Some of the funniest stories in EMS come from patients who simply weren’t prepared for their situation to become public. This is one of mine.
The call came in as a fall. Routine, as these things go. The address was a farm, and the initial report was a woman who had fallen and was possibly trapped in a barn.
When we pulled in, there was nothing out of the ordinary to see. Nobody waving us down. Just a standard farmhouse, open fields, and a big barn about a hundred yards behind the house. We drove as close as we could, until the tires started spinning, and stopped before we got ourselves stuck.
So we hiked it: two jump bags, a backboard, and the usual immobilization gear. As we got close to the barn we started hollering for anyone who could hear us, and somebody hollered back from inside.
It was a bank barn. If you didn’t grow up around them, the main level sits at ground level on one side, and underneath are the paddocks, which you get to either by a ladder from above or by walking in from the low side. We found a door at one end and went in on the main level. From the far end, a man was calling to us.
A man. So much for the initial report.
We found him wedged in the floor. He’d gone through a broken board, and everything from the waist down was hanging below the floor. He wasn’t hurt much, and he was holding himself up well, but the broken boards were digging into his ribs and there was no way he was getting out on his own.
Our captain pulled in right behind us in the QRV. Before we tried to pull him up, my partner asked her to go around and come in on the lower level, to make sure there weren’t any injuries down there that we couldn’t see from above.
She went in. And then all we could hear was laughter.
We got on the radio and asked her to report. Between laughs, she did. Our patient hadn’t been wearing pants, and his boxers had dropped all the way to his ankles. From where she stood, she was looking at a man buck naked from the waist down, sticking out of the ceiling.
I’m sure our faces were something to see when we looked at the farmer, who had clearly heard every word of that report over the radio.
“Well,” he said, “I wasn’t expecting visitors!”
Shared anonymously by an EMT-B in North Carolina.