Sitting in Emerg.

Well, went for a tattoo today and everything was going fine until right near the end.

Started getting really sweaty. My pulse was tripping along at about 125 bpm. I stood up, and promptly collapsed.

This isn’t the first time I’ve had syncope.

Never fainted while getting a tattoo before, but I am new to escitalopram.

So, I ventured off to St. Paul’s got an ECG and a bunch of blood tests just to make sure that it wasn’t the escitalopram causing me trouble.

Now I’m just sitting here in the waiting area for the results of a second round of blood tests.

The doctor doesn’t seem to think it’s anything serious from the results of the first test.

I’ve always wondered if my ease at hospitals is due to the amount of time I spent in hospitals when my father was stationed at CFB Shearwater or the amount of time I spent getting tested and checked out in Edmonton.

I don’t remember much about my stays at the IWK, but I do remember going to a park a lot as a kid.

In 2015 I went to Halifax, Nova Scotia for a visit. I hadn’t been back in Nova Scotia since when my father was posted to CFB Summerside in 1977.

I spent the week wandering around the city. Paid a visit over to CFB Shearwater and saw the PMQ that I had lived in.

On one of my trips downtown I visited the Halifax Public Gardens. The park just seemed so familiar. Kinda like how CFB Shearwater had a vague familiarity to it.

On my way back to Vancouver I stopped over in Calgary for a few days to see Marie. I told her about my trips around Halifax and my visits to the Citadel and CFB Shearwater. I mentioned to her my trip to the Halifax Public Gardens. I asked her how many times she had taken me there as the park had seemed really familiar to me. She said that she had never taken me to the public gardens. She said that she rarely drove to Halifax except when absolutely necessary as she hated driving over the bridges.

The answer was in my records from the IWK children’s hospital.

On each of my admissions to the hospital Richard had signed a permission for for the hospital staff to take me from the hospital for “walks”.

The IWK Children’s Hospital is one block away from the Halifax Public Gardens.

So, it wasn’t my family taking me to the IWK Children’s Hospital. It was either the staff or volunteers at the IWK Children’s Hospital. And I was in that hospital frequently.

This one always strikes one when I read it

Working in a hospital is an interesting career.

I was hired here as a 4th class power engineer in the physical plant servicing the HVAC equipment, steam systems, chilled water systems, condenser water systems, and heating hot water systems.

I still remember the first time I got called up to a ward to consult on a patient. I was over in the power house working on a regulator. The chief engineer at the time called me on the radio and asked me to head up to 7C and speak to the unit coordinator. When I got up to the ward the staff were all like “See, I told you”. I found the unit coordinator and asked them why they wanted to see me. They escorted me over to a patient room and asked me if I could show them how to remove nipple rings from a patient that needed to go for an MRI. These were segment rings. Unlike a captive bead ring, a segment ring doesn’t have a ball to pop out. The ring must be slightly stretched for the segment to release.

Over the years I’ve been called to emergency a couple of times for the same thing… how do we get this out.

Twice I’ve been called up to give advice on how to remove roofing nails from roofers. One guy had shot the roofing nail through his knuckle and the other guy had shot the nail through his safety boots and into his big toe joint. All I could say is for the ER staff to cut the head side of the nail off as close to the knuckle as possible and then use vice grips to pull the nail through. The flutes on a roofing nail make it almost impossible to pull a roofing nail in reverse without great effort and without doing damage to the bone. Yep, guess who got asked to supply and use the Dremel tool.

The funny thing about these two guys is neither of them seemed in great pain. But none the less the staff administered ketamine to the patients before removing the nails. One thing I’ll say about ketamine is that stuff acts super fast. One minute the guys are talking, the next minute their eyes roll back and their jaw goes slack.

One nightshift I had to change a control panel on an operating room table that had an open heart surgery procedure in progress.

I had to fix an HVAC mixing box in a maternity room where a delivery was in progress.

One weekend I got called up to the CCU because the code blue button didn’t work. The charge nurse directed me over to the room. When I got there I had the pleasure of watching the code blue team working on a teenager.

I’ve be on elevators when the morgue stretcher is brought on with a deceased heading to the morgue cooler.

I’ve removed hair from the garburator in the autopsy suite.

I got called into the autopsy suite one day. Pathology had called the plant office saying they had a problem with a lift. Being a lift, that was automatically assigned to mechanical. When I got to the suite there was a covered body on one of the exam tables and the battery operated lift was in the lowered position. I plugged the charger in to see if it was charging the battery. Nope, it was dead. I said that I’d go get an electrician and see if they could autopsy the charger and figure out what went wrong.

There are many more stories I could tell, but that would be a complete other blog entry.