Traveling Travesty - LJ Idol
Do you know where you live? Does your currently-chosen significant other know where you live? Presumably, the answer is yes. Therefore, if you can tell me your full address, including zip code and the name of the apartment complex you currently live in, you should be able to tell me which building is yours. Or at least how to get to it. People who are of sound mind typically are able to do these things. Especially if you've lived there for longer than, say, a week.
So here we are in my ambulance, my partner driving around the shady side of town trying to find this apartment complex, and me talking to this woman about where exactly her complex is. We've mapped it out in our Mapsco and on my GPS and are driving down the street it's on, but there are what looks like two apartment complexes right where the GPS and Mapsco says hers is - and neither are marked with the 1001 street address we're looking for. She's in her 50s, sounds like she's a two-pack-a-day smoker, and other than some psychiatric issues that don't affect her recall whatsoever, she's completely of sound mind. She just apparently lives under a rock, because she's completely useless at finding her own home.
So we make our way in the gate of the one that's on our left, further up the hill. I stare at the building construction and ask the woman if her building has tan wood paneling and limestone rock. She confirms. Here's the kicker - there's not a SINGLE building number on any of the buildings we're driving past, and the unit numbers are written in the most annoyingly illegible curlicues I've ever seen in my ten years of working on an ambulance. We park. My partner gets out of the truck, goes to check out what building we're in front of. He comes back, asks if '612' sounds familiar. The response is nope. We drive about two hundred feet forward, stop, lather, rinse, and repeat. The answer is still the same - nope.
At least in front of building 8 there's someone we can ask (since it's 945 at night on the shady side of town) where building 1 is. They have no idea. Well, great.
We drive across the street to the other complex... Hey, this one looks exactly the same as the one on the other side of the street! Complete with a leasing office (turns out this complex has two - one to service each side of the street), since that's the only other thing this woman knows she lives by - she can't tell us if she's to the left or the right of the office, however, so the fun continues.
We drive this way, then that way, and finally stop. Meanwhile, my patient sits there on her cell phone complaining to her boyfriend about how the stupid EMS people have no idea where they're going and we've managed to get lost and this sucks. She sounds like the 23-year old that we took for kidney consult at a specialty hospital two weeks ago, only with the gravel of the cigarettes cutting through her voice. I really don't understand why people think that being in the back of an ambulance means it's time to talk on their cell phone - I have an assessment to perform, questions to ask, and at the very least I need to get your blood pressure a couple of times. I don't talk on my cell phone while I'm doing it, please don't talk on yours.
After call the fourth of complaining to her boyfriend, and circling both of these complexes about five times each, we ask if perhaps her boyfriend would like to meet us in front of the office of her side. He says sure, he can do that, so we pull over in front of the office.
Turns out the boyfriend has been following us the entire time we've been circling the complex. I have no idea what he was thinking while he was doing it, why he didn't even flag us down to see if maybe we had his girlfriend inside, but it was more fun to watch us circle, park, someone get out, get back in, drive, circle, park, etc.
When we finally make it in front of her building, the boyfriend comments about how ridiculous it is that we couldn't find the right building. Very sorry sir, but perhaps the office could do with marking the buildings clearly, so that if there were, say, an actual emergency, there wouldn't be this problem. That would probably be too easy, though.
Oh, and the woman didn't even want us to take her to her unit. We had to, it's a legal thing, but boy did she not want us to. If you were sick enough to come to the ER and to require an ambulance to take you home (instead of a taxi cab), you really... Anyway. Hopefully she had a good night. A lot of the time, I work on a clown car or a taxi instead of an ambulance. This was definitely the best incident in recent memory.
So here we are in my ambulance, my partner driving around the shady side of town trying to find this apartment complex, and me talking to this woman about where exactly her complex is. We've mapped it out in our Mapsco and on my GPS and are driving down the street it's on, but there are what looks like two apartment complexes right where the GPS and Mapsco says hers is - and neither are marked with the 1001 street address we're looking for. She's in her 50s, sounds like she's a two-pack-a-day smoker, and other than some psychiatric issues that don't affect her recall whatsoever, she's completely of sound mind. She just apparently lives under a rock, because she's completely useless at finding her own home.
So we make our way in the gate of the one that's on our left, further up the hill. I stare at the building construction and ask the woman if her building has tan wood paneling and limestone rock. She confirms. Here's the kicker - there's not a SINGLE building number on any of the buildings we're driving past, and the unit numbers are written in the most annoyingly illegible curlicues I've ever seen in my ten years of working on an ambulance. We park. My partner gets out of the truck, goes to check out what building we're in front of. He comes back, asks if '612' sounds familiar. The response is nope. We drive about two hundred feet forward, stop, lather, rinse, and repeat. The answer is still the same - nope.
At least in front of building 8 there's someone we can ask (since it's 945 at night on the shady side of town) where building 1 is. They have no idea. Well, great.
We drive across the street to the other complex... Hey, this one looks exactly the same as the one on the other side of the street! Complete with a leasing office (turns out this complex has two - one to service each side of the street), since that's the only other thing this woman knows she lives by - she can't tell us if she's to the left or the right of the office, however, so the fun continues.
We drive this way, then that way, and finally stop. Meanwhile, my patient sits there on her cell phone complaining to her boyfriend about how the stupid EMS people have no idea where they're going and we've managed to get lost and this sucks. She sounds like the 23-year old that we took for kidney consult at a specialty hospital two weeks ago, only with the gravel of the cigarettes cutting through her voice. I really don't understand why people think that being in the back of an ambulance means it's time to talk on their cell phone - I have an assessment to perform, questions to ask, and at the very least I need to get your blood pressure a couple of times. I don't talk on my cell phone while I'm doing it, please don't talk on yours.
After call the fourth of complaining to her boyfriend, and circling both of these complexes about five times each, we ask if perhaps her boyfriend would like to meet us in front of the office of her side. He says sure, he can do that, so we pull over in front of the office.
Turns out the boyfriend has been following us the entire time we've been circling the complex. I have no idea what he was thinking while he was doing it, why he didn't even flag us down to see if maybe we had his girlfriend inside, but it was more fun to watch us circle, park, someone get out, get back in, drive, circle, park, etc.
When we finally make it in front of her building, the boyfriend comments about how ridiculous it is that we couldn't find the right building. Very sorry sir, but perhaps the office could do with marking the buildings clearly, so that if there were, say, an actual emergency, there wouldn't be this problem. That would probably be too easy, though.
Oh, and the woman didn't even want us to take her to her unit. We had to, it's a legal thing, but boy did she not want us to. If you were sick enough to come to the ER and to require an ambulance to take you home (instead of a taxi cab), you really... Anyway. Hopefully she had a good night. A lot of the time, I work on a clown car or a taxi instead of an ambulance. This was definitely the best incident in recent memory.