#emt1

On Wednesday, we took the written final for Fire & Life Safety Ed. It was pretty straight-forward; a lot of it seemed like review for my Firefighter I class. It was more about the types of fires, and fire structure and organization. There were some points about the different sections of a presentation, but there was very little about fire/life safety. Anyway, it was a 50 question test in total. And the great thing about the program is they have the scantron reader in the office. So within a few seconds I knew what my grade was. I ended up with a 96%, which is the highest grade I’ve gotten on a final since… ever.

I decided to seal the deal and retake the quiz I previously did terrible on. It turns out it was the same exact quiz as last time. Good thing I had enough forethought and studied the hell out of my previous quiz sheet. I ended up with an 80% on that.

Final grade for the class came out to 88.9%, which makes me mad I didn’t do *thaaat* much better to squeak out an A. But, still, it’s the highest grade I’ve gotten on a Fire class to date.

Later that evening we got the results of our EMT written final. I pulled a 71%, some didn’t fare so well. It seems a lot of people got tripped up on the question I posted previously. Now that I looked at it, a lot of the questions were critical thinking. I could deal with something like that, but the final review test we were given didn’t have those types of questions. And it’s great they’re trying to get us into that mode, but we’ve done little so far in the way of that.

We finished up the skills for airway and medical assessment. They were able to consolidate all 8 skills into 2 stations, without making it feel jarring. By the end of the night I didn’t have all of my medical assessments done. Fortunately, one of the ladies was nice enough to stay and do them with me.

I don’t know the percentage, because there’s no online component of the classroom, but the final grade was a B. This brings my GPA to a 3.214, well… until the Ops grade gets posted on Monday.

It’s all about finals this week. In Life Safety Ed, we did a final review for our final on Wednesday. This is the class I’m the most concerned about. The reason is because I did well on the presentations/question assignments, I tanked on most of the quizzes. I’ve always been a terrible test taker though. But according the instructor everyone’s, “looking good.” I don’t know if he met grade-wise, or just in that everyone’s turned in everything. But the final is multiple choice (despite the other quizzes being write-in).

We took the written final in EMT I tonight. It wrapped up the entire course pretty nicely, although it didn’t have to be so long. There were a lot of questions that were rehash of others. It felt like it did this to just fill out the test. I did feel particularly clever because I outsmarted a question. The question read something like this:

You’re called to the scene of a 14-year old girl who was found passed out in the bathroom at a local school. Some girls stated they saw her shooting up earlier that day. The faculty found a needle in her backpack. [And it went on to list out her vitals and condition]. This could be a sign of:

Fainting spell

Hypoglycemia

[something] from a pregnancy

Injecting illegal drugs

My first thought was D, of course. She was seen shooting up and they found a needle in her backpack. Then I got to thinking what if she was “shooting up” insulin? And the needle they found in her backpack was for injecting insulin? I mean it would be stupid to keep a needle full of insulin in a backpack, but it could be. So yeah… it was taking me one way, and I saw through that business.

Regardless it’s done and I’ll know the results on Wednesday. And speaking of Wednesday, we have to hit it hard because we have to do all the airway skills and medical assessments. I guess I’d better hit the skills sheets and indicators hard tomorrow.

In EMT class last night, we tested out on our medications and medical assessments. The first round with epi-pens and oral glucose was simple enough. We had to give the indications and contraindications and talk about how to administer it. I did really well on the epi-pen (you have to be a special kind of dumb not to do well on that). The oral glucose was rough, but I powered through it.

The second round was medical assessments with medication administration. This means we had to assess a patient, then call Medical Direction (the evaluator) and give enough indications/contradictions to convince them to give us the okay. The two medications involved were Metered Dose Inhaler and Nitroglycerin/Aspirin.

I only got to the MDI station last night. I missed “inability to use the device” and “exceeded max dose”. Unfortunately I went over my time and I ended up transporting them to the hospital instead. However I did ask the patient if she had used the inhaler today and they said no. I reported this to the Medical Director which could technically count and not exceeding the max dose. I’ll have to talk to my instructor about that.

Plus side of the night is I’m getting better at my medical assessments. The only thing I missed of the OPQRST acronym was Q, which is “Quality (of pain)”. Quality of pain represents what the patient’s description of pain (dull, crushing, burning, throbbing, constant, etc.). I did also miss the E in the SAMPLE acronym, which stands for “Events leading up the injury/illness”. BUT, that one is usually covered in the O of OPQRST (which stands for “Onset of the event”), which means what the patient was doing when the injury/illness started.