Floppy

Day shift: Four calls; two by car and two by ambulance.

Stats: 1 Faint; 1 Fall; 1 DIB; 1 Etoh.


The fainter was a 28 year-old female who was also 13 weeks pregnant. She’d been standing on the tube train (thanks for giving up your seat for her people) when she began to lose her balance. The Portuguese woman wasn’t so far along in pregnancy that her blood pressure should be affected adversely but she would have felt the effect of gravity when standing for a while in a hot, crowded train. I took her to A&E in the car.


A dementia patient in a care home waited for ages for an ambulance but was such a low priority that the imminent arrival of a fully loaded emergency vehicle was unlikely, so I was asked to go and check him out. The 84 year-old Irishman had fallen a few times in the night and this was unusual for him, according to the staff on scene. He sat on a chair in the lounge and offered me his bank card for some reason only he knew about. I respectfully declined the offer and carried out my obs; I could see that he wasn’t aware of what was going on.

He was able to stand and walk and the ambulance wouldn’t be with him for at least another hour, so I opted to take him myself. His initial confusion was replaced with some clarity as he was taken to the car, so at least I wasn’t going to be transporting a potentially loaded gun.


The real emergency of the day was a call to a park for a 1 year-old boy with croup and breathing problems. His barking cough gave away his disease from a distance but he was floppy in his mother’s arms and his skin had begun to go grey. An ambulance pulled up as I carried out obs and got some oxygen over his face. His temperature was 39c and his worried mum needed eye contact from me constantly so that she could indentify confidence that all was well. As far as I was concerned, the boy needed to go to hospital very quickly, so the arrival of the ambulance was a relief because driving him in the car was going to be a difficult clinical decision to make. The oxygen had brought him back a little and he was more alert, so I carried him to the crew and they wasted no time in getting him on board with mum in tow.


I ended the shift with a 60 year-old man who’d ‘collapsed’ through drink at a bus station. He’d had a fight with his girlfriend and was a bit aggressive. The crew was already on scene when I pulled up for this ‘emergency’ and he was being attended to but I stuck around in case I was needed. I wasn’t but it gave the guy an excuse to become even more annoying as he refused to go to hospital and then, when the crew kindly offered to return him to his hostel, he hurled abuse at them. Sometimes being nice to people like that is just pointless.

Be safe.