Larry on the bumpiest highway in the nation about 45 minutes away from our destination, when all of a sudden I heard this “clankity-clank” sound from somewhere behind the dash. Then the burning rubber smell came. Guessing that something wasn’t exactly right, I pulled over, popped the hood, and discovered that one of the wheels that the fan belt turns had frozen up, which in turn was wearing the belt away (you can tell I’m not a mechanic by my lack of auto vocabulary). We were dead in the water with our 5150 patient still on board.
We immediately called for another ambulance to come and finish our transfer, and they got there in pretty good time. Only had to wait 30 minutes from the time we broke down. When they got there we transferred care and then began our long wait for the tow-truck which we found out was coming from a town 1.5 hours away. Thankfully my partner brought the deck of cards, so we resumed our interrupted game of Rummy in the back of the ambulance in the 95 degree heat. But at least we had the cards.
At 1800hrs two wonderful things happened. The first was that the tow-truck arrived. The second was that my dad’s buddy Vince who lives in the area arrived with Taco Bell!!! I think the latter was the more welcome of the two at that point. Thanks Vince!
The ambulance was loaded on the flatbed, and we were on our way at 1830hrs. Getting back into county at 2000hrs, we unloaded our “dead” ambulance and switched into a “live” ambulance. We were back in service and ready to roll at 2030hrs. So our little transfer that was supposed to take us 4 hours turned into a 7 hour ordeal. I can mark that down as the 2nd ambulance I have killed so far…
8 comments:
yay...first comment! :)
Bravo! ^_^ :P
Eliza
Wow that sounds like one exciting day!
I don't think I have ever seen an ambulance ever on a tow truck.
But if I saw one I would probably...
Stare,point, and laugh
That is awesome
And 2 ambulances that you have gone through nice....
♥Cassie
ok, but what I want to know is where was the psychiatric patient while all this was happening - it would have been nice to invite them to play rummy?...
And yes how we forget that rescue vehicles can break just like our regular vehicles...
Mr. Reynolds
ooooooooooo.........ouch! Reminds me of the time that my husband's uncle, after putting his semi-conscious 90 something year old mother in law onto one ambulance, and his 60 something year old sister in law (who lived with her mother and had just fallen and broken her shoulder)onto a second ambulance bound for different hospitals, rolled along down the road only to find an ambulance involved in an accident at a near-by intersection. Poor guy!! He stopped, certain that one of them was in the wrecked ambulance, but it turns out they were not and there were no injuries either. Poor Uncle, though! By the time we met up with him at one of the hospitals, I thought we'd have to have him admitted, too!
Hooray! Now this is officially a family blog!
At least Mr. 5150 was calm about the whole occurrence, did he get Taco Bell too?
BFH
Ah, such is life in the fast lane, or should I say "side of the road"?
How was the half an hour with 5150? You didn't really describe that.
LY, Mom
Regarding Mr. 5150...
He was so drugged up by the hospital, he didn't even know his name let alone where he was. Sleeping was his priority for the trip.
TJH
*blew up* I just lost my old comment cause of this stupid computer. I'll try and remember what I said before...
Hey Toms,
Sounds exciting...
Around here there are always ambulances on tow trucks. Should I be worrying? Whenever we see them we always just say "guess they didn't make it" and then try to figure out why. We are curious family, how can we help it...
Have fun with ambulance #3... :)
-Miss Elizabeth
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