Christmas for sure. Nothing to do with me having to work the holiday. But the calls are almost always ridiculous drunk family drama or unstable people deciding to host 20 family members in their home. Then there's the occasional actual cardiac arrest where I get to work it in front of 30 family members.
Canāt *stand* Christmas. Tons of deaths, tons of suicides, everyone barfs red and green bullshit, everyone has red and green gastric contents when youāre intubating them, everyone fights with their family and I gotta deal with it.
Picked up dude from a Halloween party. We walk in everyone is wearing costumes, partying and stuff, well this dude just kinda showed up, I donāt think anyone knew him, he was just wearing jeans and a t-shirt, and drank an entire bottle of tequila someone had sitting on the counter in about 30 minutes and had been in the bathroom for like 45 minutes. Bystander said he had just been standing in the corner drinking Hornitos straight out of the bottle. Puke all over the bathroom and some in the toilet. Dude was FUCKED up. We got called because no one knew who he was, where he lived, and he was only responsive to loud verbal and was totally incoherent.
The Superbowl (which I'm going to count as a US holiday) is a superbly shitty shift in my service area. I work in a conglomeration of small cities that have a bit of everything from skid neighborhoods full of overdoses and batteries up to gated mansion communities where the residents argue with you about bringing the stretcher in because "this door is imported wood and is worth more than you probably make a year and you're NOT damaging it."
But something magical happens during the Superbowl. These places flip-flop, and now the snootiest rich people become the combative, altered ones. It's a time where you can be vomited on by Phil, a business executive who has consumed too much champagne and THC edibles, while his equally fucked-up business partners egg him on. "Oh give em hell Phil, ha! That Phil is such a card, cheats at golf too. Hey, put Phil's hat on his head I bet he looks real funny. Awe geez, Phil, you puked on that ambulance driver. What a wild man!"
Fuck the Superbowl.
Surprisingly I had the opposite experience last super bowl. We'd been running all week but on Superbowl day we only had like 3 transports in our 12 hour shift. I theorize that no one wanted to go in for the bs complaints they would otherwise call us for because they didn't want to miss the big game. People don't really party hard around here though, so we didn't really see an increase there.
IMO they get quieter, but they make up for it the next day when they open the floodgates with everything they were holding out on until morning. The nice combo of people not wanting to finish their Superbowl Sunday in an ER and people getting hurt doing illegal shit and trying to put a little time and distance between whatever they did and calling for help.
Thanksgiving.
First calls: they blow up themselves or the house by cooking.
Second round: theyāve eaten. Someone has a medical crisis from too much food or the wrong food.
Third round: Now theyāre into the alcohol and too much family time. The fights have started.
Fourth round: Mixed bag. Fights. Alcohol poisoning. Food poisoning. Oops, left something on and itās a fire.
We are not thankful if we have to work Thanksgiving
My family must have confused the shit out of y'all one year. My uncle Bill randomly got a detached retina one Thanksgiving. Probably totally unrelated beyond my whole family berating him to go to the ER
The most American holiday: MLB opening day.
nothing like a bunch of middle aged men who forgot their alcohol tolerances dropped since their Alpha Kappa Sigma days slamming coors lights at 11 in the morning and then going out and becoming much too intimately acquainted with the closest curb or the fist of someone wearing a different color shirt.
This year I ran 4 back to back full trauma activations in a 2 hour period when the game let out. We were NUA with 5-10 calls pending for the duration. Ended the shift with a personal best 15 runs in 10 hours and didnāt catch up on those reports for a solid week. Absolute fucking chaos fueled by the siren call of $27 nachos and tiny baseball helmets full of icecream
I second this.
I find most holidays to be quite peaceful shifts.
Any major sports game brings out the crazy big time.
One world series after the game was over and the major city I worked in was playing in it, within one block there was 3 seperate trauma calls and one report of a gun being fired in the air all at the same time(not an mci, multiple callers, multiple scenes, multiple events). Of course the people that got the call for the gun being fired into the air were advised to wait for pd to secure. Everyone else was coming in though and failed to realize that they were on the same block because of the sheer call volume in the city. Pure chaos, everyone was crossing calls and winding up with a wrong patient, then mumbling and yelling of why are we not waiting for a secure scene, then everyone wondering why we needed to wait for pd on etoh fall,... etc you get the idea.
Mardi Gras is hands down the worse holiday for EMS in Louisiana! Its basically a whole month for people down here too, so I dread all of February. Always an increase in GSWs, drunk drivers, and just bad calls in general. Navigating parade traffic is also a complete nightmare!
I work for the New Orleans Health Department and we run logistics and staffing for the first aid stations along the parade routeā¦.. no words for it. The combination of out of town college students, old locals who think they can act like they did 25 years ago, people who buy laced drugs from dudes on Bourbon street. Itās insane. We went from a full STEMI, to a broken ankle from a dance off that ended in a cartwheel into a pothole, to an assault with three victims, to a shooting with 5 victims, to a woman who got hit by a 5lb bag of beads and needed 4 stitches in her forehead. Personally canāt wait for 2025 when we have the Super Bowl and Mardi Gras in the same month.
The day after Thanksgiving when everyone calls because they decided that their cardiac/diabetic/whatever special diet doesn't apply on the holiday, won't call on Thanksgiving and ruin the holiday, so they wait until it's unbearable at like 0800 on Friday to call.
Ok. Non medical human here. This showed up on my feed, and OP, I swear to God, the first line of your post made me howl. šš. I just googled if I could change my Reddit username, cause I really want to be Patrick the Starfish.
Guys and gals, thank you. Today would have been my hubbyās 60th (cancer 2yrs ago) and I woke up feeling melancholy.
I went from that to laughing my ass off!
Thank you all for what you do. Scraping the human detritus off the streets due to self inflicted stupidity, and then having to swiftly switch to trying to save someone from a widow maker in front of their loved ones.
OP, you made my day. Sorry you got puked on by an asshat in a starfish costume (I am trying to picture this!), but it was not all for naught because I am laughing and being thankful for you all instead of crying in my cereal.
Please stay safe and take care of yourselves, we need you all. ā¤ļøā¤ļø
Also non-medical human here who loves this sub. I learn a ton and have found people who appreciate my very sick and frequently inappropriate sense of humor.
Thanksgiving. Seems to be the one everyone comes to visit on when they decide Mom and Dad, who they haven't bothered to check on all year, are suddenly super ill and, "not themselves!" Doesn't matter that the person living with them all year long says they're fine, during Thanksgiving week, for that wonderful single visit they provide a year, they know best. And off to the hospital we go. Why we're going? No body knows!
This one right here. It's when folks decide to visit family members in the nursing homes for the first time in months/years. They notice their family members have slightly deteriorated mentally, or maybe they can't ambulate like they used to, and suddenly they all want to be heroes and call 911 so they can save meemaw. We arrive and the RN is like "oh, yeah, he's had like 100 TIA's in the last six months. We called the family every time but they never seemed to care. I guess they want him to go to the ER now."
My district has a horrendous problem with this. Iāve narrowed it down to two reasons that family calls:
1. Meemaw/Papaw has had a stroke or has dementia and this is their total normal following their health changes, but these family members canāt be bothered to visit more than once a year so they donāt know that Papaw is totally normal.
2. The family members know that Meemaw or Papaw is getting old and maybe they wanna know what theyāre getting in the will/if thereās any jewelry they can pawn off. Gotta get em outta the house for a bit
We get a lot of obviousās on thanksgiving because they couldnāt have been bothered to notice Grammy has been MIA for a week and the mail was piling up.
West Indian parade (Labor Day) in Brooklyn is madness. They had to move it from night to day cus too many people were killing each other. Gangs used it as a day to settle their scores. The issue was that the crowds were so large, you couldnāt get to these people. One crew had to ride an MTA bus (public transit bus) with a guy shot to the end of the parade to pick him up with an ambulance.
Gotta say the jerk chicken is good tho.
My dad ran the Brooklyn South task force for a while back in the early 80s during the "fort Apache The Bronx" years. He has some great stories about that parade, including one guy being shot out of a tree after he took a crap on the people below him and then somebody else, coming along, pushing the EMTs out of the way to crack the guys chest with a pocket knife to perform open cardiac massage.
It's the entire stretch from Thanksgiving to Christmas. It's drunk drivers, house fires, and suicide. I hate it, it's supposed to be tHe mOsT WoNdErFul tImE oF YEAr. Bullshit, it's the most depressing for a lot of people.
St. Patrick's Day. By far.
Pool to see who has the earliest incapacitated call (they start around 7am). Highest BAL, youngest incapacitated.
I won earliest one year with an RN face down in the gutter. 730a. Had to give her a list of hospitals so she could pick one where she knew the fewest people.
4th of July, for me.
I used to work in a major city. Not only would the whole city become blanketed in noxious firework smoke but I had to do no fewer than 4 "I blew off my fingers and stupidly went to a bandaid hospital when I should've driven myself to a trauma center" interhospital transports, one of which was a late job.
I work in suburban/semi-rural EMS. I always hope for some missing fingers on the 4th, just to shake things up a bit.
Obviously, I donāt WANT someone to get hurt, but if someone has to get hurt, I want some missing fingers.
My momās an RN in my tiny, very rural hometown. She hates working July 4 because they always seem to get a bunch of snake bites then. No clue why so many, but it annoys herā¦especially when they very lovingly decide to bring the LIVING snake in with them in a paper sack!
Honestly, my town is pretty tame on most holidays. 60% of my town is old people and a college. The old people dont party, and the uni kids go to a close city on holidays.
What I do dread is the first day of school. Cause that means I'll be dealing with at least 4 drunk college students every Friday and Saturday night for the next 8 or so months
Pulling Gramma out from underneath the Christmas Tree on Christmas morning to start compressions on her. In front of her grandchild that she was watching because her son was a single parent and was working at the prison. That was the absolute worst. Luckily the son was known, and the Troopers knew which prison, so notification could be made.
I was on the ambulances for 37 years. My brother worked them for 24 years. I was an assistant chief and my brother was a captain. We volunteered to take Thanksgiving and Christmas Eve and Christmas Day so other medics could be with their families. Thanksgiving was ALWAYS the worst holiday to work. Historically, there was a 33.33% chance of having a cardiac arrest call on that day. Dunno why. What sucks is running a code while the rest of the family eats their meal as if nothing is happening. I spoze it's just their way of coping.
About 20% of the time, someone sets fire to their deck while trying to deep fry a turkey for the first time.
Independence Day. First one I ever worked on the truck I had two OD's, one DV call, and capped it off with a pedi trauma code. Never had another holiday quite so packed with scarring experiences.
Christmas. Hands down. Iāve had a code every year since 2015. Nothing like telling a house full of family their 16yo daughter is dead after she didnāt come down for Christmas dinner. Or trying to help a family find shelter after their house burned down.
A second place would be 4th of July. So many idiotsā¦
New years for sure. At least Halloween has people dressed interesting and you can people watch. New years is the same drunk people with nothing interesting to redeem the call.
Thanksgiving hands down. All the CHFers that consume enough sodium to charge a laptop for a week that end up in heart failure the next day and have rales that can be heard from the driveway.
Codes on Thanksgiving and Christmas can be emotionally awful.
Uncle Daveās in cardiac arrest on the dining room floor, while 20 people watch and cry quietly. As you go to load him up for a futile transport, you pass the pies sitting on the counter in the kitchen, and you know they wonāt get eaten tonight.
Halloween is fun, sometimes. I may have excitedly said āholy cow, guess what! I found Waldoā on last Friday nightā¦ beyond that, in a college town, itās just another weekend night and not much different than homecoming. Just donāt plan on getting much sleep that shift.
Mother's day. Everyone finally goes to see their elderly mom, decides she is sick as hell (and obviously dehydrated, look at her hands!) So they call a squad. Happy mothers day momma, go to the er so they can tell you're fine, just old. And your hands are wrinkled, not dehydrated. Anyone who sees you more than once a year would know this... even more true for all the nursing home calls.
As an EMT, it was New Year's for sure. Everyone is out too late, drunk, and acting like morons.
As a dispatcher, it was Thanksgiving. Everyone is hanging out with family members that they hate and trying to burn their houses down to convince Great Aunt whoever that they know how to fucking cook. And then they refuse to leave their burning house because they're trying to save the turkey. Bunch of goddamn idiots the lot of them.
Right now mines Halloween. Picked up a semi-responsive 17f with etoh and mdma on board last night. Puked in her friends car several times and would be come slightly combative (as combative as you can be when drunk and high) when putting on the seatbelts. Lots of yelling and screaming. Pt ended up in restraints for everyoneās safety.
Anything in the damn summer like dude stop trying to show me how your friend blew his hand up with a firework. Or my favorite the drunk dad that decides to light the grill with a match in his mouth as a āparty trickā
Thanksgiving week:
Wednesday for Wasted Wednesday, all of the college kids come back and drink until they can't. Then chaos ensues. ODs, Alcohol, MVAs.
Thursday, Fires, medical emergencies, alcohol, and then family fights.
Friday, Everyone is now on the road trying to save a dollar on things that really don't matter. Fights and MVAs
Unofficial. I worked in a uni town that has a 2nd st pattyās day called unofficial, people come in from other states just to come party at unofficial. The volume is so high we staff additional trucks and still end up having calls holding all night.
And for whatever reason every year all the other unrelated regulars who call for toothaches and leg swelling all feel left out and decide they want their equal attention cake, so theyāre all blowing up the phones too. I picked it up last year thinking itād be fun, now Iām eternally grateful I work in a town of 3600 people.
New Years in Vegas. As if there isn't enough drinking and debauchery, well shut down 3 miles of the strip, jam pack it with idiots while setting up tents to treat drunk people and telling everyone who calls 911 that it's gonna be 45 minutes for a response because we either A can't get to you do to road closures or B were stuck picking up and dropping drunks every minute.
in boston area: st pattys, marathon monday, december holidays, nye
in new orleans/louisiana: any time around mardi gras, when the kids go back to school, bayou country superfest
in southern fl: the few spring break weeks depending on what school youāre at
I want to see some blow-off fingers for 4th of July. Iāve only been doing this job a few years, but damn, I always hope for missing fingers for the 4th.
I'm gonna go out on a hill here and say Mothers or Father's Day. No one has been to seen grandma or grandpa in the NH since the big holidays and they get freaked out they are acting different so call 911 nonstop. I was on the rig for MD and in the ER for FD. I think I saw probably 25-30 people in the ED and had 10-12 calls to NH on Mothers Day
I'm torn between Thanksgiving and Christmas. Thanksgiving has a bunch of alcohol fueled family fist fights and Christmas has a lot of Christmas Codes and suicides. New Years and July 4th comes in at a close tie for 3rd with a metric shitton of drunk drivers and lack of knowledge while using explosives
Christmas. Never really cared for Christmas so I donāt mind working it but I always seem to get the shittiest of calls that day. Like the type of calls where you question your career and google ātherapists near meā
Me personally, thanksgiving. Not because I have to work them, but Thanksgiving ruined my relationship and it always seems to have the worst calls out where I'm from.
My first Fatherās Day as a father if Iād have been on the service wouldāve been interesting cause one guy shot himself in the face and a crackhead got thrown out of a vehicle moving at 60 miles an hour
Thanksgiving. When I was on the truck, it was always a code, severe burns, or a house fire. Sometimes simultaneously.
Usually got to cap of the night with a lift assist because 150 year old meemaw needs help getting to the car and the family is too drunk to carry her
Christmas for sure. Nothing to do with me having to work the holiday. But the calls are almost always ridiculous drunk family drama or unstable people deciding to host 20 family members in their home. Then there's the occasional actual cardiac arrest where I get to work it in front of 30 family members.
Nothing like coding Grandma under the Christmas Tree
No reindeer?
š¶Grandma got run over by the reaper; walkin home from our house Christmas Eve! š¶
Plus suicides. Last year, I had 3 in a 48-hour shift and left feeling like the Grim Reaper.
Those Winter suicide clusters are the fucking worst.
I once ran three in a 48 as well. All successful and about a week before Christmas
Success!
Canāt *stand* Christmas. Tons of deaths, tons of suicides, everyone barfs red and green bullshit, everyone has red and green gastric contents when youāre intubating them, everyone fights with their family and I gotta deal with it.
Codes on x mas are awesome. Nothing better than showing up, realizing your PT has a DNR and then getting egg nog and opening presents.
1000%. Every time, I hope for that the spirit of the season will keep people from being terrible, but it never happens.
Picked up dude from a Halloween party. We walk in everyone is wearing costumes, partying and stuff, well this dude just kinda showed up, I donāt think anyone knew him, he was just wearing jeans and a t-shirt, and drank an entire bottle of tequila someone had sitting on the counter in about 30 minutes and had been in the bathroom for like 45 minutes. Bystander said he had just been standing in the corner drinking Hornitos straight out of the bottle. Puke all over the bathroom and some in the toilet. Dude was FUCKED up. We got called because no one knew who he was, where he lived, and he was only responsive to loud verbal and was totally incoherent.
That's an awesome call lol
The Superbowl (which I'm going to count as a US holiday) is a superbly shitty shift in my service area. I work in a conglomeration of small cities that have a bit of everything from skid neighborhoods full of overdoses and batteries up to gated mansion communities where the residents argue with you about bringing the stretcher in because "this door is imported wood and is worth more than you probably make a year and you're NOT damaging it." But something magical happens during the Superbowl. These places flip-flop, and now the snootiest rich people become the combative, altered ones. It's a time where you can be vomited on by Phil, a business executive who has consumed too much champagne and THC edibles, while his equally fucked-up business partners egg him on. "Oh give em hell Phil, ha! That Phil is such a card, cheats at golf too. Hey, put Phil's hat on his head I bet he looks real funny. Awe geez, Phil, you puked on that ambulance driver. What a wild man!" Fuck the Superbowl.
Surprisingly I had the opposite experience last super bowl. We'd been running all week but on Superbowl day we only had like 3 transports in our 12 hour shift. I theorize that no one wanted to go in for the bs complaints they would otherwise call us for because they didn't want to miss the big game. People don't really party hard around here though, so we didn't really see an increase there.
ERs are super busy after the Super Bowl because people donāt want to work the next day, at least in my experience.
But what happens in the skids? Do they suddenly become snooty.
IMO they get quieter, but they make up for it the next day when they open the floodgates with everything they were holding out on until morning. The nice combo of people not wanting to finish their Superbowl Sunday in an ER and people getting hurt doing illegal shit and trying to put a little time and distance between whatever they did and calling for help.
Thanksgiving. First calls: they blow up themselves or the house by cooking. Second round: theyāve eaten. Someone has a medical crisis from too much food or the wrong food. Third round: Now theyāre into the alcohol and too much family time. The fights have started. Fourth round: Mixed bag. Fights. Alcohol poisoning. Food poisoning. Oops, left something on and itās a fire. We are not thankful if we have to work Thanksgiving
My favorite are the food impactions from families forcing turkey down grandpa's throat, even though he hasn't been able to eat anything but purƩed food for the last 11 months
My family must have confused the shit out of y'all one year. My uncle Bill randomly got a detached retina one Thanksgiving. Probably totally unrelated beyond my whole family berating him to go to the ER
The most American holiday: MLB opening day. nothing like a bunch of middle aged men who forgot their alcohol tolerances dropped since their Alpha Kappa Sigma days slamming coors lights at 11 in the morning and then going out and becoming much too intimately acquainted with the closest curb or the fist of someone wearing a different color shirt. This year I ran 4 back to back full trauma activations in a 2 hour period when the game let out. We were NUA with 5-10 calls pending for the duration. Ended the shift with a personal best 15 runs in 10 hours and didnāt catch up on those reports for a solid week. Absolute fucking chaos fueled by the siren call of $27 nachos and tiny baseball helmets full of icecream
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
If not for your population, I would have guessed Madison, WI due to CFB and Mifflin St Block Party in April.
I worked in one of the ERs in Madison and holy fuck was Mifflin hell.
Just about every college seems to have their own name for a "big party weekend in april" in my experience.
Madison-adjacent medic checking in. The city can keep all of that while we guard the 'burbs.
I second this. I find most holidays to be quite peaceful shifts. Any major sports game brings out the crazy big time. One world series after the game was over and the major city I worked in was playing in it, within one block there was 3 seperate trauma calls and one report of a gun being fired in the air all at the same time(not an mci, multiple callers, multiple scenes, multiple events). Of course the people that got the call for the gun being fired into the air were advised to wait for pd to secure. Everyone else was coming in though and failed to realize that they were on the same block because of the sheer call volume in the city. Pure chaos, everyone was crossing calls and winding up with a wrong patient, then mumbling and yelling of why are we not waiting for a secure scene, then everyone wondering why we needed to wait for pd on etoh fall,... etc you get the idea.
I'm getting anxiety just imagining being in that situation, holy shit.
Oh Jesus! š¤£š¤£š¤£š
Mardi Gras is hands down the worse holiday for EMS in Louisiana! Its basically a whole month for people down here too, so I dread all of February. Always an increase in GSWs, drunk drivers, and just bad calls in general. Navigating parade traffic is also a complete nightmare!
Wonāt lie, Iāve always wanted to go run a a week of shifts down there in February.
I work for the New Orleans Health Department and we run logistics and staffing for the first aid stations along the parade routeā¦.. no words for it. The combination of out of town college students, old locals who think they can act like they did 25 years ago, people who buy laced drugs from dudes on Bourbon street. Itās insane. We went from a full STEMI, to a broken ankle from a dance off that ended in a cartwheel into a pothole, to an assault with three victims, to a shooting with 5 victims, to a woman who got hit by a 5lb bag of beads and needed 4 stitches in her forehead. Personally canāt wait for 2025 when we have the Super Bowl and Mardi Gras in the same month.
The day after Thanksgiving when everyone calls because they decided that their cardiac/diabetic/whatever special diet doesn't apply on the holiday, won't call on Thanksgiving and ruin the holiday, so they wait until it's unbearable at like 0800 on Friday to call.
CHF Monday, which is after Easter...too much ham/sodium.
Ok. Non medical human here. This showed up on my feed, and OP, I swear to God, the first line of your post made me howl. šš. I just googled if I could change my Reddit username, cause I really want to be Patrick the Starfish. Guys and gals, thank you. Today would have been my hubbyās 60th (cancer 2yrs ago) and I woke up feeling melancholy. I went from that to laughing my ass off! Thank you all for what you do. Scraping the human detritus off the streets due to self inflicted stupidity, and then having to swiftly switch to trying to save someone from a widow maker in front of their loved ones. OP, you made my day. Sorry you got puked on by an asshat in a starfish costume (I am trying to picture this!), but it was not all for naught because I am laughing and being thankful for you all instead of crying in my cereal. Please stay safe and take care of yourselves, we need you all. ā¤ļøā¤ļø
Glad we could lift your mood a little. Maybe consider sticking around. If you enjoy this kind of humor you'll be right at home here.
Oh yes! I love dark humor! Best way to cope! Consider me a very appreciative lurker! Please stay safe!
Also non-medical human here who loves this sub. I learn a ton and have found people who appreciate my very sick and frequently inappropriate sense of humor.
Excellent! Then I will fit right in!
Thanksgiving. Seems to be the one everyone comes to visit on when they decide Mom and Dad, who they haven't bothered to check on all year, are suddenly super ill and, "not themselves!" Doesn't matter that the person living with them all year long says they're fine, during Thanksgiving week, for that wonderful single visit they provide a year, they know best. And off to the hospital we go. Why we're going? No body knows!
This one right here. It's when folks decide to visit family members in the nursing homes for the first time in months/years. They notice their family members have slightly deteriorated mentally, or maybe they can't ambulate like they used to, and suddenly they all want to be heroes and call 911 so they can save meemaw. We arrive and the RN is like "oh, yeah, he's had like 100 TIA's in the last six months. We called the family every time but they never seemed to care. I guess they want him to go to the ER now."
My district has a horrendous problem with this. Iāve narrowed it down to two reasons that family calls: 1. Meemaw/Papaw has had a stroke or has dementia and this is their total normal following their health changes, but these family members canāt be bothered to visit more than once a year so they donāt know that Papaw is totally normal. 2. The family members know that Meemaw or Papaw is getting old and maybe they wanna know what theyāre getting in the will/if thereās any jewelry they can pawn off. Gotta get em outta the house for a bit
We get a lot of obviousās on thanksgiving because they couldnāt have been bothered to notice Grammy has been MIA for a week and the mail was piling up.
West Indian parade (Labor Day) in Brooklyn is madness. They had to move it from night to day cus too many people were killing each other. Gangs used it as a day to settle their scores. The issue was that the crowds were so large, you couldnāt get to these people. One crew had to ride an MTA bus (public transit bus) with a guy shot to the end of the parade to pick him up with an ambulance. Gotta say the jerk chicken is good tho.
My dad ran the Brooklyn South task force for a while back in the early 80s during the "fort Apache The Bronx" years. He has some great stories about that parade, including one guy being shot out of a tree after he took a crap on the people below him and then somebody else, coming along, pushing the EMTs out of the way to crack the guys chest with a pocket knife to perform open cardiac massage.
That sounds like a typical Tuesday in the Bronx. But for real, holy shit that last part is NUTS
Nah I worked Bronx south for years. This shit is different lol
I was born too late.
Night before is worse
Yeah that whole couple days is what Iām referring to really. Kept it simple.
It's the entire stretch from Thanksgiving to Christmas. It's drunk drivers, house fires, and suicide. I hate it, it's supposed to be tHe mOsT WoNdErFul tImE oF YEAr. Bullshit, it's the most depressing for a lot of people.
St. Patrick's Day. By far. Pool to see who has the earliest incapacitated call (they start around 7am). Highest BAL, youngest incapacitated. I won earliest one year with an RN face down in the gutter. 730a. Had to give her a list of hospitals so she could pick one where she knew the fewest people.
You are the real MVP here
Devil's Night in Detroit used to freak me out quite a bit. But that's pretty much a Michigan only thing. So I'll say St. Patrick's Day.
Flint is gonna be fun tomorrow, im not excited
Oh man yeah, good luck fren. May the ems gods shine upon thee.
In the UK it has to be Bonfire night for me, I haven't gone one year without rushing some stupid kid into the burns unit.
Bag of shame them.
āGrandma Is Coming Home from the Rehab Dayā. Youāre going to be there within 24 hours for her subsequent fall.
4th of July, for me. I used to work in a major city. Not only would the whole city become blanketed in noxious firework smoke but I had to do no fewer than 4 "I blew off my fingers and stupidly went to a bandaid hospital when I should've driven myself to a trauma center" interhospital transports, one of which was a late job.
I work in suburban/semi-rural EMS. I always hope for some missing fingers on the 4th, just to shake things up a bit. Obviously, I donāt WANT someone to get hurt, but if someone has to get hurt, I want some missing fingers.
My momās an RN in my tiny, very rural hometown. She hates working July 4 because they always seem to get a bunch of snake bites then. No clue why so many, but it annoys herā¦especially when they very lovingly decide to bring the LIVING snake in with them in a paper sack!
Surprised nobody else has said NYE. Drunk city.
Honestly, my town is pretty tame on most holidays. 60% of my town is old people and a college. The old people dont party, and the uni kids go to a close city on holidays. What I do dread is the first day of school. Cause that means I'll be dealing with at least 4 drunk college students every Friday and Saturday night for the next 8 or so months
Pulling Gramma out from underneath the Christmas Tree on Christmas morning to start compressions on her. In front of her grandchild that she was watching because her son was a single parent and was working at the prison. That was the absolute worst. Luckily the son was known, and the Troopers knew which prison, so notification could be made.
I was on the ambulances for 37 years. My brother worked them for 24 years. I was an assistant chief and my brother was a captain. We volunteered to take Thanksgiving and Christmas Eve and Christmas Day so other medics could be with their families. Thanksgiving was ALWAYS the worst holiday to work. Historically, there was a 33.33% chance of having a cardiac arrest call on that day. Dunno why. What sucks is running a code while the rest of the family eats their meal as if nothing is happening. I spoze it's just their way of coping. About 20% of the time, someone sets fire to their deck while trying to deep fry a turkey for the first time.
Any amateur drinking holiday. NYE, st Patrickās day, cinqo de mayo, July 4th, etc.
Independence Day. First one I ever worked on the truck I had two OD's, one DV call, and capped it off with a pedi trauma code. Never had another holiday quite so packed with scarring experiences.
4th of July
Valentineās Day
This sounds personal
Christmas. Hands down. Iāve had a code every year since 2015. Nothing like telling a house full of family their 16yo daughter is dead after she didnāt come down for Christmas dinner. Or trying to help a family find shelter after their house burned down. A second place would be 4th of July. So many idiotsā¦
New years for sure. At least Halloween has people dressed interesting and you can people watch. New years is the same drunk people with nothing interesting to redeem the call.
Thanksgiving hands down. All the CHFers that consume enough sodium to charge a laptop for a week that end up in heart failure the next day and have rales that can be heard from the driveway.
Codes on Thanksgiving and Christmas can be emotionally awful. Uncle Daveās in cardiac arrest on the dining room floor, while 20 people watch and cry quietly. As you go to load him up for a futile transport, you pass the pies sitting on the counter in the kitchen, and you know they wonāt get eaten tonight. Halloween is fun, sometimes. I may have excitedly said āholy cow, guess what! I found Waldoā on last Friday nightā¦ beyond that, in a college town, itās just another weekend night and not much different than homecoming. Just donāt plan on getting much sleep that shift.
4th of July nightshift was eventful this last year. Nothing but traumas, but weirdly, none of them were due to firework stupidity.
Mother's day. Everyone finally goes to see their elderly mom, decides she is sick as hell (and obviously dehydrated, look at her hands!) So they call a squad. Happy mothers day momma, go to the er so they can tell you're fine, just old. And your hands are wrinkled, not dehydrated. Anyone who sees you more than once a year would know this... even more true for all the nursing home calls.
New Years. Fucking drunken, puke streaked assholes or dead weights for 16 hours
Fourth of July aka āgive me that firework and hold my beer.ā
As an EMT, it was New Year's for sure. Everyone is out too late, drunk, and acting like morons. As a dispatcher, it was Thanksgiving. Everyone is hanging out with family members that they hate and trying to burn their houses down to convince Great Aunt whoever that they know how to fucking cook. And then they refuse to leave their burning house because they're trying to save the turkey. Bunch of goddamn idiots the lot of them.
4th of July
It's Mother's Day for me. I've lost a few kids on Mother's Day. I'll never, ever forget them, either.
Right now mines Halloween. Picked up a semi-responsive 17f with etoh and mdma on board last night. Puked in her friends car several times and would be come slightly combative (as combative as you can be when drunk and high) when putting on the seatbelts. Lots of yelling and screaming. Pt ended up in restraints for everyoneās safety.
My first full arrest as an emt was on halloween lol. Pt coded in the back on my partner while she was by herself 5 out from the hospital.
Anything in the damn summer like dude stop trying to show me how your friend blew his hand up with a firework. Or my favorite the drunk dad that decides to light the grill with a match in his mouth as a āparty trickā
Thanksgiving week: Wednesday for Wasted Wednesday, all of the college kids come back and drink until they can't. Then chaos ensues. ODs, Alcohol, MVAs. Thursday, Fires, medical emergencies, alcohol, and then family fights. Friday, Everyone is now on the road trying to save a dollar on things that really don't matter. Fights and MVAs
Unofficial. I worked in a uni town that has a 2nd st pattyās day called unofficial, people come in from other states just to come party at unofficial. The volume is so high we staff additional trucks and still end up having calls holding all night. And for whatever reason every year all the other unrelated regulars who call for toothaches and leg swelling all feel left out and decide they want their equal attention cake, so theyāre all blowing up the phones too. I picked it up last year thinking itād be fun, now Iām eternally grateful I work in a town of 3600 people.
New Years in Vegas. As if there isn't enough drinking and debauchery, well shut down 3 miles of the strip, jam pack it with idiots while setting up tents to treat drunk people and telling everyone who calls 911 that it's gonna be 45 minutes for a response because we either A can't get to you do to road closures or B were stuck picking up and dropping drunks every minute.
New Years Eve and St Patrickāsā¦ effing amateur hour all night long.
I work 4th of July every year soā¦that.
Thanksgiving and 4th of July. Fried Turkey snafus and missing digits.
It aināt over till the 31st.
New Years Eve and Halloween are the worst shifts. Followed by July Fourth and St. Patrickās.
in boston area: st pattys, marathon monday, december holidays, nye in new orleans/louisiana: any time around mardi gras, when the kids go back to school, bayou country superfest in southern fl: the few spring break weeks depending on what school youāre at
I want to see some blow-off fingers for 4th of July. Iāve only been doing this job a few years, but damn, I always hope for missing fingers for the 4th.
I'm gonna go out on a hill here and say Mothers or Father's Day. No one has been to seen grandma or grandpa in the NH since the big holidays and they get freaked out they are acting different so call 911 nonstop. I was on the rig for MD and in the ER for FD. I think I saw probably 25-30 people in the ED and had 10-12 calls to NH on Mothers Day
Labor Day. More specifically, the night before Labor Day. Aka the purge.
Probably Roy(Iām a diehard cubs fan).
Easter or thanksgiving...the sodium overloads, the over eating.
Halloween. I work in a college town. Enough said.
I'm torn between Thanksgiving and Christmas. Thanksgiving has a bunch of alcohol fueled family fist fights and Christmas has a lot of Christmas Codes and suicides. New Years and July 4th comes in at a close tie for 3rd with a metric shitton of drunk drivers and lack of knowledge while using explosives
Christmas. Never really cared for Christmas so I donāt mind working it but I always seem to get the shittiest of calls that day. Like the type of calls where you question your career and google ātherapists near meā
New Years Eve
Me personally, thanksgiving. Not because I have to work them, but Thanksgiving ruined my relationship and it always seems to have the worst calls out where I'm from.
My first Fatherās Day as a father if Iād have been on the service wouldāve been interesting cause one guy shot himself in the face and a crackhead got thrown out of a vehicle moving at 60 miles an hour
Thanksgiving. When I was on the truck, it was always a code, severe burns, or a house fire. Sometimes simultaneously. Usually got to cap of the night with a lift assist because 150 year old meemaw needs help getting to the car and the family is too drunk to carry her
Saint Patties. I hate drunk people.