Travel advisory service

... and neither are you lot. Protestors on Parliament Square are giving the place a very untidy look as they rage against things (some pertinent, some not) that will never change just because they are there. Some of them are 'on strike'. Eh?

Day shift: Four calls; one left on scene; one by car; two by ambulance.

Stats: 1 diarrhoea; 1 ? appendicitis; 1 head injury ? TIA; 1 eTOH with head injury.


We were asked to wait in a hotel lobby while the patient, a woman with diarrhoea, made her way from her room to see us. It felt as if we were a taxi service.

When she appeared she told us she just wanted checked out in case she had food poisoning; she didn’t want to go to hospital and thought a quick 999 call and check up would be enough. She and her family were off to Edinburgh later on, so I think she was hoping for a medical miracle or a pocket remedy to stop her loose bowels from giving her problems during the long drive north. Of course, we didn’t give her anything but advice and left her on scene with the necessary paperwork.


At a place where traffic wardens gather for work, one of their colleagues became ill with acute right sided abdominal pain. He’d had it on and off for a while and it had always gone away but this time it was worse and stubborn, so a cycle responder was sent, followed by us in the car.

He had Entonox but it didn’t touch the pain and he could barely stand up, so he got a little morphine and that made him a little more flexible – enough that he could walk to the car anyway. The student paramedic sat in the back with him as his pain level dropped and we took him to hospital for diagnosis. If it was appendicitis, he’d waited too long before getting it sorted.


A few hours passed before we got our next call, which was for a 70 year-old man who collapsed in a pub. He wasn’t drunk and his friend told me he had no medical problems but something had made him fall to the floor, bashing his head and cutting his scalp open.

He was very confused but conscious when we arrived – he was clearly concussed and the staff member who was helping him had carefully taken his false teeth, which had fallen out, and wrapped them in a towel. The missing teeth concerned the fallen man a lot and he quickly replaced them as soon as they were given back to him.

He may have had a neurological event, possibly a TIA, so when the crew arrived, the trolley bed was brought in and he was put on it for the trip to hospital.


A last-minute RTC, ‘lorry vs pedestrian’ turned out to be a drunken man who’d fallen, cutting his head open on the pavement. He staggered around with blood coming out of his wound, claiming he didn’t need any help but he was clearly too drunk to walk. When he tried he staggered into the path of an oncoming car, dropping to the ground in front of it. I ran over, grabbed him and lifted him out of the way. Then we walked onto the ambulance, which had just arrived. He was still being a little aggressive but he'd at least submitted to his weak condition.

Be safe.