Day 2

Today was slower than last week. As always, I learned a few things here and there. The staff was mostly the same as the staff I encountered on my first day, although very few of them, if any, seemed to remember me. I wonder how many volunteers they see from 4 AM when I leave until 12 AM when I return the following day. I need to find a way to distinguish myself... a letter of rec from someone from there couldn't possibly go against me sometime down the line, and additionally it is nice to be remembered.
Paramedics in training are kind of like lazy doctors. I talked to a paramedic intern for quite an extended period of time and I didn't really like his attitude. He maintained professionalism with the patients, but when he wasn't with them he told me, "You know, sometimes they ask you for stuff like a pillow or something, if you don't feel like getting it for them, you can keep walking it's no big deal." How sad is that? As if the patients are there just to give the staff a hard time.. I didn't like his outlook at all, rather, in my downtime I made it a point to talk to the patients who were awake and ask if they were comfortable.

The lady in CT remembered me. I took a lot of patients to and from CT for scans, and while they were being scanned I asked her questions and she told me stuff. She told me about a couple of conditions that, while often observed, will never be taught in a course or officially documented. I thought that was really interesting. One of them is called "throckmorton": when a man has an injury in his torsal/pelvic area, his penis will lean towards the side of the injury. Pretty crazy; it happens so much there's a term for it, and often enough for the woman at CT to tell me that it happens every time, no joke. The second condition she told me about is called "sun downing." It's when senior citizens get eccentric after the sun goes down and they're just completely neurotic and restless. She told me she tried writing it in a report here and there and was reprimanded for it because it's not an official condition, and her question was, "How am I supposed to say why I couldn't scan them at night?" A valid question in my opinion. I think it's strange that there hasn't been a definite cause for these symptoms given their frequency.