Not too long after leaving the party Saturday night I was at the base and we were contacted by the shift sergeant from the PD requesting us to check out a prisoner in custody. It had been a pretty routine night for us, we hadn't gone on any calls yet and hadn't exerted ourselves so it came as quite a shock when as I was walking across the parking lot I felt a sudden, sharp, incapacitating pain in my low back. I was unable to move. I managed to shuffle myself in to the PD and upon getting a refusal signature from the patient managed to shuffle myself back out to the ambulance. My partner drove us back to the garage at which point I got out of the passenger seat and into a chair. The pain would not let up and as I was unable to move I decided to go to the ER for treatment.
While being triaged and my nurse (also and EMT and married to one of our paramedics) asked me about my pain all I could think about was Scalpel's pain scale which I couldn't exactly recall from memory but now that I review it I was correct in assigning it to 7/10 though there was no groaning as in 6/10 but there was heavy breathing through clenched teeth and there were also slight nuances of 8/10 (trembling). I requested to be conservative with pain management but when the IV Toradol didn't work the doc, who is also one of our medical command physicians, came in and said "the Toradol isn't going to be enough, how about some Dilaudid?" And with that he ordered 1mg of Dilaudid and after about 30 minutes of being in the hospital I didn't care any more about the pain in my back, well, as long as I was laying still I didn't care. When I had to go from the ER bed to the x-ray table I cared. I cared a whole hell of a lot.
So now, a day and a half later, I'm sitting in my apartment on my bed in the only position I can get comfortable in waiting so I can call occupational health to get an appointment. Needless to say my weekend has sucked.
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