A very educational day

As readers may be aware, I am currently taking an EMT course online, with various lab sessions scheduled periodically to allow students to get hands-on practical experience to reinforce what we read in the textbook.  Today I was at EMS Training Center to do some lab time, and though I thought I would do some patient assessment practice, turns out they actually had some ambulance ops and gurney practice scheduled, which turned out to be a very educational afternoon for me.

I was sitting in with the EMT Advanced class, catching the tail end of their covering soft-tissue trauma injuries which I happened to just complete, so it was a good review of what I had studied.  After they broke for lunch, they then quickly went through the next chapter and then moved on to a presentation on the do's and don't of proper ambulance driving (even including GoPro footage of good and bad driving of an ambulance).  Then we all practiced on operating the Stryker gurney (or cot, whatever term you prefer) as shown here.

Then the real fun began, as we then went outside to practice loading and unloading from a Type II van ambulance similar to the one shown below:

We practiced first with the gurney unloaded, then one brave soul from the advanced EMT class volunteered to be the 'patient', and I got picked by him to be one of the two handlers.  And although the weight wasn't too bad (he weighed about 180 and the gurney is about another 100 lbs), it still took a lot out of me, which drove home the need to work on upper-body strength and cardio.

Overall it was a good day, and my instructor congratulated me on my overall progress.  I am about 2/3 of the way through the course, and I plan on doing the two 12-hour ER rotations sometime either in late April or early May.