Grabbin` Air: Finally - an Ambulance Pillow that Makes Sense

Ever watch Paramedics? You should sometime, just to get an idea of what we're putting in front of people. You'll see some carefully selected well-coached crews, and you'll see some others who are clearly not. You'll see a fairly decent variety of urban EMS calls. You'll see some partners you wouldn't mind working with, and a few you'd rather not. But you'll see something else, too. Or maybe I should say you'll see a conspicuous lack of something else: pillows and blankets. Especially pillows. Remember pillows? Back in the days when EMSers weren't so scared of cooties, you could find a pillow on every ambulance cot. Not anymore.

But I bet there isn't one person reading this article who forgets to use a pillow when they turn in. So why don't we use 'em in the ambulance?

Part of that's due to tighter fiscal controls at the hospital end. When your ambulance is the only show in town and you only transport to one hospital, it's easy for an ED to keep track of its pillows. They all come from the hospital and they all come back to the hospital. But when a bunch of EMS units deal with a bunch of hospitals, pillows grow wings.

Storage is a problem, too. Pillows take up space. And when your ambulance is the size that fits in a parking space, you don't have much room for spare pillows. But let's say Grace Brown calls 9-1-1 because Clarence is having his big one, and you show up with $75,000 worth of equipment, ready to rock and roll. Grace has some expectations. She doesn't see your perfect calculation of her husband's Dopamine drip, and she doesn't notice that you did a 15-lead ECG instead of just a 12. If you're not nice to him, you don't keep him warm, and you bounce him out the door without so much as a pillow under his head, you're an amateur. See, the Browns have pillows on their bed, too. Always have.

I read a piece at Merginet.com about an air-filled pillow called FlexAir, so I ordered some samples. I have tried air pillows in the past, but they were just too flimsy—or they were even more expensive than the real deal. These are great.

The FlexAir pillow is made out of the same kind of stuff as a FedEx envelope, so you can't tear it. That's bonded to an inner layer of polyethylene, to make it hold air. Uninflated, it occupies about as much space as a folded disposable pillow case—so you could store about 50 pillows in a four-inch stack.

Each pillow comes attached to an inflation tube that looks like a drinking straw, and the straw is sealed in a plastic sleeve. You break the sleeve, insert the straw into an inflation port in the pillow, and then inflate the pillow by blowing into the straw. When you remove the straw, the pillow seals itself. You never have to put your mouth on anything you've already touched with your gloves.

You can get these in two sizes: 14.5 x 10.5 inches and 19.5 x 10.5 inches, and they're priced to run about 50 cents apiece. That's half the cost of a disposable pillowcase, and because the outer layer of the pillow itself is soft (it feels like cloth), you could even consider doing away with pillowcases.

FlexAir is manufactured by Graham Professional Products in Green Bay, WI. Call 920/490-5337, or fax 920/494-7887.