Others in EMS know the following, and I am slowing learning them too...

You can ask the same history question five times and get the same answer, only to have the receiving nurse ask it a sixth time and get a totally different answer.

Some people can be dieing, literally, before they will reluctantly agree to have an ambulance called.

Others will call with a toothache when they are within walking distance of their dentist’s office. My favorite, though, is the non-emergency patient who can ambulate and whose family calls for an ambulance only to follow said ambulance at an unsafe distance in the family car.

You can tell a lot about how sick someone is by looking at them.

How sick someone thinks they are is not correlated with how sick they really are, with one exception: If someone states that they are going to die, you best start driving.

If someone is going to have a “smelly” problem, they will be in an enclosed space with no ventilation.

For some patients, their expression if being in severe pain suddenly diminishes when you tell them you are not carrying narcotics. Their pain can then get immediately worse upon arrival at the hospital. Hard to figure, eh?

Some children live in shitty circumstances. Everyone knows this abstractly. It sucks to see it concretely as it is not just a number or idea, but faces. Faces are hard to get out of your mind or ignore as “not my problem”.