Paramedic Jokes…

I warn you… Paramedics often use black humour to relax… most Paramedics genuinely want to help people and do not like to see people get hurt… sometimes this sort of humour is just a way of letting go, or settling after a very bad situation, or accident. Paramedics see bad things every day (okay, not every day, but often), and although they wear the uniform, they’re not Superman, they do sometimes go home and take things seriously…

These are some of the paramedic jokes that I’ve come across in my time… they are often macabre… and I’ve often found myself at a party telling them, only to find that I’m the only person who can see any sense of humour in them… now that you’ve been warned… I hope you enjoy…

1.

A friend of mine once went to a motor-bike versus truck at 100k+ and… needless to say, the truck came out better off than the motocyclist. As one of the Paramedic started assessing the scene and in doing so locating the various body parts of the deceased motor-cyclist, the Police Officer on the scene asked “How tall do you think this guy is…” The Paramedic looks around… looks at the legs in the bushes and then the head down the street “hmmm… he looks to be about 45 foot tall currently…”

2. 

Assume all Physicians on scene are proctologists until proven otherwise… and considering this, never turn your back on them!

3.

Telling a patient “I’m just going to insert a very little needle in your arm…” followed by, “and I promise you… this wont hurt me a bit…”

4.

I was called to a MVA which included a man who had been enjected from the vehical and thrown into a razor wire fence – this actually cut him in half around his waist. The patient was obviously deceased by the time we got there, and while looking through the car at the accident scene, we found dozens of bottles of empty beer in the car… I made the comment, “Hmm, guess this is what happens when you drive legless…”

5.

I treated a person who obviously couldn’t help but lick the hand held cake before turning the power off… needless to say, the person ended up with a tongue that had amazingly managed to wrap itself around a million times and was now semi-permanently attached to the blender. When I was telling the triage nurse what had happened, she asked “did he tell you how this happened” to which, the response was “Ah… not really, he was a little tongue tied…”

6.

 A paramedic is called to a high speed MVA roll over. On arrival he finds a brand new BMW rolled on its side and badly damaged. He can hear a man screaming from underneath the car “My car, my car! What have I done to my beautiful car!” The paramedic comes over and finds the man is missing part of his arm after the car rolled on it… “Mate… forget about your car… what about your missing arm?” The man looks down and for the first time notices that his arm is missing… “My Rollex, my Rollex is missing!”

7.

Do you realise that the optimum speed for CPR chest compressions is about 100 beats per minute, which, incidently, is the same as the beat in the song “Stayin Alive” – true story.

8.

What’s the difference between a Paramedic and GOD? GOD doesn’t have a delusion that he’s a Paramedic! 

9.

I treated a patient who had fallen while he was using a chainsaw to cut a branch off a tall tree. When we arrive we found him with a half severed right leg, and a major arterial bleed from his femoral artery, which he was vainly struggling desperately to contol with both his hands. His wife was there, but she was trying her best to keep her young children away from the excitement. As we started to treat the badly injured man… we noticed that he started laughing… almost hysterically… at first, we continued working without asking him anything about it – often people react in very strange ways to terrible accidents such as these, and sometimes it’s just a response to the low blood preasure and decreased cerebral perfusion (blood to the brain). We applied an arterial tornequet and raised his leg… it didn’t completely stop the bleeding, but it slowed it down. Severed arteries are virtually impossible to control. We applied a second tourniquet to stem the bleeding. This seemed to do the job… the patient was still laughing, but he was conscious and the bleeding had stopped… so we figured we weren’t doing too bad a job. We still knew we didn’t have time to muck around on seen and basically this was one of those ‘load and go’ situations. The man was still laughing, and throughout all the excitement, I hadn’t really given any thought to what in the world he could be laughing at. We rapidly got him loaded in the back of the ambulance and inserted 2 large bore cannulas (one 16gauge and one 14 gauge) enroute to hospital. It was only at this point that I finally thought I had enough time to ask the obvious question…

“You just nearly killed yourself… what could possibly be so funny?”

The man looks at me… starts laughing hysterically and says… “Its just that… I just can’t  stop….”

I let him keep laughing a little while longer… eventually he settled down…. and told me…

“I had been meaning to trim a few branches off that tree for months now… I had my children there and my wife… and I had told them all to stand back while I used the chainsaw… now, when I fell… and I immediately saw how much of my leg I had taken off… and I realised I was probably going to die… I should have been thinking about my wife and kids, about my own life, about what its going to be like if I don’t make it through this… but you know the only thing that came through my head was?”

I look at them as though he’s a little mad… and shake my head…

“All I could think of was that stupid movie by Monty Python and the “Black Knight” and all I could see in my own mind was me standing there, like the “Black Knight” and yelling “Its only a mere flesh wound!”