Dopey parents

Eleven calls. One assisted-only, one refused, two running calls, one conveyed, one false alarm and seven taken by ambulance, including the running calls.

Alcoholism and depression are best buddies. My first call of the night was to a 56 year-old female described as ‘unconscious thru drink’ on the system. The police were on scene when I arrived and the lady was conscious. She was slumped in a corner and she was very drunk. It took about five seconds for the tears to start flooding when I spoke to her. I’d like to think I have a more positive effect on drunken women than that but there you go.

She claimed that she had taken an overdose of co-codamol but after that she told me she had only taken six, downed with a bottle of vodka. Hardly an overdose but the bottle of vodka could kill her. Initially I thought she was a wandering soul, on the streets and helpless but the more I looked at her the more I realised that she wasn’t poor or needy.

Her husband turned up out of the blue as the ambulance arrived. He had come into town to meet her and they were supposed to be going out. She had dashed those plans by binging and munching on pills for reasons he couldn’t fathom. She did, of course, have a long history of depression and that doesn’t come cheap or easy in most people’s lives, so I felt very sorry for her.

Every now and then I come across a patient with an ‘eating disorder’. This call was for a 16 year-old female with abdominal pains and vomiting. I drove past the address twice. There was a queue of people outside and a couple of security guys but nobody knew I was coming, so they didn’t wave me down. I assumed that I was at the wrong place. There was no name plate on the building and no way of identifying it as a ‘ballroom’. As I drove around the square for the third time, the ambulance caught up with me. They had been going around in circles (squares) too.

Eventually I stopped and got out to ask. The security guy went inside the building and found someone who knew what was going on. People still call ambulances and then expect us to know, by some psychic means, exactly where they are, even when the address is vague and the building is completely anonymous.

Anyway, the mother of the patient came outside with a first aider who was on duty at the venue. They guided me to the young girl who was sitting at the bottom of the stairs, looking more upset than ill. I asked my usual questions to get the ball rolling and took her and her mother upstairs with the ambulance crew. The first aider gave no handover and simply melted into the background.

‘She has an eating disorder’, mum told me, ‘she has been feeling ill on and off and fainting but the doctors aren’t doing anything about it.’

She hadn’t fainted but she did look a little pale. She had obviously recovered from whatever had happened to her earlier and she was taken to hospital for a check over.

Stupid drunken women should go home as soon as they feel the urge to tightrope-walk in public places. The 25 year-old female I went to next had fallen from a table and banged her head on the floor. We were called because the pub manager had seen blood coming from her ear and was concerned, which is fair enough.

She was sitting on a chair when I got to her. The pub was crowded and very noisy. She was extremely drunk and wouldn’t even talk to me at first. Then she replied with the standard drunk person’s silly grin every time I asked a question. I think it means ‘yes’.

She had lost her balance during her trapeze act and cracked her head on the floor because she was far too drunk to stop herself from hitting it. I looked at her ear and found nothing more than a superficial cut to the inside. When the crew arrived she hurled abuse at them almost immediately and that was that. She was left alone and a friend was instructed to take her home by taxi. There were only two things wrong with her, she was drunk and she was obtuse.

For the second time in one night I was driving around in circles with an ambulance ahead of me doing the same. Some addresses, especially in those big estates, are extremely difficult to find. This call was for a 1 month-old baby boy who was having difficulty in breathing. Eventually, a kindly gentleman asked where I was trying to get to. I told him and he jumped in the back of my car to direct me. The ambulance missed it and I radioed instructions to them via Control.

I got to the address, thanked the man (who had to walk all the way back to where he had been before he met me) and made my way urgently to the flats. I say urgently because there was a panicking man at the foot of the stairs and he was in a hurry to get me up to the child, so I figured this call was genuine.

Sure enough I was confronted with a very floppy baby. His breathing was laboured and slow and he wasn’t responding properly at all. Floppy babies are almost always very ill. I took the child, told the parents to follow me and hoped that the ambulance had caught up and was waiting outside. It had and it was but the crew were on their way up in the lift as I descended the stairs with the family. Luckily they saw me from the balcony and started to return. The ambulance was unlocked and I bundled everyone inside and waited for the crew.

As soon as we were all assembled I gave a quick handover and the crew took it from there. All my basic obs were normal for this child, so I have no idea why he was in that condition.

An allergic reaction that resulted in no more than a mild urticarial rash next. The 28 year-old man had no history of allergies and couldn’t pinpoint what might have triggered this one. He had quite a wide-spread rash but there was no airway compromise and his breathing was fine. He went to hospital for a proper diagnosis.

I rolled around to Leicester Square after that and sat on stand-by, chatting to a couple of police officers I know. As I bantered, I noticed two young women crossing the road with red buckets. Each bucket was adorned with stickers proclaiming that they were collecting money for Cancer Research. I found it ironic therefore that both of them should be smoking fags as they walked on by, buckets swinging merrily in the air.

A posh hotel next. The place was crawling with private medics because there had been a major boxing tournament there all evening. Inside was a 55 year-old well off Russian man who reportedly had chest pain. He had collapsed at his table and the medics had been called to help. When I arrived I thought there were probably too many cooks...two paramedics, two technicians and an Emergency Care Practitioner...and now me. Soon enough the crew turned up and it was looking like a party (where green is the only colour allowed). I told them that the patient had refused to go to hospital and his obs had been checked and were normal. He had no chest pain and was patently drunk.

I stuck around while a 12-lead ECG was taken; I wanted to be sure before I left this guy to his vodka. It wasn’t normal – he had an irregular heartbeat and the ECG wasn’t completely stable, so I advised him in the strongest terms to go to hospital. He still refused. I had lots of witnesses and I got my magic form signed, there was nothing else I could do but leave. So I did.

A stabbing in the West End and I was first on scene. Well, I would have been if the traffic hadn’t been so bad. The police were ahead of me, lights and sirens going but it was useless; none of the cars and buses could move, it was gridlock. Behind me an ambulance was fighting its way through the mess. If this guy had serious wounds, he was waiting unnecessarily. London traffic can cost you your life.

When I got to him I found that he had two serious stab wounds – one to the abdomen which had split the muscle wall wide open and one to the arm which had gone all the way through to the bone. They were long slashes, rather than deep penetration wounds, so he would survive these. They were allegedly caused by a broken glass or bottle and were inflicted on him ‘for no reason’, according to the patient.

‘I was in the wrong place at the wrong time’, he said

We dressed his wounds and got him to hospital where they would clean and stitch him up. He would have significant battle scars for the rest of his life.

Liberal parents annoy me. Not because I am particularly politically flavoured but because my upbringing means I simply don’t understand them. Tolerance is one thing but complete abstinence of responsibility for your child is another.

My next call, in the early hours of the morning, took me to a very well-off part of town – out of my area in fact. Inside the large house was a 16 year-old boy who needed an ambulance because he ‘thought he may faint’. The call had been made by an adult in the house. The young lad was visiting and was surrounded by his teenage mates.

He told me he had long Q-T Syndrome (LQTS) and he was feeling faint. He was worried that he might pass out and his doctor (private of course) had advised him to dial 999 if he ever felt like this. This is fine because LQTS can, in some cases, deteriorate into a life-threatening arrhythmia, so I took him at face value and began my obs.

As I questioned him about what he had been doing prior to feeling faint, I discovered that he had been drinking alcohol and smoking cannabis. Well, well. I wonder why he felt faint after all that? I told him off for being irresponsible (I couldn’t help it, as a parent the nagging gene kicks in) and he just nodded and said acquiescent things that meant nothing at the end of the day.

Then his parents arrived and I thought there was going to be trouble. I wasn’t going to say anything about the drinking or smoking because I didn’t want to drop the boy in it, so I just told them why I was there and what I was going to do next. I got the shock of my life when daddy piped up.

‘Have you been drinking?’ he asked the boy with the same downward drawl you use with a two year-old who’s been naughty.

‘Yes’, the boy replied

‘And smoking?’ smiled the dad

‘uh-huh’ the boy said sheepishly (but not guiltily)

I was gob-smacked. Was this a Soap Opera? If I had been caught drinking or smoking (and I know a lot of us did it) I would have been dragged home and never let out again! Worse than that is the fact that these parents didn’t seem too concerned about the massively damaging effect this stuff could be having on their son’s already fragile heart. Either that or I was reading them wrong.

When I am worried about my family, I tend to look worried. I don’t patronise them with soothing tones and reassurances as I semi-lecture them in a completely unconvincing neutral tone about the errors of their ways. Daddy even mentioned the fact that their own doctor had instructed the boy not to take cocaine as it would be detrimental. He took this to mean he could take any other kind of illicit substance. What the hell kind of medicine is that? This is what took place in my car all the way to hospital. I had cancelled the ambulance because it wasn’t required; the young lad was fine, just drunk and stoned.

I dropped them off at hospital and left with a feeling of dismay.

During my break, as I sat inside the station, I was called and advised by Control that a large gang fight had broken out nearby and that I should stay put for the time being for my own safety. It’s usually so quiet up there at night, so I was a bit taken aback by this. Couldn’t the thugs stick to the West End?

I got called out soon after my break had ended and was cancelled as I approached the end of the road but a small group of people were running around in front of me and one of them approached the car and asked me to stop. I slowed down and cautiously weighed up what I had to deal with. There were five or six men around the car but they didn’t seem threatening. One of them looked hurt.

The man who had flagged me down told me that his friend had been hit over the head with a belt buckle when a ‘madman’ had suddenly gone berserk in a shop. He had lashed out with his belt at everyone in the queue.

I inspected the man’s head and he had a small cut to his scalp. He would live. The police and an ambulance had been called for me because I had radioed in the fact that I had been stopped by this gang.

As I spoke to the men, a guy appeared from the shadows with a belt rolled up in his hand. He headed straight towards us and I thought we were all going to be attacked by him but it turned out to be one of their mates. He had been hunting down the assailant and was ready to inflict an equal punishment on him. I advised him to put the belt away before the police saw it.

The man with the head injury was taken to hospital and the police began a search for the assailant. The little gang dispersed and I went back to the station.

Later on I went south for a 22 year-old female who was sleeping in the street. She was drunk and I considered her to be vulnerable, so I asked for an ambulance to take her to hospital. She was in no fit state to go home alone.

My last call was to a house fire in east London. The LFB were on scene and the fire was out when I arrived. Only one person had been inside at the time and she escaped with minor smoke inhalation but she refused to go to hospital. She looked fine and was recovering from her ordeal – she had lost a lot in the fire and her home was now open and exposed so I could understand why she would rather not be away from the house.

House fires leave a smell in your nose that doesn’t go away for hours. I went home with that smell.

Be safe.