Puke Day 2009

Apparently Friday was “Puke Day”. I didn’t get the memo, but the patients I had in my truck were kind enough to fill me in on the special significance that puke day afforded.

See, apparently, on puke day patients are allowed, nay encouraged, to vomit copious amounts of apple sauce/pudding/unidentified chucks all over themselves, the stretcher (right into the strap buckles, don’t ya know), the floor, the bench seat and yours truly. Oh yeah, the kicker is this vomiting must come with absolutely NO warning. And to really make it extra special, Puke Day is always held on the first 85 degree day of the year when there is no AC working in the truck.

My first celebrant of this auspicious holiday was a 47-year-old woman who had been discharged the night before from a local hospital. She had spent the last three days being treated for gastroenteritis. She apparently saw the Puke Day memo stuck to her fridge with a magnet so she immediately summoned 911 to invite us to celebrate with her. As she heaved into a plastic bread bag she showed me the scrips that the discharging RN had given her. Zofran and Phenergan. Hmm.

I looked at her and said, “Ma’am, why didn’t you fill these? The Zofran will help prevent the vomiting.” She peered up at me over the top of the bag, “I didn’t want to take no more pills, I just wanted to stop puking.”

You just can’t argue with that kind of logic. We continued to the ER.

Later that day we responded to a call at a Group Family home in the middle of BFE for Abdominal Pain. Our patient was an 85 y/o woman with a history of dementia who had been feeling unwell for the past few days. This woman was confused and scared by the all the firefighters and other people crowded into her room. Of course, due to the dementia she was unable to answer questions and her caregiver was not exactly forthcoming. When I stared to question her she just blew me off, so I had to pry the chart from her hand to get a list of current meds and an idea of her history.

We placed her in the truck and started for the hospital. As I was on the phone with the ER she coughed a few times. I looked up and she smiled at me. I smiled back looked down at my PCR to answer a question and then I looked back up at the patient. She smiled again, I smiled again and then, without warning, she opened her toothless mouth and unleashed a ginormous glut of stomach contents into the back of the truck, coating everything within a 2 foot range in a gelatinous layer of muck.

No warning. No time to get the puke bucket under her chin. No “Hey I feel sick.” I think I may have shouted “Holy Shit!” My partner looked back in the mirror and started laughing as I was talking to the patient. “Oh my, you sure did make a mess back here.”

A mess was an understatement. It took forever to decon that stretcher.

Of course, as I mentioned, it was 85 degrees, the truck was one of the older rigs in the fleet and the exhaust fan wasn’t doing a great job of sucking out the smell. I let loose with a few gags and dry heaves as I tried to mop up and red bag as much of the effluent that was sloshing around as possible before we rolled into the ER.

We got the woman into a bed in the ER, changed her into a gown before the RN got there and laughed about the simply ridiculous amount of puke. The patient was oblivious to the whole event. She didn’t know she had puked. She wasn’t aware of who we were and had no idea why she was covered in partially digested applesauce.

Later that day, my partner, still chuckling, said, “That call will make a great story, although I may have to embellish this a bit when I tell it. Don’t worry, I won’t make you look too bad though.” I looked at him indignantly, “What do you mean, ‘make me look bad’?” He cracked up and did a falsetto impression of me, complete with some dry heaves, “Ohhhhh dear, (urrrp) you sure did make a (gaaaggggg) big mess back here!”

Happy Puke Day 2009.