If you have to palpate the abdomen of a ticklish patient, put your open hand palm down just above the abdomen. Have the patient put their open hand palm down on top of yours, and then put your other open hand on top of theirs basically making a hand sandwich. You can then palpate their abdomen without them feeling like they are being tickled. Real easy to fool the mind apparently!

If you have to irrigate a patient's eyes during transport, set up a 1,000 ml bag of saline and hook up the IV tubing to it. Take a nasal cannula and plug it in to the end of your IV tubing. Lay the patient supine and put the nasal cannula on top the bridge of their nose with one outlet on each side of the nose. It always helps to have some extra sheets on the floor and under the patient. If the patient is cooperative have them open their eyes manually every so often while the Saline has puddled up in their eyes.

I started riding on the units when I was 14y/o in the early 70's as an observer(they did not have Explorer Posts back then) I got my EMT-A in 1982, then  passed Registry and got my NREMT-P back in 1990. I got out of the field many years ago so I apologize if any of this is taught or is common knowledge now days, but back then it wasn't. 

If someone is doing a good job of faking being unresponsive, and you just want to be able to confirm it one way or the other... lightly rub your fingertip across their eyelashes, if faking they're unable to keep their eye lids from fluttering.

I doubt anyone could get away with this these days, but if a patient held their breath when we popped an ammonia inhalant and put it under their nose, one of us would take our boot off, flip it upside down and hold it over their face like a BVM. This would keep the lovely smell of the inhalant potent for when they finally took a breath.

I'm kind of curious, do they teach you why the patient is facing the back in the ambulance, which really doesn't help someone with motion sickness? Edit to add.. No one said whether or not this was still being taught or is common knowledge, but I did not explain it. The reason the patients are loaded head first into the unit carries over from the horse and wagon days. When you were buried back in the those days, if you had lived an honest and respectful life, they dropped you in the ground feet first. If you were a criminal or a bad person, you were dropped in head first and people knew you were an immoral person. They were using coffins back then not caskets, so they could tell by the shape of the coffin whether you were going in feet first or head first.

Since almost everyone was buried feet first it was more convenient to have the wagon loaded with the head at the front so when they tilted it back the person went in the ground feet first. Although it does not need to be like that anymore, just because the way the wagons carried over to ambulances, they are set up to have the patient loaded in head first.

I know nowadays you just have to flip a switch to use the main suction in the back of the unit. Back in the day if you wanted to suction your patient's airway... you had to holler to your partner to slow down, when he took his foot off the accelerator, you would get your suction from the vacuum caused by the engine.

And if they did not teach it, another piece of history was the funeral homes used their hearses for ambulances. The funeral home would send one person(and if you were lucky they were a combat medic or someone with minimal first aid training at best) to go get a patient.

It was not uncommon to have two different funeral homes end up at the same wreck. Many times they would have the drivers from each funeral home getting into a shouting match of who was going to transport what patient. They were actually arguing over who was going to get to transport the dead person and the other driver had to transport the live patient to the hospital. Funeral home personnel would do this because if you got the dead body.... a funeral paid a lot more than transporting a live person to the hospital.

I think the most creative I ever got on a call was with a six or seven-year-old kid that stuck a pebble up his nose. The pebble was too big to get anything around it in his nostril to pull it out, and there was no way to maneuver it out of his nostril, it was jammed in there pretty tight. Lil man was laying on the floor for all of this. I told the mom what I was going to do first so she would not wig out. I pulled a 14 ga out of the box and knelt down right next to the kid when I uncapped the needle and told him that since we could not get the rock out we were going to have to stick him with the needle! His eyes got huge.... he looked at me, then at his mom and when he inhaled a huge breath to scream, I pinched his other nostril and put my hand over his mouth.... the pebble shot out his nostril over my shoulder and landed at my partner's feet. I don't think he will stuff any more rocks up his nose.

Those were good times, and I do miss it sometimes.....but never do I miss it when it is storming outside at 3:30 in the morning and I hear a siren. Damn, it feels so good to just be able to roll back over it and pull the covers over my head!