My daughter's a CEN working at a Level 1 Trauma Center. Before that, she was a Paramedic at a Fire Station. She would probably agree with everything you said.
She enjoys Emergency Medicine more than any other field of nursing, but has told me some stories...the thing that drives her nuts are the "regulars" who treat the ER like an office visit, or who clearly don't need to be there, like the Gen-X'er who complained that her pain was a "10". Her problem? A hang nail.
One time when she was still working the Fire Station, she and three other first responders were carrying a morbidly obese woman down the stairs in a special seated carrier. My daughter was at one of the two bottom rungs of the carrier when the woman let-er-rip with her bladder.
On the other end of the spectrum, her greatest satisfaction is helping children - as long as the parents let her do her job and don't behave like they know more than the nurse! :-)
I know that type of “stair chair” very well. We had a morbidly obese Polynesian man who was dead at the top of some stairs. I had requested over the radio that the Medical Examiner bring their gurney that was designed for heavy loads. But somehow the message didn't get through. So the lady showed up with a super flimsy backboard with legs with wheels at the ends. We managed to get the dead guy into a jumbo sized body bag and dragged him down the stairs and onto this flimsy contraption.
My driver and I were across from each other at the front of the thing and my 3rd man and the lady from the medical examiners office were opposite each other near the feet. My driver and I were holding the thing up with our arms stiffened as we rolled it toward the back of the medical examiner's truck. We expected it to collapse and of course it did and my 3rd man and the lady basically let it go and stepped back, but my driver and I had a good grip on the thing and it caused our heads to bang together hard before we dropped it also.
It made a loud noise like two coconuts when our foreheads slammed together and the lady screamed out, “OH MY GOD!!! Are they going to be alright!”
My third man calmly said to her, “Don't worry mam, they are both Republicans.” The two of us were both a little dazed, but this made us laugh so hard that we forgot our discomfort and managed to get the mangled contraption into the back of her vehicle.
A few months later my driver had to have an aneurysm removed from the front of his brain that was the size of an egg and I always wondered if it might have been related to this incident. He came back to work, but he had to retire soon afterwards because of ongoing issues related to his surgery.