I was out partying with friends in college one night, when I had to stop a sexual assault, take vitals, protect an airway, and take spinal immobilization precautions for a guy who drank way too much in too short a period of time.
I'm an EMT, but I was not on call that night. I smoked before I went out at around 9:00pm. I had a beer and a single shot of vodka because I don't like to drink and I was coasting at a comfy [6]. Throughout the night I drank maybe one beer per hour, but I smoked again at around 11:00pm. That, and the small amount of alcohol brought me up to a solid [7].
The night goes on, and I notice that the guy (Harvey) who smoked me up the second time is still sober and is shuttling people back to wherever they wanted to sleep. A foot of snow was still on the ground from the week before because temps never got above 20 degrees fahrenheit for three weeks. On top of that, it was raining that night. Everything was covered in ice. I was impressed with Harvey because he's always the guy to get wasted and make everything harder for others.
Harvey finishes up driving people at 12:00 and comes back to the party. I don't really pay attention to what he's doing because a girl (Sarah) I was dating came over with a friend (Cindy) of hers from out of town. We talk for a bit while everyone else plays drinking games. At 12:30am, we set up a gravity bong. I took a full hit and went to an [8] almost immediately. Harvey shared the next pack with a few others.
At 1:00am, a small group of 6 leave the party and walk to another friend's (Bill) place. On the way there, Harvey and Cindy get really close. About fifty meters from the front door of Bill's apartment, Harvey wipes out on the ice and smashes his face into the pavement right when a cop car drives by. We carry Harvey into the apartment narrowly avoiding the cop.
Once in the apartment, we lay Harvey on his side on the ground. Cindy lays down next to him and puts her face right in his. Harvey is unconscious.
After a few minutes, Cindy gets more inappropriate. She starts grabbing his hands and putting them on her body. I walk over, tell her to step aside while I assess him. His face is pretty beat up from the fall. A thumb-size goose-egg is growing on his face and he doesn't respond to my voice or to physical stimuli. Cindy's shrill voice didn't rouse him either, so I told her to stay quiet and sit on the couch away from him. She pulls the "what? Am I not allowed to talk now?" bullshit, trying to act offended. In my cop-voice–something I'm sure people here know–I say, "no, you need to be quiet so I can assess him. You are only interfering. If you want to help, stay on the couch and out of the way."
Harvey was breathing fine and he wasn't vomiting, so I stepped away to talk with Sarah about taking her friend home. In the meantime, Cindy lays down next to Harvey and starts feeling him up again. We go over, break it up, and I tell them I will walk them home. We walk in the rain to Sarah's place, which is the furthest dorm room. I gave Sarah my rain jacket and resign myself to getting soaked in freezing rain.
When we finally arrive at Sarah's dorm after slipping on ice several times along the way, Bill calls me to say that Harvey is getting worse. (By the way, every time Sarah began to fall, she'd grab me for support and wind up pulling me under her, so that I'd fall on the icy pavement and she would fall on a me-pillow.)
Once I get back to Bill's apartment, Harvey is laying on the couch with his face in a pool of his own vomit. I reassess him, and find that he is still breathing. Next, we sit him up briefly in order to lay him back down on his other side where his face won't be in puke. While we have him sitting up, he fails to maintain his own airway and stops breathing. I immediately lay him back down and he resumes breathing. That's when we knew Harvey had to go to the hospital. Head trauma and severe alcohol poisoning do not mix. I've seen someone have a stroke from something similar.
Bill tells me to hold off on calling the ambulance for a few minutes. I stared at him dumbfounded. Then, we hear a knock at the door. Bill answers it. It's a fucking pizza delivery guy. Bill ordered a fucking pizza while his friend lay vomiting on the couch. We ate the pizza while I call the ambulance and Bill cleans up the beer cans left over from another party. It was really fucking good pizza. I had forgotten how high I was and the munchies were just hitting me.
The ambulance arrived along with a few of my co workers. I took a blood pressure and immediately forgot the number. This is when I realized I was still stoned out of my gourd. I took the blood pressure again. No one noticed my fuck-up because they were busy with other stuff. We then put in an IV, collar him, strap him to the backboard, lift him onto the stretcher, tie him down again, and load him into the ambulance.
It's strange to think that the story of the most I've smoked in a night is the same story as my favorite EMS-related call.