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Nurse practitioner Penny Miller, left, watches as registered nurse Nancy Ballon
removes stitches from Marilyn Myers on Friday at the medical facility set up at
Hornet Stadium. Myers, a visitor from Bloomington, Ill., suffered the cut in a
fall on the first day of the Olympic Track and Field Trials on July 9 at
California State University, Sacramento.
This story is taken from
News at sacbee.com.
One big house call
Medical workers volunteer to tend to those suffering from heat or other
ailments.
By M.S. Enkoji -- Bee
Staff Writer - (Published
July 17, 2004)
The
good news is, there's no mosh pit.
The
bad news: The heat is a potential killer.
That's been the quick diagnosis for the eight-day U.S. Olympic Track and Field
Trials in Sacramento.
Daily
crowds of 20,000 or more baking in a concrete-and-steel stadium are generating a
different kind of experience for a unique team of medical volunteers that got
its start treating the "overindulged" at rock concerts.
"There's not going to be any drugs or alcohol problem here," said Wes Fifield, a
Roseville volunteer paramedic with Rock Medicine, the San Francisco-based
nonprofit founded in 1973.
Nor
are there likely to be flesh wounds inflicted by music fans who crush close to a
concert stage and bang around - into each other - to the music.
With
nearly 400 volunteers, Rock Medicine works concerts at almost every Northern
California venue, including Arco Arena and Sleep Train Amphitheatre and the most
storied of all, The Fillmore in San Francisco.
In
later years, Rock Medicine has branched out to non-musical events, such as the X
Games and even a Hell's Angels motorcycle soiree. After working the first
Sacramento Track and Field Trials in 2000, Rock Medicine was invited back. The
on-site service relieves traditional public-health services and keeps the crowd
out of local emergency rooms, Fifield said.
The
older, more sedate crowd at the Trials isn't always acclimated to an all-day
event in the sun, Fifield said. By the fifth day, about six gallons of
intravenous fluids had already been pumped into fans.
Fifield and 80 other red-shirted medical workers took vacation time or worked
off hours from their regular jobs to provide free medical care. Their vocations
range from doctors to CPR trainers, some of whom roam the bleachers in teams,
dispensing kindly advice and sunscreen.
By
the time the Trials fold on Sunday, they will have tended to several hundred
cases, including a few heart attacks, a lot of dehydration and everything in
between. Like the guide dog that needed a quick cool-down and the girl who
needed tape to cobble her sandal back together.
"We
never know what's going to walk in the door," said Penny Miller, a nurse
practitioner who began with Rock Medicine at a Grateful Dead concert in 1977.
On an
ovenlike afternoon, she sat in a tented oasis just off the stadium track at the
Trials in this temporary city on the California State University, Sacramento,
campus.
The
portable hospital with cots, shelves of rolled gauze and bandages is the same
setup for the ear-ringing venues Rock Medicine usually works.
It's
hardly work, Miller said.
"This
is my social life. I learn something every day," said Miller, 49, who works in
the emergency room at UC Davis Medical Center.
A
carefully coifed woman lifted her sunglasses for Miller, showing off the
stitched eyelid and purple and yellow bruises she got after tumbling down
stadium steps on opening day, July 9.
"I
thought I was holding onto the rail," said Marilyn Myers, 68, of Bloomington,
Ill.
Scooting onto an examining table, Myers had returned to Rock Medicine to have
the stitches removed. Stitch-free, but still bruised, Myers and her husband
happily disappeared into the throng.
Doing
25 to 30 shows a year, Miller has seen a little of everything, including a few
births.
"It's
not something we encourage," Miller said.
Dr.
Tris Rieland, 35, a rock fan who works at UC Davis Medical Center and Methodist
Hospital, is in his fifth year of volunteering. But he welcomed the more sober
stint, nonetheless.
He
and some other volunteers once puzzled about what to do after a concert with an
inebriated woman who had passed out and wasn't waking up. The crowd was nearly
gone. She was alone, and they didn't know who she was.
Then,
they heard a ringing: her cell phone.
"Thank God, it was her boyfriend wanting to know where she was," Rieland said.
"Thank God for cell phones."
About the Writer
---------------------------
The
Bee's M.S. Enkoji can be reached at (916) 321-1106 or
menkoji@sacbee.com.
Reina Middlebrooks, left, brought her 4-month-old daughter, Christina, to the
medics' tent as refuge from the heat. Registered nurse Heidi Schoberg looks the
baby over.
Sacramento Bee/Jay Mather
Joel
Klein, left, a CPR instructor, and emergency medical technicians Shannon Parrish
and David Warman, all volunteers for Rock Medicine, discuss their work at the
Olympic Track and Field Trials on Friday. Their nonprofit organization was
founded in San Francisco in 1973.
Sacramento Bee/Jay Mather
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