Riot

Eight emergency calls – one hoax, two conveyed, one false alarm, one assisted-only, one treated on scene and one (that’s right, just one) taken by ambulance.

Another busy shift started out with my favourite and yours...the notorious time-wasting hoax caller who demands all three services before hanging up. Tonight, however, he changed his M.O. slightly and enquired about the health of the call-takers each time (he called in three times but I was only activated once).

Of course, I didn’t get on scene in time to put an end to his fun and games but I’m beginning to wonder how much of a wimp service we are looking to the others. After all, the police never turn up and neither does the fire service – just us. Why is that I wonder? Don’t reply – I’m being rhetorical.

So I went back to work, proud to be a professional in the Cinderella Service – out there saving lives every day. This guy has to be stopped or ignored before he causes the death of someone who really does matter.

A dramatic hyperventilation in a restaurant next. A 33 year-old German man was having a panic attack and couldn’t control it. He was sitting on the steps leading to the toilets and there was a small gathering of young ladies waiting to go up before they wet themselves. They had the good manners to wait there while I carried out my basic obs. After a few seconds I felt sorry for them and allowed them through, even though they would be squeezing past my patient. Maybe human contact would calm him down.

I took the man and his friend to hospital in the car. On a busy night like this, there’s no point in tying up an ambulance crew.

Calls stating the patient’s condition is ‘unknown’ alert me to the possibility of death or deep drunken sleep. My next patient was described as ‘collapsed, unknown status’ at King’s Cross station. I found out his status when I arrived. He had been asleep but he decided to walk off before I got to him and the underground manager was ‘sorry to have wasted my time’. An ambulance was on scene when I arrived incidentally, but not for my call – they had a separate drunk to ‘treat’.

A crew were also on scene for my next adventure. I had been called to a 50 year-old male with DIB and I arrived at a hostel to find my colleagues dealing with him in the back of the ambulance. He was asthmatic and needed a few minutes on a nebuliser to settle him down but he refused to go to hospital. He was a die-hard Scouser and wanted nothing to do with wasting NHS time.

During his treatment I asked him how he got to where he was now. I often ask people who are on the street or in temporary accommodation how they came to be where they were in life – I think it’s important in order to temper any judgement that might skip through your mind before you know the facts.

He managed to keep us occupied for the next half hour with his life story, from mega-bucks to divorce to losing it all and ending up in alcoholism. I wondered just how easy it was to end up in the same mire - surely it can't be that simple? But so many do and it’s a little worrying.

I volunteered for the next call; or rather I was volunteered by someone else. A colleague and I were talking to a couple of police officers over a quick coffee at a hospital canteen when their radios blared.

‘LAS required urgently!’ was all I could hear but the chatter was frenetic – something was going on out there.

My colleague suggested I take the call because it sounded like the police were getting no ambulance support and they needed it. The colleague in question is also a paramedic and his ambulance had just been impounded by the police after a stabbing victim had been transported in it, so he joined me for the job, leaving his crew-mate to gaurd the vehicle. Control were made aware of this and were happy to let us go.

We got on scene, south of the river, a few minutes later and saw a huge crowd of young black men and women being controlled by dozens of police officers. The crowd had come out of the local club, where Nigeria’s Independence Day was being celebrated and somehow one of them, a teenage girl, got hit with a police baton (allegedly), knocking her unconscious. Now there was an angry crowd around her and we were expected to go in there to help. I found myself hoping the ambulance service weren’t going to be seen as an extension of the police.

My colleague jumped out and went to the patient and I followed a few seconds behind. The crowd were baying for blood and the police were looking a little bewildered – and outnumbered. The sounds being made by some of the people around us were not friendly and both my colleague and I wondered about the presence of weapons.

We decided to lift the woman up and take her to the relative safety of the car. Neither of us was comfortable kneeling down in the middle of that mob. Abuse and threats were being hurled at the police and it wasn’t long before other things followed – glass bottles and stones were launched into the officers from somewhere further down the road. This prompted the release of the police dogs and this, in turn, provoked a serious increase in the tension. The crowd, which had pretty much dispersed from immediately around the car, rushed towards us, screaming and shouting as those large Alsatians bore down on them. The dogs were leashed to their handlers but they were un-muzzled and clearly excited.

Out of the crowd I was delivered a young man with a head injury, caused by a broken bottle. I dressed his wound and put a tight bandage around it and told him to wait inside the car. The police dogs were feet away from us and snapped at him every now and again. He was clearly afraid of them.

I had requested an ambulance and an Officer to the scene urgently but now we needed more than that, so a request was made for another ambulance. The first vehicle turned up after five minutes or so. Things were still very heated and as the crew moved the patient to the ambulance another surge of screaming, shouting bodies came directly towards us. We were stuck in the open and all we could do was tuck ourselves in to the vehicles and wait for it to pass.

There were three or four armed police officers on scene now but I could see that they were uncomfortable with the situation – their weapons could be taken if they were over-run, so they left the immediate area and withdrew to a safer distance. This did nothing for our confidence.

The ambulance left and an Officer arrived to help us out. We were given ballistic vests and instructions for our safety. It was all getting a little too dramatic.

The second ambulance arrived and my head injury patient was taken away to hospital. Meanwhile, all hell was breaking loose down the road and there was a real danger of this situation spilling out of control. More police arrived and riot shields were used to keep the main body of trouble-makers away from the generally innocent crowd of people who had just come out for a good night and got caught up in this.

We stood there, in the middle of the road, for another 30 minutes or so until it all calmed down. It had taken a few more charges by the police and the slow release of people to continue their journeys home but at long last it was quiet again. At one point a tall black girl faced the police dog handler and requested to cross the road. The officer said yes but the dog had other ideas and launched at her. She just stood there looking down at it and the brightest smile I've ever seen broke across her face. If I had a camera at that moment it would have been the picture of an angel looking down on a beast. She didn't flinch.

We went back to the station after being stood down for a debrief – not that we needed one because we had done nothing of note and weren’t the targets of that particular disturbance - but it was a good excuse for a break.

When I got back to reality my next call was for a 20 year-old ‘collapsed in the street’. I looked at my watch and decided there could only be one reason for that and when I arrived on scene I found I was right – he was drunk. A crew were dealing with him, so I left them to it and went to another call in the same area. This time it was for a ‘21 year-old ? fitting’. He wasn’t fitting, he was drunk and his friends were confused. He refused an ambulance and went home with his mates. He didn’t have epilepsy, he didn’t have any significant medical problem but he did have a bad attitude.

I conveyed my final patient to hospital myself, rather than ask a crew to do it. He was 35 year-old and was complaining of chest pain. He had been smoking marijuana all night and now he had palpitations a dry mouth and felt ‘weird’. Funny that.

I checked his obs and asked him all the right questions to be sure he wasn’t having a heart attack. If he was, he would have waited a while for an ambulance anyway because they were all out picking up drunks and other marijuana smokers who felt the need to express their concern about the ill-effects of their habits.

He was edgy and when the police pulled up next to my car to ask if everything was alright, he became even wrigglier.

‘Did you tell them I smoked drugs?’ he asked.

‘Nope. I told them you were going to hospital. They don’t care about you – you aren’t important to them’.

I was, of course, trying to keep him calm otherwise he would have walked himself to hospital but it came across as unkind. However, I forgave myself because he was the one wasting his life and I was the one taking him to good people who would waste their lives on him.

Be safe.