Glad I Brought My Jacket

Southern California, springtime. No need to bring a jacket to the hospital, right? Well, I have this thin Columbia Shell that I wear because I can put all the stuff I need in it for my walk to the car and then to the hospital. That way I’m not trying to find everything like stethoscope, name tag, energy bars, patient notes, lab values, etc., every morning at 5:15 am when the brain is still not quite in the world of the living. However today I really needed the jacket, and for a reason I would have never expected.

I took call for the PICU last night and that just means that instead of going home at 5:00 pm, I stay until the next day at noon and take care of whatever needs to happen during the night with the resident on call. Even thought that doesn’t sound like a fun schedule, being on call gives way more opportunities for doing cool stuff since there is hardly anyone on staff. So, last night when the attending told us we had a sick kid that needed to be transported to our hospital in Long Beach from a little city called Delano, I wasn’t that interested. That is, until I heard that Delano is 3 hours away and that we would need to go in a Huey Medevac Helicopter!

Taking off the roof of the hospital, we saw people opening their windows and staring. I didn’t realize how loud our helicopter was until I cracked my flight headgear a little and it sounded like a jet taking off, with the added harmonics of 4 massive blades shattering the night calm of 1:00 am. When people say they wish for the ability to fly as a superpower, I can say that I kinda know what it might feel like. I’ve never ridden in a helicopter before, and for those that have, how many have done it at night, in the copilot’s seat, with a clear floor, over a well-lit city like Long Beach? I have to say that it is amazing. The first 15 minutes, we stayed low, and though I’m not sure why we didn’t go higher, I’m glad we were low. Seemingly skimming the tops of buildings, we followed freeways and waterways as we went close enough to downtown LA to get a good look that I will definitely never get again. It was a feast for the eyes and I was speechless.

I watched the speed and although I couldn’t do the knots to MPH conversion in my head, I knew were going significantly faster than the freeway traffic. Later, convert-me.com helped me to figure out we were doing about 120 MPH most of the time. When we got to The Grapevine, the pilot took the ‘copter straight up. It’s an amazing feeling to go straight up from a few hundred feet to really, really high. I’ve done it in an airplane, like everyone, but in a helicopter, it’s like the reverse sense of falling. There’s a lack of sure-footedness (like that word I made up?) that you don’t get in an airplane that climbs the same amount. As I watched the altimeter go from 600 feet to 8,900 feet, the scene became darker, everything smaller. At that elevation, it got pretty cold up in our seats and I was very glad I had worn my jacket. We then headed north for about an hour as I watched the little GPS navigation screen on the control deck between our seats. It was like one of those Atari video games with a little triangle clicking ahead second by second. I was just waiting for a little pixel to take off and obliterate an airport “asteroid” up ahead.

Landing was just as cool as taking off. The baby we were picking up was intubated, but would be ok in a day or so in the PICU, so it was a positive trip. I rode in the less-scenic back and there was a small emergency on the ride home when the baby came out of sedation a little and became agitated. She grabbed at her endotracheal tube and dislodged it slightly. We (better said: the resident and respiratory therapist-while I watched) gave Ativan and Versed and then re-situated the ET tube and the oxygen saturations came back up from a low 84 to a healthy 98.

When we got back, the attending and resident were talking about how lucky I was that they had let me wear one of their flight jackets (my jacket is yellow and looks somewhat EMT-ish). When I told them I had just brought it with me, they were amazed that I had brought a jacket to work during our beautiful Orange County weather. I guess I just had faith that something cool would happen on my last PICU call night ever. Boy did it.