Day in the life.

We step quickly up the sidewalk, toward the side entry of the house, secondary equipment in hand - on the way to back up the first crew in. The first thing I notice is a kid, probably under 12, inconsolable in (I assume) the neighbor's arms. The second thing I notice is the house-arrest bling on the ankle of "the neighbor".

When you hear the words "CPR in progress" and the patient is in their 40s, we expect the worst. This was no exception. We pull out all the stops for these patients, but the result is rarely good. Especially difficult was the fact that this patient - after a night of drinking - snored irregularly passed out in his chair, and the time of actual arrest was in question.

In the end, all we did was not enough, and my partner and I actually had to leave the scene after helping to extricate the cardiac arrest patient from the house to cover another call - a rectal foreign body insertion.

From the mortal to the ridiculous. Just a typical day in the life.