Update

I greatly enjoy season 3 of The Academy, a Fox Reality show. The first 2 seasons were following a law enforcement academy, but this season it is a fire academy from Orange County, CA. It is a much better insight into the life of a firefighter/EMS worker than all the other medical trash that has been developing e.g. NBC's Trauma, Mercy, Three Rivers, etc. There are so many errors in medical dramas that it isn't even watchable. Ever see a paramedic use a laryngoscope to put an OPA in? HECK NO!

I still think the best EMS drama/documentary is Discovery Health's Trauma: Life in the ER. I mean it is all documentary; EMS and the ER is full of drama already, it actually doesn't need any "fakeness" added to make it awesomely interesting. My $0.02.

On another note, my sister almost killed her patient yesterday. She was suctioning a trach tube to clear it of secretions and buildup and she had the yankauer tip in longer than necessary eliminating the pt's oxygen source. It's alright, mistakes made now won't be made later when it matters.

Mom's CEA is down to 17 now from 400's and her CT scan showed a 15% reduction in tumor size. All good news, but the tumor reduction seems slight compared to her bloodwork so there is some discrepancy. PET scan in 2 months will give us a better understanding of what the heck is going on. At Kaiser today, there was a new medical assistant learning and didn't know how to use the machine to take vitals; did not know how to use the pulse ox and BP cuff. Honestly if you don't know how to do something ask! Don't make stuff up.

She said "oh that's your BP" to my mom and my mom told her that was the patient before and that she hasn't even felt the cuff inflate yet (the MA didn't know where the inflate button was... heaven forbid she had to do a manual BP).