EMT Finals

A couple of days ago, I wrote this:

I’ve been reading EMS message boards. I always see a bunch of posts about “the test”. How the thought of it is making them nervous. How they failed the last test twice. How hard the practicals are. How difficult the written test was…

Amazing.

If you can’t master the basic EMT skills after 3 months of class, there’s something really wrong. It’s not rocket science.

OK. Maybe I was a little too cocky. I didn’t fail my practicals, but did come pretty close.

When the practical testing started, my partner and I jumped into it and we smoked both the major and minor medical stations. I mean, we were on point. It was flawless. We worked like a well oiled machine. High Fives all around. (Jake, you are the MAN!)

Then came the major trauma station.

Our patient was a guy that had a wall collapse on him at a construction site. I was holding C-spine and was trying to talk to the PT. From where I was crouching, it looked as though things were going well, but I was stuck at the head. The other guys were thorough, did a good exam but just took too long to get the guy rolled on to the board and get moving. The instructor stood up and shook his head. “Thanks for playing.”

OK, so we went back out into the classroom to regroup, clear our heads and work on team strategy. We took another shot at major trauma and I screwed it up. Yep, it was all me. While I was bagging the PT, a car vs. ped, I didn’t maintain c-spine. WTF? What was I thinking? Am I an idiot? Apparently, yes. Not maintaining c-spine. What a rook mistake.

OK, so later on we did wind up making good on the major trauma and rocked it… shortly after that a different partner and I went in to do the minor trauma station and that went fine as well… but, that fact remains, I did something really stupid, screwed up the team and almost kept us from passing the final. I’ve been kicking myself for two days.

The written test is tomorrow and I’m sure I’ll do fine. I’m just upset that I made such a dumb, newbie mistake.