Broken siren

Six emergency calls; three assisted only, one arrested and two taken by ambulance. Three calls were cancelled and if we were charging £50 per drunk, the LAS would have made £150 from my shift alone. I have yet to raise the possibility of a commission :-)

My siren wouldn’t work and I had a twelve hour night to get through. It works when a little yellow button on the end of a flexible stalk, behind the steering wheel, is pressed. One press will start it off on ‘wails’, another will change it to ‘yelps’ and another press will make the sirens either ‘two-tone’ or that new space-age sound that the public cover their ears for – it depends on which car I have. If I press the button twice in a row the sirens will stop.

It’s all moot because the button wasn’t performing and I couldn’t get the siren to start when I got my first call (we don’t test the siren before starting a shift because of the number of complaints we would get from our neighbours). I was running along on blue lights just fine but when I got to a junction and tried to warn traffic that I was there – nothing. Blue lights and silence. I hit it again and again but nothing happened.

I called Control, explained my problem and told them I couldn’t complete the call. There was a delay as they mulled over what to do and in the short time I waited I managed to get the siren to work but then I couldn’t get the damned thing to shut up. I kept cycling through the sounds as I travelled along the road. If there’s one thing that’s guaranteed to confuse the general public it’s the sound of three different types of noise coming from one source.

The call was cancelled and I pressed another button (the one marked reset) on my little control panel to shut off my lights and (thankfully) the siren. I went back to my base station to get another vehicle and had to scavenge one from EOC – it was a shell but I transferred all the stuff from the faulty car and was ready to get back to work within an hour.

I started the night off with a call to an unconscious 55 year-old male. He had been found lying in an alleyway by a couple of upstanding citizens who were only too keen to hang around and watch (probably to see how dead he might be). Unfortunately for them, he wasn’t even near dead (unless you count liver disease). He was a Polish alcoholic who had gone to sleep. I used my trick of sounding the sirens nearby to make him wake up before I had to go and handle him but they had no effect….so I had to go and handle him.

He woke up after the second tug and shout. He told me to f**k off and became aggressive. The upstanding couple ran off and left me to deal with him. Luckily for me, the police arrived and asked if I wanted help and together we tried to persuade the drunken Pole to move on. He wasn’t interested - in any language.

I carried out my obs and concluded that he was just drunk, so the police asked him to move on again. He refused and told them to f**k off. Big mistake.

The two police officers had no option but to drag the man out of the alley and onto the street where he was threatened with arrest. He seemed to see the wall and the writing, so he stood up, brushed himself off, swore a couple of times and walked (staggered) away. I never saw him again but I’m willing to bet another crew did.

I cancelled the ambulance as soon as I realised he didn’t need one but a crew turned up five minutes later anyway. They had been sent from miles to this call.

My next call was to an unconscious 45 year-old male. This time, he was lying flat in the middle of the floor of a Tesco store. Apparently he had walked in, mooched around, then lay down, refusing to budge or even open his eyes. He was, of course, stinking of alcohol when I got near him. I got him to open his eyes after a few seconds of painful persuasion and he told me to f**k off. This felt familiar.

The man’s shoes were off for some reason and he wouldn’t let me carry out any obs on him. He shouted and lashed out if I tried, so I let him be. I simply hovered overhead like a green buzzard.

When the ambulance crew arrived they too got mouthfuls of abuse so they too backed off. The police had been called and they arrived a few minutes later. Just like the Polish alley drunk, this man (who was from other foreign parts), refused to move and hurled abuse at the police. They carried out the only kind act they had at their disposal – they arrested him and dragged him out of the shop and into the waiting cage of a police van. He wasn't happy but everyone else was.

My next patient’s wife chatted to me about stuff I knew nothing about as her huge dog and even huger cat looked on. Her husband had suffered an asthma attack and the crew were currently (as we spoke) nebulising him, speeding him to normality. I waited outside by my car until I was no longer needed, which was just about straight after I had handed over the patient, where I was ear-nabbed by his wife. Now she was chatting at length about other stuff that I knew even less about and I was trying to edge my way back to the safety of the car without offending her or cutting her off. I tried to leap in with a “well, got to go” where any gap in the conversation presented itself but she was relentless and didn’t stop to draw breath. At least I knew she wasn’t asthmatic.

Don’t get me wrong, she was very nice and friendly and all that but I’m not much on small talk and can’t do long conversations with strangers I’m not treating. I beat a retreat as she spoke and excused myself on the basis that I needed to do my paperwork. I completed it at the bottom of her road in case she followed me. I used my rear view mirror for defence.

I went back into Soho for a call that was a little more honest than most; ‘24 year-old female, unconscious thru drinking’. At least I knew for sure what I was dealing with - not that it hasn’t become all too easy to work out on any other basis.

When I arrived on scene, she had friends around her and she was wailing and crying and repeating that she wanted to go home. She gave me no help whatsoever when I spoke to her, in fact she just ignored me. She was wailing in my ear and her friends were clucking about how little she had drunk and that she had never been like this before. They all say that.

I tried to reason with her but she wasn’t listening to anyone. She was so drunk that she was behaving like a lost 2 year-old. I thought about how much this was costing tax payers (me included). I also thought about how much my ears were hurting; she was quite shrill.

The ambulance crew arrived and I explained the situation. They stood her up and walked/dragged her to the ambulance. She couldn’t be put in a taxi and sent home because she lived alone and her friends were only work colleagues, so she was vulnerable in her current state. The hospital becomes a place of safety for her...and a free bed in which to sober up and contemplate her position.

Another classic ‘unconscious male on bus’ followed and I got on scene to find another FRU had beaten me to it. In fact, the FRU I was looking at was the vehicle I had taken off the road earlier because of the dodgy siren switch. The Team Leader was using it to help out with calls during the night and it dawned on me that he had been racing to a call in front of me just an hour before when I got cancelled down on it; at the time it hadn’t occurred to me that his siren seemed to be working perfectly well.

I boarded the bus and went upstairs. The Team Leader was already walking the drunken (Pole/Russian/Czech – take your pick) off the bus and he was bemused by my presence (the TL, not the drunk). So was I. Two FRU’s are not required for this type of call, unless support is required (or requested). Incidentally, this alcohol fuelled Eastern European had a go at me on the way off the bus. I realised there and then that tonight was my lucky drunken rage night and that I must have mistakenly put on my ‘attracta-waster’ shirt or something. Whatever it was, I received more verbal abuse on this single shift than I have in the past six months.

Once we had disposed of the drunken man (he was sent to another bus), I asked the Team Leader what he had done to sort the siren problem out. I had left the vehicle on charge, at his request, and this, apparently, had cured the problem. So we have vehicles that are so power-hungry that a drop in charge will affect vital systems? This is crazy. To this day the problem of ambulances draining their batteries has never satisfactorily been sorted out (at least to my knowledge). I therefore suggest the following (and I am formally copyrighting this idea, so no stealing) :

Solar-wind powered ambulances. Not run entirely on sun power of course, but a device could be fitted to the roof of an ambulance so that whenever it is moving, a turbine is forced to turn, generating electricity which can be stored for use in the emergency systems (lights and sirens). A couple of solar panels would top up the electricity on sunny days. I figure a low profile tunnel, built in to the length of the vehicle roof and with lots of turbine fans inside would generate a decent amount of energy for these hungry beasts.

You probably have better ideas out there...or have better ambulances but that’s my proposal.

Meanwhile, a Red1 call for a 30 year-old male, ‘life status questionable’ (which usually means nobody bothered to find out) sent me to the Strand. A couple of passing bus drivers had called 999 to report a man lying half in the road and half on the pavement at a bus stop. Amazingly, neither of them thought to stick their head out of the window and shout to him. You could quite possibly die in the street in full public view if you choose the wrong place and time.

I drove along the Strand until I spotted him. He certainly looked like a convincing dead man. There was a small queue of people waiting for their night bus. He was lying across the kerb, halfway into the bus stand. Nobody in that little group even looked at him. It was as if he was a bag of rubbish that had blown into the road. Londoners are strange.

I U-turned the vehicle and parked next to him. I walked over and shook him once or twice. He woke up with a big daft grin on his face. I almost expected him to say “morning mum” and offer me a kiss!

I helped him to his wobbly feet and he continued the activity he had started when his ‘demise’ occurred – he waited for his bus. It arrived in a flash and spirited him away to wherever he lived. Either that or he was taking the wrong bus to nowhere.

The police arrived as I made ready to leave (I cancelled the ambulance of course) and I explained what had happened to the ‘corpse’. They were quite happy to leave it at that.

Bless.

I finished my shift earlier than usual because I was asked to help a colleague out with his training crew. The last hour or so of the shift was uneventful and I pushed off in time to escape the clutches of big bad Ken’s stupid go-to-work-in-London tax (the congestion charge).

While I’m ranting – why hasn’t he introduced a system where we can register our vehicles and credit card details, thus making payment for the charge automatic whenever our vehicles are captured in the zone during charging periods? Even if you innocently forgot, or (as is the case with myself and my colleagues) you work later than expected and simply don’t remember that you are in the zone at the wrong time when you make your way home, the charge would be deducted and no more would be said. That’s fair.

I think big Ken and his commercial mates would rather be raking in the profits made from the steep fines they impose for those drivers who flaunt the charge, forget the charge, are too tired to remember, have bad memories or suffer from Alzheimer’s. I won't be voting him back in - he's a turncoat.

Be safe.