Official Paramedic Semester Part 2

Now what can I say about my last classroom semester for the EMS program from TSTC? Before I start on my last paramedic course, I need to digress over how each course leading up to this point did hold a different kind of challenging milestone starting from Basic all the way to Cardiology. The issues could have been remembering to give oxygen to the patient, knowing a particular chapter front to back like 8 or 13 in Intermediate, differentiating your heart blocks, or knowing both adult and pediatric cardiac drug dosages. It could have been anything that seems so simple now, but, in the past, it was one of the hardest things to comprehend. Equally, this paramedic section was no different.

In my last part of paramedic lecture, as like the other previous lessons, the three main divisions were Pharmacology, Medical Emergencies, and Assessment Based Management. As a whole, this semester had to be one of my greatest challenges; a challenge because of two primary reasons – my own competence in math and a case of ‘senior-itis’. Pharmacology played a significant battle on my weakness towards math. Fortunate for me, I wasn’t alone, but it’s scary to think that one of the necessities of being a paramedic needs to be capable in determining drug calculations in which many in my class struggled. My instructor during this semester also confessed how hard it was for him to become accustomed with drug calculations, thus offered any tutoring to the willing. Although memorizing drug dosages, class, indications, contraindications, routes, and special considerations took up a bunch of gray matter in our brains, I swear learning how to calculate these medications brought some of us to literally tears of frustration. Somehow we all survived pharmacology without any head explosions, but while I did pass that section I still know I need much practice throughout my life.

The Medical Emergencies section consisted of fourteen chapters in about eight weeks, naturally that’s loads of in depth critical information packed in for a soon to be paramedic student. Somewhere the each of us did hit a road block while learning theses fourteen chapters, I was no different and toiled with the neurology and endocrinology portions. As a team we all tried to play our part in helping each other either by sharing flash cards, using different tips of memorizing such as Beta 1 equals one heart and Beta 2 equals two lungs, or just discussing over the last lecture of the week. Even our instructor helped us by creating scenarios related to a specific medical lesson to learn while doing. I still remember playing 20 questions with a classmate while waiting for our food trying to guess the patient’s medical emergency. As said before, there was a huge amount of information in this section, but after utilizing every technique available the class moved forward to the last section of the fall semester.

Knowing Pharmacology and Medical Emergencies happened to play the biggest parts in the semester, it was nice that Patient Assessment just involved one whole chapter for the last couple weeks of school. What occurred during those last 6 class days in the end was playing scenarios inside and outside the classroom. The situations applied to all the knowledge we have gained throughout our time in the paramedic program, for the four of us about to be done with lectures, it went as far back to Cardiology. In a way forcing the four of us to realize nothing just stops after a passing a section in class, everything we were taught was for a reason to enable us to treat a patient as a paramedic. To reinforce that realization and proving to ourselves that we in fact did not forget our painstaking efforts, we had approached our comprehensive final.