An Honor...I Think

Found out today that my crew and I had our picture published in a magazine. It was kind of a nice story about a couple of boys (one of which was blind) that came home and thought their house was on fire. They called their dad on the cell phone and he called 911. When we arrived, we found that an attic vent fan had started an attic fire. We were able to crawl up into the attic and put the fire out with minimal damage to the house. It turned out that he was a magazine publisher and asked if he could take our picture since we saved his whole home/office based business from going up in smoke. He took the picture with the boys and then published it (the photo is scanned from the magazine). Unlike the caption indicates, I am am the one in with the red helmet and not Jon the firefighter who actually did all the hard work in a very hot attic on a very hot day.

Well, today we got our copies of the magazine which is called Traditional Lowriding a features a lot of show cars and SoCal pictures of the lowrider scene. Only problem I have is that the issue we received featured a lot of very very scantily clad females draping themselves over the cars.

So, although it was an honor to get our picture published, it is not likely that I can show it around to say...my mother?

Why Did You Call?

We have had a rash of weird reasons for calling the emergency 911 system recently. Actually, it is an on-going problem and a woman was recently prosecuted for calling 911 to have a police officer come to her house because she thought he was "cute". Some of the not-so-cute calls we had in the last few days were:

• Emergency response for a headache - admittedly, the so-called patient thought that if he would not have drank some much beer, he would not have the headache.
• Complaint of allergic reaction to medication - but on our arrival the complaint changed to "hurting all over". Somehow the patient decided he was now "allergic" to his anti-psychotic medication that he had been taking (and doing quite well) for about 6 months. He suddenly decided he was allergic and stopped his medication. Surprisingly enough, he was having significant issues with paranoia and anxiety.
• Code 3 emergency response for an overdose because a lady thought the prescribed single pill of Vicodin was not doing the trick and took two. Never mind that the last time she had the same prescription, the label said "take one or two every four hours."

I have to keep reminding myself, just because it does not appear to be an "emergency" to me, it still might seem that way to the person calling 911...