Dance Irish, Canuck on

The pager..

Its terrible screetching that goes off at 3 am waking me from a dead sleep and leaving me gasping for air means someone somewhere is either dying, thinks they’re dying, or are sadly, already dead.

As a rural paramedic working on an on-call car we have to call dispatch and confirm we received the page within 2 minutes of the pager going off. Usually we’re pretty quick to call in. Our day room has a radio so we can listen to what’s going on in our region and we can usually guess when a call for coverage in a different area is about to come in. Or we’ll hear them say “paging” and our tones drop, and of course being millenials, we have our phones in our hands at all times so we get call within seconds of the pager going off.

Not this night apparently. I’m a fairly deep sleeper, but I will still wake up to a page.. at least I usually do.

The night goes like this; we were out on calls for a good chunk of the day, swap to nights and get paged out early. Get back to quarters, hang with the other crew, binge watch more of The Musketeers, go to bed around midnight. 3 am rolls around and the pager goes off. But I was apparently quite adamant I was going to continue sleeping. I quickly flipped over from my right side to my left and had the pager completely turned off before it even stopped beeping. Luckily there was a second pager in the room going off still. But the thing is… I was completely asleep during all of this. I woke up to the noise of me fumbling around to put the pager back on the charger. Then my partner asks “was that a page?” I immediately said no and rolled over to try and fall back asleep but I heard my partner call dispatch to ask if we had been paged to which they replied “Yes, for coverage please”.

Drunk Male patient who likes to joke around with us: just a little morning sickness.

Me: uhm you have something to tell me?

Patient: yes, I’m pregnant and guess what! it’s yours!

4TH PLACE!!! 😭 I’m over the moon to announce that I made the Oireachtas podium and qualified for the 2018 Worlds in Glasgow! Congrats to all my fellow senior girls on an amazing job repping our region. ❤️

I may be a pretty shitty boyfriend, but it turns out I’m actually a pretty damn good babysitter.