I had a good shift last night. I attended again. I'm beginning to realise that working with someone else can be fun and doesn't have to be stressful. That always depends on the person you are working with and my new crew mate is only on my line until February, when he begins his paramedic training, so I'll have another EMT assigned to it after that. Maybe he or she will be just as agreeable and I'll be happy to go back to an ambulance for a while after this next car secondment.
We did good. We got a call to a 'collapse with head injury' outside a pub. We made our usual assumptions about the possibility of the patient being a little worse for wear and set off. When we got on scene there was a rather large man lying on the pavement, covered in a quilt (!) and a pillow was placed under his head. There were a few people around him helping him lay still.
I went over as my crew mate parked up and asked my usual questions.
"What happened?"
"He came out of the pub and just collapsed on the ground", a Liverpudlian man said.
"Yeah, he had a couple of drinks, not a lot, took some pills and fell outside", interjected a woman who turned out to be the pub Manager.
"Did he bump his head at all?", I asked.
"No", they replied.
Good. No injury. I looked down at this guy and I was struck by something that seemed familiar, like recognition. He was thrashing about a bit and making no sense, just repeating garbled garbage but it was the look of him that switched a light on in my head. This guy was schitzophrenic.
"Do you have mental health problems?", I asked, somewhat cheekily.
"Yes, I'm schitzophrenic", he shouted.
"I took my pills. I took all of my pills. I'll kill someone", he went on, rather convincingly.
He then began to get a LOT more aggressive and started aiming punches and kicks at us. By this time my crew mate was helping me to hold him down, as were the other two people on scene. This was happening in a very public place and so a lot of interest was developing among the locals. I asked my crew mate to call for police assistance because I knew we were never going to get this guy into the ambulance without a fight and something didn't seem right.
I continued to hold him down and tried to glean information from him, like his name. He told me it was Adrian, so I addressed him as Adrian from then on. By the time my crew mate returned he had calmed down and we all relaxed a little. Big mistake. He thrashed out and launched a kick which connected with the back of my head, very hard. I think I said something unprofessional and decided to speed the police response up a little because this guy was going to become dangerous. I called Control for an urgent police response and they obliged.
The police arrived a few minutes later, as did one of the FRU's and we soon had enough hands on 'Adrian' to control him but he was very strong and very determined. The police had to handcuff him (no choice) and we bundled him onto the ambulance, holding him down on the stretcher (I should stress that at no point did we put pressure on his chest). He continued to thrash and threaten all the way to hospital. He made claims of recent murder and that he would do it again.
We got him into hospital and he was secured, with four police officers, in a cublicle. I booked him in and when I returned one of the police officers told me that they had identified him. He wasn't Adrian at all. He was an escaped prisoner who had walked out of a supposedly secure mental hospital. I think he had actually murdered someone. Apparently he and another runner were featured on the evening news earlier!
I asked if there was a reward. I was offered a smile. Never mind.
After a short break my head stopped hurting. Occupational hazard.
Our last call of the night was to a drug user who had injected cocaine into his leg but missed the vein. He now had a serious infection in his leg and possibly a deep vein thrombosis (DVT). While I was talking with him (and I have to say he was an intelligent guy who seemed to realise how stupid he was being with his life) we discussed the end point for addicts. He mentioned a friend of his who had been found dead and who had died alone (as they usually do) in a filthy warehouse building. Guess what? It was the dead man with the shiny shoes!
His friend had died of an overdose up on the third floor of that filthy, rat-infested warehouse that I was in weeks before. I found that a sad and depressing coincidence. I told him that I had dealt with that incident and I said that I really didn't want to meet him again when he was dead, which was extremely likely if he didn't change his life somehow. I know that this is much easier said than done, however, so far be it from me to judge or patronise. I hope maybe something I say will make a difference to someone like that.
Back on the car for a while next week.
Be safe.
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5 comments:
Hi
I like the new format the spots aren't the best background but they are ok! I enjoy reading your blog keep it up at the end of the day if some of your colleagues or who ever don't like it -they don't have to read it, do they ? Blogs like this do far more for educating people about what the ambulance service is or isn't than any amount of public service adverts and campaigns. I have some idea what the work is like from being a community responder but i still like to read your blog keep it up.
Ouch, hope the head is ok. Odd that the people most likely to come across a criminally insane escapee are the ones most likely to be trying to catch a snooze during the early evening before going on a night shift and thus least likely to get the benefit of the warning.
Sad for the IVDA but pleased, if that is the right word, the mystery of the shiny shoes is solved. It is often funny how you see a pt weeks or even months later who will begin spontaneously speaking about something like this and filling in info which you never thought you'd come across.
With regard to speaking with this man I always reckon it is worth a try as one day it might just click for him.
I used to regularly triage/treat a woman who was being abused. Each time I discussed the options with her and tried to support her but she always went back to the partner in a truimph of hope over experience. One night tho' I was pushing a trolley round to X-Ray and a smart, well groomed woman waiting with someone called out to me that classic line "Dont you recognise me?". Errr... It was the abused woman looking wonderful, happy and full of confidence. As I spoke to her she said she had known she needed to do something but just wasnt ready to admit it to herself but when the time came she said she used the information and encouragement my colleagues and I had given her to make the change. I was delighted but also a little ashamed of myself as I had rather given her up as a lost cause having personally seen her around 15-20 times in the past. This just reinforced to me that it is always worth a go as one day it might just make the difference.
Lucy
So much for secure hospitals eh! hope your head feels ok, suonds like yet another busy shift
Lucy. I agree and I do try my best to see these individuals as human beings in trouble rather than useless flotsum, although on a Friday night it can be very difficult to be patient.
I think talking to them and offering them a perspective is better than judging them. There's no point in saying "Why don't you just get a job" when clearly that option has long past for some.
Thanks for your insight and experience.
Hi I am an Intermediate paramedic in Mozambique. I read this story and you will not believe me seems like nothing changes exept our locations.
I also had one of those, he was a mental patient that believed he was related to Bruce Lee.
He was quite a pleasant man but the crow had flown over the Coo coo nest, he had this believe that the area in which he lives was to violent and he wanted to make a differance. He decided to train the children in his village to become martial arts specialist.
His first training session he demonstrated that he has the ability to fly like the chinese as he put it.
He did fly of the edge of the roof and inro a dumpster.
The poor dude broke his left femur, and still maintained that if you cannot handle pain you are not a real man.
What he forgot to tell every one was that he was given morfine for the pain.
Later in the hospital this (Sipho) started to become very quite,as the pain meds had worn of.
Like the saying goes life in Africa is rough.
Sipho had also escaped from an institution.
Sad but true his dream of making his village a better place left the man immobilized.
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