Another CO Alarm

Carbon monoxide alarm activation.

Again.

This one belongs to Car 65 (we're Car 66) and District 2 (we work with Districts 4, 5 and a small portion of 6 - their territory covers a sliver of ours), so I am not going out for this one. That's fine. CO calls are usually short, but as tonight at 19:40 proved, not short enough. At least this one wasn't.

We rarely see patients with CO poisoning. Anyone who has inhaled too much carbon monoxide will have a cherry red colour and while the person's blood saturation level will show 99 - 100%, the pulse oximeter cannot tell the difference between oxygen and carbon monoxide atoms - it just can read if the cell is carrying the amount of atoms it should be. (I bet you didn't know that...)

EMTs are a special sort of weird. We know that this is something we shouldn't see but on the other hand, we want to see this stuff! We train for it and we are interested in it and sometimes you think it would be cool to see a gun shot wound or a CO patient. Bad news for the patient... but interesting to us. We've mostly been there in some fashion - gone to the hospital, been in an accident, whatever - so we know or at least have some idea what it is like to be on the other side of the stretcher. Still, we want to see stuff.

We do see a lot, though. And I have a rotational weekend coming up soon, so I will soon see more!

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