Humid

Ten emergency calls; one running call, one treated at scene, one conveyed and the others went by ambulance. There were five cancelled calls tonight, most of them were sending me up to 4 miles away and one of them was for a ‘rash all over body’.

A beautifully still, peaceful and humid night; not the chaotic traffic-filled melee that is Friday and Saturday night in Central London. The downpours of the past few weeks have gone and its hot – the dead air is making my uniform uncomfortable to wear so I hope I don’t have to go underground during my shift. Its hotter than Hell down there.

A friend of mine met me for a coffee at the station and chatted to a few of my colleagues while I tended to the car and completed my VDI. I needed the distraction to be honest, so it was nice to have company for a short time before things started moving. Most of my calls were going to be a distance tonight.

My first trek was into the west for a 90 year-old male who had fallen. He crawled to his front door and lay there complaining of feeling ‘weird’. His neighbours were concerned for him and there was a strong smell of smoke coming from his flat, although a few people had investigated it and found nothing seriously wrong. His smoke detector was beeping away periodically and that meant the battery was going. If he did have a fire in that place, he wouldn’t wake up to know about it, so I asked one of the kind neighbours to sort it out for him and I know it will be done.

Meanwhile, the man didn’t appear to have any real physical injuries but he was very confused. The bottom line is he shouldn’t be living alone in the flat anymore. The crew arrived and I set off for my next call after my paperwork was completed.

In a very posh part of west one I found myself leaning on the doorbell of a woman who was ‘having a coughing fit’. She was asthmatic and when I got to the front door I could hear her – she had one of those annoying persistent dry coughs that eventually hurt the diaphragm. I get that myself whenever I have had a chest infection and some people are prone to longer recovery times than others. It is more delicate if you have asthma though, so I nebulised her and this brought some relief. She developed a sense of humour (I think she called me a dirty rotten liar when I got a detail wrong during my handover to the crew) so I knew she wasn’t too bad in herself. Just that damned cough. I told her she was just trying to get attention from her neighbours. She went to hospital but there will be very little they can do for her, the cough will have to clear up on its own.

Back into my neck of the woods for a 19 year-old female with abdo pain, ? cause. She wouldn’t sit down and relax for me and insisted on standing in the hall with her entire clan gathered around her. None of my investigative questions were answered positively enough for me to identify a probable cause for her pain and it was difficult to get her to comply with the crew’s directions when they arrived. Eventually, she sat down and tried some entonox to ease her pain. Her family had spilled into the street and were talking to her (and one another) in their own language. I find this a little annoying. I think its bad manners when we are trying to get answers and a three way conversation spins away into two languages, neither of which is intended for your ears. Something could be said that is relevant to the patient’s condition and unless I learn Urdu or Hindi very fast I won’t know what it is.

I had a fairly long rest after this. I think I got through an hour without a single call. I sat in the car on stand-by at Leicester Square and Trafalgar Square – my two usual haunts. My street-bound friend ‘Mike’ no longer sleeps in his usual place at the Odeon Cinema because the Casino has arrived and he has been turfed out – he doesn’t add class to the place I guess. It’s a shame because he slept every night for years in that doorway and never bothered anyone. He was always gone by 6am.

I went back to my home station, had a cup of coffee and, two sips later, got called to a head injury. A man had fallen from a railing into the road; smacking his head on the tarmac and splitting it open. He was drunk and lay in his own blood until a passing driver noticed him and called an ambulance. The police were on scene when I arrived and had put him into the recovery position (incidentally, there is no reason to do this if he is conscious – it’s best if he is left still). There was a large pool of blood where he landed and a good deal of the stuff on his clothing but his wounds were not too bad. The only concern I had was that his scalp moved a little too much when I felt around the large bump on his head. Then there was the possibility of a neck injury, never to be ruled out, especially when the patient is too drunk to complain.

When the crew arrived, we collared and scooped him. I’m pretty sure he is neurologically sound but that sloppy scalp of his means that he may have a cracked skull, so a thorough check needs to be carried out at hospital. Unhappy bus drivers were queuing up because we had blocked the road to deal with this patient. I didn’t feel sorry for them because they are only too happy when we dash out to remove the drunks from their seats. Fair, don’t you think?

As I was attempting to escape to a cooler place I was ‘attacked’ by a hysterical Brazilian woman who banged on my window and begged me to go to her boyfriend’s aid. I was at Trafalgar Square and he had been set upon by a few men that he apparently knew. They had punched and kicked him to the ground. I did notice him lying in a heap when I passed and had slowed down but I tend to mind my own business so I didn’t stop - then she came running after me and I knew I would be dealing with something. I thought he had been stabbed and was bleeding to death. Her behaviour was very dramatic. Brazilians are very passionate people, so I guess they also overdo it when they are a little emotional. Maybe you know better – I’ve only met a few.

I checked him out and called it in as a running call. I asked for an ambulance just in case and the police were also sent. The man had a jaw injury but it wasn’t significant – he had been punched once or twice around the face and kicked while he was down. He was a big, strong guy, so he could absorb the blows. His girlfriend was embarrassing him I think. I had to tell her several times to stop screaming in my ear. I don’t think she could help herself because she would stop at my request, apologise then start all over again when anyone else spoke to her. I got it, the police got it, the ambulance crew got it and a few random strangers got it. It was almost funny.

In the end, he refused to go to hospital and the whole thing turned out to be an expensive exercise for non-Brazilian taxpayers.

Another asthmatic to treat but this time she was so confident in her condition that she walked out of the hotel to meet me. The crew had arrived at the same time, so I handed her over immediately. She was nebulised but her condition was so mild it amounted to no more than a tickly chest. She never carried her asthma inhaler and felt that this was the worst ‘attack’ she had ever experienced. Luckily, she understood how mild it was after twenty minutes and returned to her room all the happier.

I had another annoying language-barrier encounter in a casino later on. A Chinese man had fallen (twice), cutting his head and hurting his wrist. He was slumped against a wall and I tried again and again to establish what was wrong with him but he either didn’t understand or wasn’t able to speak. I asked for someone to translate but she turned out to be worse and a conversation flowed between the two in Mandarin but never reached me in English. When it did, there was confusion over what I had asked in the first place.

The next translator I got was no better and used broken phrases that made no sense, so I had to try and put them together to work out the man’s current condition – he looked spaced out. Eventually I established that he had low blood pressure problems and had collapsed a few times like this in the past. He didn’t have any serious injuries as far as I could work out but he still needed to go to hospital.

The crew arrived amid the confused conversation and took him out to the ambulance. I sat in the car and reflected on my mood. I realised very quickly that I had been a little unreasonable with the patient. I had been short with the Casino staff and the second translator (who turned out to be his wife). It occurred to me that I was tired and my behaviour was deteriorating. I needed to be less involved in the heat of the moment and unemotional about language barriers and difficult patients.

I went for a caffeine shot and sorted myself out.

At 5am I sat in Leicester Square watching passing prostitutes harassing lone young men and a young boy, wrapped in a blue blanket begging with a polystyrene cup. It was very still out there and what little life went by was tired and ragged. I felt the same. I need a holiday.

I raced to a 75 year-old male who had been robbed and was now suffering chest pain and DIB. I arrived to find he had fled the scene as soon as he spotted the police. I thought this was strange and we did an area search. We found him across the road, shouting at the ambulance crew who had been assigned as they tried to drive to the call location. I drove over to where he was and told the crew I would deal with this myself. I knew we were having our time wasted and the crew were happy enough to leave it to me.

The man was ranting at us (the police officers and me) and it looked like he was just going to give them a statement about his alleged robbery and leave it at that. He told me his chest pain had gone away and that we had taken so long to get to him he had got better. We took precisely four minutes to get to him.

I was just about to leave when he approached the car, told me the police were useless and laughing at him and demanded that I take him to hospital. He usually went private but he didn’t mind slumming it in a NHS place this once. I was mildly amused.

I was even more amused when he told me his chauffeur had been given the night off and that he was worth millions and had gambled £10,000 that night in the Casino. He was dressed in a dirty pair of jeans and a ragged T-shirt. I couldn’t see past his demeanour to a point where he hunted grouse during the week.

I took him to hospital and he talked incessantly. He didn’t stop. He made no sense half the time and used racist, sexist and other-ist comments. The nurse thought he might have a psychiatric condition. I couldn’t agree quick enough.

Nobody seemed to know who he was but when I went to book him in the receptionist recognised his name instantly and told me all about him. He wasn’t rich, he didn’t have a chauffeur and he didn’t visit casinos. He hadn’t been robbed either. He was Bi-Polar.

He had been entertaining, I have to say and he helped change my mood from the little sulk I was in earlier on. He reminded me that I was seen once by different patients, not many times by one.

My next call was to a 30 year-old homeless man who was ‘not alert’. He was cold and fed up, so he got an ambulance and a warm bed for the night. On Sunday nights its easier to find a place for an unfortunate soul to rest his head.

My last call of the shift was for a male who had been stabbed. I got the call as I pulled up to my base station, expecting to go home shortly afterwards. I got on scene but couldn’t see any police. I moved slowly around the estate and kept my eyes peeled. At the back of the estate I saw three police vehicles and a couple of officers standing over the body of a man. I jumped out of the car, grabbed my stuff and went over to them.

The man was a drug addict and he had been stabbed once in the back. The wound had stopped bleeding and, luckily for him, didn’t appear to penetrate his lung. In fact, it looked like it had been deflected by his shoulder blade. He writhed and cried out in pain though and it was very difficult to keep him still. The police helped by holding him down while I pressed a dressing over the wound.

The crew arrived soon after and the man slumped into ‘unconsciousness’. He wasn’t really, his girlfriend had arrived after hearing him cry out for her (so had most of the neighbours) and he was faking the loss of consciousness for dramatic effect. We woke him up and took him to the ambulance. I noticed he had tattoos all over his torso, most of them were crudely done but one of them stood out and epitomised this stabbing victim’s natural inclination to lower level society. It read F*** OFF.



Be safe.