Dollar Drinks & $2 Decisions: My Wild Ride as a Barroom EMT

In this episode we're taking a trip into the wild world of bar safety and security. Did you know Jimmy used to moonlight as a bouncer at a country rock club? Brace yourself for tales of dollar drink-induced brawls, the unexpected challenges of breaking up fights when half the patrons can't hear you, and quite possibly the most questionable first aid decisions you've ever heard (hint: it involves a power washer). Seriously, it does.

Jimmy spills the tea on the crazy situations bouncers encounter and the sometimes outrageous ways they have to deal with them. This episode is a must-listen for anyone who's ever wondered what goes down behind the scenes at their local watering hole. You'll laugh, you'll cringe, and you'll definitely learn a thing or two about barroom safety. So, ditch the dollar drinks for a refreshing dose of safety knowledge and tune in for some spicy stories and barroom heroics.

Life Safety Associates specializes in emergency response training for corporate ERT Teams. We help businesses create competent and confident first responders who are ready to handle unexpected emergencies. For more information you find us @lifesafetyassoc or email@lifesafety.com.

Transcript

Jimmy: 0:23

What's happening. Another podcast with Life and Safety, with Jimmy Rios, and again we got Mrs Life Safety, jenny, with us today. I'm so glad you decided to bring me back. Well, I had to. We're business partners and we're married, so I don't really have a choice sometimes. Married, so I don't really have a choice sometimes. So, yeah, so we're going to build off the scene safety from our last podcast. Go back and give that a listen too. It's a pretty good one.

Jimmy: 0:58

Tell a couple good stories of me getting sacked in the mouth and from just not doing the right thing. So today we're going to give you a little history about Jimmy and maybe a little bit about Jenny as far as how we met, and then I'm going to talk about some real-life scenarios where I should have probably been safer, but during the job I was doing, it wasn't necessarily the right thing to do, so to speak, and we'll talk about that more in a second here. So when I turned 21, I needed a job. I was going to school and I just was working a lot and I just needed. I was working a lot and you know, I just I don't know, I didn't need, I just needed a job. Realistically, I had a cousin who was working at a bar and she said, hey, they need bouncer's security at this bar. And I was like, cool, to make decent money. It's at night so I can keep going to school during the day and I can meet people Insert women there I can meet women. I was just at the station all the time or on the ambulance, and that kind of goes back to where Jenny and I met. We actually met at that bar At that time. When we first met. She would not date me before because she had a pretty good rule that I think we need to teach our daughter if we haven't taught yet, which is tell the rule. I did not date bouncers or DJs or bartenders. Yes, because, yeah, if you know, you know pretty much right. So, with that being said, we're going to talk about some barroom brawls, uh, scene safety and some treatment. So first off, I'll talk about the bar I worked at. It was a country slash rock and roll bar, depending on which night of the week it was, and they had dollar drink nights on Sundays and Thursdays, right, I don't remember I did not partake of the dollar drinks, yeah, so they had dollar drink nights on Sunday, for sure, and on three-day weekends. It was always very interesting and they had $2. Tuesdays and Sunday nights were usually rock nights and Tuesday nights was country night, and so it got pretty interesting was country night, and so it got pretty interesting.

Jimmy: 3:57

Now I was told early on that you don't really go into the fight in the back room where the pool rooms were, where the pool table was, because of the pool cues. People would always use the pool cues as weapons and I think it was the first two or three weeks I worked there. There was a fight there. I was standing at the patio door, which was about 20 feet maybe from the pool room, and we communicated with flashlights. So if you had a flashlight in your eye, you had to quickly unblind yourself, look at the person who flashed you and then go respond to whatever was going on. Not the best scenario, uh. So I got flashed.

Jimmy: 4:40

I ran into the pool room, wasn't thinking about scene safety, I was just just like, oh my gosh, there's actually a fight happening and I have to do something Like. I didn't get trained for this. I'm trained to patch people up. I'm not trained to like pull people apart from each other. This is weird, and I walked in and I immediately saw a guy take a pull cue across his head and he had a bruise, laceration, basically his temple, if you can imagine, from his eye to his ear, and he went down and I stood there I'm not going to lie didn't know what to do, and then I grabbed the guy swinging the pole cue in a bear hug and I said stop fighting. And he kind of squirmed a little bit and then I held on to him and then I carried him outside and I was like that's enough. And then the other bouncers grabbed him and they actually ended up in a pretty good tussle.

Jimmy: 5:43

But I walked in my response side of me, walked back in and I started taking care of the person and I started asking the level of consciousness questions you know what's your name, things like that and he actually was pretty bad off and it was interesting because I couldn't tell if it was the alcohol or if it was the hit Plus. He was slurring his words, alcohol, or if it was the hit Plus, he was slurring his words. And another off-duty firefighter who was there drinking, he was slurring his words, pretty good, but was with it enough. That said, hey, check his pupils. And I hadn't gotten there yet and I don't know. To be honest, I was so hyped up on adrenaline and just all over the place I didn't know if he was going to I was going to check that out or not. But I checked it and one was small and the other one was blown, which is a pretty indication that he had a brain bleed. So I imagine he got smacked so hard it busted some vessels in his brain. So we ended up calling 911 for that. The owner didn't want us to call 911 a lot because of the police situation and he didn't want the police there a lot because it just created a nuisance and created an issue for him and the bar as far as with the city licensing and stuff like that, I guess. So he was a little upset with that. But I told him this is what I do during the summers and usually I work on an ambulance, this and that and this is what's going on, and he was like, oh, all right, then that makes sense. He was cool with it.

Jimmy: 7:13

Another instance at that same place we would have a how do I politically say this? How do I politically say this? It was a group of hearing impaired folks would show up to the bar like once a month, usually on Thursday nights, to dance and have fun. And there was a couple of regulars that were there that were from that hearing impaired group and they got into an argument and the argument turned physical and I'm kind of shocked right now just because I'm remembering and I'm not going to be politically correct right now, but it was pretty awesome to watch two hearing impaired people sign at each other so fast and argue. So when they started slapping each other and hitting each other I was like whoa, that turned left really quickly. That turned left really quickly. So I reached up and I grabbed the female in the altercation and I picked her up and she was so mad, she was kicking and screaming and she bit me and she actually bit me on the chest and I dropped her pretty quickly, as you can imagine, probably not that nicely, not proud of that, but you know, just for sake of the story, I let her go and she actually broke skin on my chest so I had teeth marks on my chest.

Jimmy: 8:52

You know we talk about dealing with puncture wounds and you know, through high velocity projectiles and stab wounds and knife wounds and stuff like that in our first aid class, but something we don't really talk about is bites, you know. Is that a human bite or a dog bite or whatever it is? Ultimately, though, it's a puncture wound. You know, you got your skin got punctured, so you got to fix that. So it was a couple of things to that, you know.

Jimmy: 9:24

And could she transmit something to me? A hundred percent? There's hepatitis B, for instance, is transmitted through saliva. Not a lot of that virus is in that saliva, but definitely enough. But since she broke the skin, I wasn't worried about that too much, because my t-shirt that I had on absorbed a lot of the moisture, if you will. But then, on the flip side of that, it absorbed it, so it held it to that open skin. And then did I transmit anything back? You know, at this point I was still fighting fire. I was out in the world, you know, doing things. Luckily, I had been exposed to HIV I guess it was the summer before that, maybe a little bit beforehand, and I had gone through a lot of things and I was testing negative. So that was all good. So I knew I wasn't going to give her anything.

Jimmy: 10:18

But the other thing was just like, how do you treat this? So what I did. I went into the back and we didn't really have a lot of first aid kit stuff and I didn't really have anything in my car at the time. So I took the industrial wash thing in the sink, I took my shirt off, walked over basically to this power washer for all the dirty dishes and I just power washed the bite and then sprayed it with some rubbing alcohol and then just bandaged it up with a couple four by fours and some scotch tape and finished the night um, with some blood just kind of dribbling down the chest. It was kind of pretty stupid. Looking back at it I probably should have got a shot or something. That could not have felt good. No, like power washing and alcohol, no, no. But you know this bar, it was Borderline Dive Bar, so it was what we had.

Jimmy: 11:22

Yeah, so that's just a couple barroom brawl situations for seeing safety and how do you treat that stuff? Because people are out there living their lives and things happen and you know you gotta be ready for all emergencies and it doesn't matter how it happens. At the end of the day it's still a puncture wound and if it was deep enough I would have wound, packed it, but it wasn't, and you never wound pack on the chest anyways. So there you go. There's some barroom brawls and a glimpse of my previous life as a bouncer. Do you ever talk about that in class? Use that as examples? No, so a lot of people don't know that. First time, first time ever. Maybe, if any of you all see me out in the wild, I'll buy you a water and I'll tell you another story about that. But yeah, yeah, thanks for joining us team and we'll see you in the next podcast.