Day shift: Four calls; all by ambulance.
Stats: 1 Faint; 1 cough masquerading as asthma; 1 partial amputation; 1 ETOH (drunk)
As usual with most of my fainted calls, the patient had fully recovered by the time I got on scene. The ambulance crew arrived soon afterwards and made their way, as I had, to the train station office where the young woman was chatting away to me about how this had never happened to her before and discussing how hot it was on the train. In response to this heat I presume, she stumbled off onto the platform and promptly collapsed, causing panic with the general public and a quick removal by the rail staff.
It was very hot today and my car began to feel like an oven because the air conditioning wasn’t playing ball. It was chucking out hot air and this, I felt, was an insult to me, considering I’d never done anything to offend it. I played around with the dial and the button until I reached a satisfactory compromise and the atmosphere changed for the better(ish).
The weather probably caused my next patient, a 25 year-old woman, to believe she had suddenly developed asthma because her cough (there’s a lot of it going around) was getting worse as she worked in her stuffy office building. She had no wheeze (not that I could detect anyway) but I gave her a neb just in case and that seemed to improve things. My diagnosis was the same though – bad cough.
A 17 year-old florist’s assistant was changing the contents of a heavy glazed vase at a hairdressing salon when it slipped over the sink. She attempted to grab it as it fell but it kind of exploded in her hands, cutting two of her fingers almost in half. The floor had a few good-sized pools of blood on it (pools are good because they mean venous bleeding, not arterial, which tends to spray and spatter) and the sink was pretty red too. She’d been bleeding onto a towel for a time and that too was soaked, so she’d lost a decent amount but not enough to result in shock just yet.
I had a look at the wound before quickly dressing it and elevating it in a sling. Two fingers had been torn through and one of them was so deeply sliced that it had almost been amputated. She’d need a good plastic surgeon to repair the damage and although she could move them, she had lost some feeling in them.
The ‘unconscious’ 30 year-old that I’d been sent to rescue was a drunken man who didn’t fancy getting into an ambulance, so he staggered away, leaving the poor MOP who’d called it in looking like a fool when I arrived on blue lights. Until then, the ‘patient’ had been unrousable. Sirens are like bagpipes I think - you either love them or you hate them.
Be safe.
Wednesday, 30 July 2008
Tuesday, 29 July 2008
Mud is slower than water...water wins
Day shift: Two calls; both by ambulance.
Stats: 1 Hypoglycaemic diabetic; 1 Abdo pain.
I’ve had a couple of strangely quiet shifts, probably because the computerised system, FRED, is now being used by the MRU’s (they used to self-activate). This means that the same number of calls is being handled by more resources in the area, which is good for the patients I guess but I honestly don’t think it will pan out in the long run. I have a feeling about it.
So, a 66 year-old diabetic man who’s not responding and has a BM of 1.1 (thus the lack of response can be nailed) needs urgent Glucagon to lift his blood sugar level. The man is an amputee and it looks like he will lose the second leg as a result of his disease soon; there are ulcers and signs of vascular breakdown all over it.
He responds well to the injection and within a few minutes he’s climbing out of his near-coma. Eventually his blood glucose reaches the dizzy height of 4.4 and all is well again. He still goes to hospital because his treatment regimen needs to be reviewed; he was only saved because his carer visited and couldn’t get a response when he knocked on the door over and over again. When he finally let himself in his charge was on the bed and almost out of the world.
A case of Polycystic Ovary (PCOS) caused abdo pain in a 20 year-old and she collapsed in a cinema with her friends around her. It was called in as a ‘fitting’ by the cinema manager who didn’t really check before she gave the diagnosis over the ‘phone, so the patient looked confused and I looked confused and it might have been funny except for the fact that she was in agony. I waited for an hour before an ambulance was available and I found that ironic considering the not-too-frantic day I’d had. I gave her pain relief and the crew arrived to whisk her away to hospital but by that time her pain score had dropped considerably and I figured she’d almost got over it herself (well, with the help of Mr. Morphine).
And so ended an action-packed day. To be honest, the rest did me good. I was able to catch up on stuff I needed to do, like reading and sitting in the car waiting for a call. Hasty sarcasm there, sorry.
Be safe.
Stats: 1 Hypoglycaemic diabetic; 1 Abdo pain.
I’ve had a couple of strangely quiet shifts, probably because the computerised system, FRED, is now being used by the MRU’s (they used to self-activate). This means that the same number of calls is being handled by more resources in the area, which is good for the patients I guess but I honestly don’t think it will pan out in the long run. I have a feeling about it.
So, a 66 year-old diabetic man who’s not responding and has a BM of 1.1 (thus the lack of response can be nailed) needs urgent Glucagon to lift his blood sugar level. The man is an amputee and it looks like he will lose the second leg as a result of his disease soon; there are ulcers and signs of vascular breakdown all over it.
He responds well to the injection and within a few minutes he’s climbing out of his near-coma. Eventually his blood glucose reaches the dizzy height of 4.4 and all is well again. He still goes to hospital because his treatment regimen needs to be reviewed; he was only saved because his carer visited and couldn’t get a response when he knocked on the door over and over again. When he finally let himself in his charge was on the bed and almost out of the world.
A case of Polycystic Ovary (PCOS) caused abdo pain in a 20 year-old and she collapsed in a cinema with her friends around her. It was called in as a ‘fitting’ by the cinema manager who didn’t really check before she gave the diagnosis over the ‘phone, so the patient looked confused and I looked confused and it might have been funny except for the fact that she was in agony. I waited for an hour before an ambulance was available and I found that ironic considering the not-too-frantic day I’d had. I gave her pain relief and the crew arrived to whisk her away to hospital but by that time her pain score had dropped considerably and I figured she’d almost got over it herself (well, with the help of Mr. Morphine).
And so ended an action-packed day. To be honest, the rest did me good. I was able to catch up on stuff I needed to do, like reading and sitting in the car waiting for a call. Hasty sarcasm there, sorry.
Be safe.
Friday, 25 July 2008
Daylight robbery
I stumbled on this building by accident after a long night shift when I needed somewhere quiet to do my paperwork - built in 1567 would you believe and just off Lincolns Inn Fields. Go see it; it's amazing. And haunted...probably.Day shift: Five calls; one refused, one assisted-only and three by ambulance.
Stats: 1 Minor injury from a RTC; 2 ETOH; 1 Head injury; 1 Leg injury.
I sat in the car and watched as two drunken lads slept, flat out, on the steps of a church. They’d obviously had a heavy night of it and were both dead to the world. It was 8am and there were other people around but that didn’t stop the gang of three who were passing from committing a crime right in front of me and other witnesses. As they strolled past, one of the men stopped when he caught sight of something lying next to one of the sleeping drunks. He went onto the steps, reached down quickly, picked something up and nonchalantly walked away. His two friends eyed the other man to see what he might have dropped or left on the ground. Then they all walked off. I had to assume that the slumbering man had just been relieved of his mobile phone.
A tall man stopped the three as he approached them; he had seen this happen too. He questioned the culprit about what had been taken but apparently (I spoke to this witness afterwards) he denied it and said the phone belonged to him. He didn’t explain why he had been on the steps and what he had lifted from the ground.
I thought it was pretty brave of this passer-by to challenge the lads at all, especially these days when a knife in the chest is more likely than a punch in the face but he couldn’t stop them from walking away and turning the corner. I left the car and tried to wake the men up but they were completely out of it. I shouted into one of their ears that they had been robbed but all I got was a confused grin and a relapse into unconsciousness. I also tried to follow the little gang but they had disappeared when I went around the corner. I called the police via Control but they didn’t appear for another fifteen minutes and by that time the thieves had long gone.
Meanwhile, the passer-by (who was staying to talk to the cops) and I had managed to wake up one of the two drunken lads. He understood what had happened and confirmed that his mobile phone was missing but he didn’t want to do anything about it because it would be ‘too much trouble’. Most people keep their lives on their phones so I was a bit surprised that he didn’t want to bother pursuing it. When the police arrived both men were up and staggering away, so the officers had to chase them, stop them and question them. When they’d finished they told me that nothing was going to be done because the two men didn’t want to take it any further. Sometimes I wonder if it’s better just to let crime happen.
A strange foreign woman called an ambulance after she stepped out in front of a moving van and it ran over her foot (allegedly). She was sitting in a bus shelter when I arrived and there were several people with her, including the van driver. They all seemed a bit excited because the woman had made a fuss about her injury and was demanding compensation. I inspected her foot and found nothing wrong with it but I told her that she could go to hospital in the ambulance when it arrived and get it checked out properly. I also told her that the police were coming to take details and her behaviour changed. She suddenly didn’t want to give her details and didn’t want to go to hospital. She walked (her foot seemed to function properly now) back to the shelter and demanded an on-the-spot payment of £800 from the van driver to cover the cost of her trainers. I saw her trainers and I can tell you they weren’t worth £80, let alone £800.
By the time the police had arrived, she was gone, having left the scene without her money and with no apparent difficulty in walking quickly. I spoke again to the witnesses at the bus shelter and one of them said ‘I think she didn’t stay because she’s illegal’.
A 60 year-old man fell from a tube train onto the platform because he was pretty drunk. He was given a thorough assessment by the CRU paramedic, who’d arrived with me and who was being filmed for the television series ‘London Ambulance’ (so I let him take over from me). The patient had nothing but booze wrong with him and he argued and disputed the need to go to hospital – he was on the verge of being asked to leave the ambulance when he capitulated, behaved and went with the crew to sober up. The footage will never be seen because the man refused to allow it to be shown.
A 3 year-old who fell at a train station and allegedly sustained a head and back injury looked perfectly fine to me when I got on scene. The crew was there too and so I left them to it.
A local alcoholic fell on his face in Covent Garden, so I was asked to attend and help him out. Security men were around him but he is a harmless 47 year-old drunk and there’s no need to have three large guys standing near him but it’s their policy I guess. Anyway, he needed no help from me, except to stand up. The crew arrived and together we managed to get him fully upright and walking again, albeit with a left-handed gait. Off he went, back to his hostel which was more to the right than the left...but he managed.
A plain-clothed cop flashed his ID at me when I pulled up outside a store in Oxford Street. He directed me to an elderly lady who’d slipped and gashed her shin open on the marble steps outside the shop. A first aider was with her and she seemed well looked after. A good dressing had been put on the wound and I didn’t really need to look at it because the description was enough and I’ve seen and dealt with lots of these. The skin on the shin bone of an elderly person tends to be very thin and easily peeled, so scraping injuries result in large flaps of skin coming away from the bone, almost like the skin of a cooked chicken. There can be heavy bleeding but sometimes there isn’t. In this lady’s case the bleeding had been self-limiting and the dressing was doing a good job of controlling it too. Her main risk factor was infection, so she was taken away by the crew a few minutes later.
The summer sales were on today and the shopping streets of London were heaving with people and bags. Once again I noticed the very nature of people changing as they clashed with each other on the crowded pavements and shop floors. Gone was any thought for others - gone were kindness, respect, manners and courtesy. All gone for consumerism. No wonder we can be robbed in broad daylight for a mobile phone that will be out of fashion in a year.
Be safe.
Thursday, 24 July 2008
Monday is the new Friday
Night shift: Nine calls; three assisted-only and six by ambulance.
Stats: 1 DIB; 4 ETOH; 1 Alcoholic fit; 1 Hyperventilation; 1 GI bleed; 1 Abdo pain.
We’ve been taking an average of 4,000 calls a day over the weekend and tonight (a Monday night) has been crazy. Don’t people have work to go to in the morning?
A 75 year-old man with DIB, cardiac problems, liver failure and cancer deserves my attention first off and I arrive to find him surrounded by worried family members as he lies on his bed wheezing. I put him on a nebuliser, which gives some relief, and carry out my obs until a crew arrives and takes him away. More family members show up and spill out onto the street as he is taken to hospital. I think they're expecting the worst.
Into Soho next for a 55 year-old ‘unconscious’ man who couldn’t be seen at first because people were sitting at tables drinking and chatting around him as he lay slumped on the pavement. Typically, nobody seems to notice him and the ambulance crew are about to call it a no-trace when I spot him, legs first.
He is an old queen and he is instantly annoyed by our presence as we wake him from his drunken slumber. ‘Go away!’ he barks before we can get a kind word in. We spend ten minutes getting him on his feet to move until he plants himself back down in someone’s doorway. A couple are trying to get into their flat but he’s obstructing them, so we move him again and this costs the NHS another three minutes. He wanders into a bar and is ejected very quickly. Then he finally shuffles off with his eye liner and painted nails; the only evidence that he was a coordinated person at one point.
A couple of colleagues were on a night out and I chatted to them as I did the paperwork for that patient. I left the scene wishing I was just another jolly MOP myself…a long night was ahead of me.
My next patient was a 35 year-old alcoholic who’d had a fit outside a gym and had been taken inside by the kind staff as he waited for the ambulance to arrive. He was face down on a massage bed in his own private world when I walked in to see him. He didn’t stir – I think he was asleep. He stank of booze and his clothes were filthy; he was giving the place a bad name – at least the regular clients were sweating for healthy reasons.
I got him to turn over and sit up and began my obs after establishing his name and what had happened. His clarity and demeanour made me doubt he’d had any kind of fit at all and this is a common enough game played by homeless alcoholics who just want a bed for the night, so what the hell. I asked him for his finger so that I could put my sats probe on it (the device slips on a finger and measures blood oxygen saturation levels (sats), normally they are above 94% in most people). He sneezed into his hand and offered me said germ-ridden mitten by reflex. I declined the offer and asked for a clean(ish) one. Since he had only one more to put forward for testing, I got that instead and a grin. I got no apology and I gave no blessing. Such is the straight-forward nature of this job sometimes.
It took me so long to get access to the road in which my next patient lived that she had recovered from her panic attack and was sitting on the sofa as if nothing had happened. Her friend had called the ambulance when she started to hyperventilate; she thought there might be a connection between the breathing problem and her mate’s bulimia.
The 25 year-old’s heart rate and blood pressure were low but this was normal for her and she was as thin as a rake (how did we get to that? Isn’t a shovel or a brush just as thin when looked at the right way? Oh wait, brushes are reserved for daftness, aren’t they?). She had recently fallen out with her boyfriend and this had triggered an emotional state in which her breathing rate had rocketed but she was absolutely fine now and I left her at home with her friend and a ‘get out of jail’ form. The ambulance had arrived with me earlier but I’d told the crew what was going on and that they weren’t needed.
Gastrointestinal (GI) bleeds can be life-threatening emergencies and the 74 year-old woman with abdominal pain, a low BP and who looked like death warmed up (pale, cold, clammy) was in real trouble. She had been reported as ‘not alert’ by her family and at times she wasn’t, otherwise she seemed to communicate quite effectively, insisting that she was in good shape, even though her body argued with her.
A patient I can only describe as a nutter on drink stormed off and walked into traffic, almost getting himself injured when I tried to get him to wake up from his ‘unconscious’ state on the pavement. The French 24 year-old and his gathering of equally French friends (who were all able to handle their alcohol sensibly I should say in their defence) had been out all day drinking but he collapsed on the way home and now no bus or taxi on Earth (or in London) would touch him. I know this because when he became aggressive and started physically pushing me and others around I called the police in. He was cuffed and told to behave, then one of the cops flagged down a taxi and I asked the driver if he’d be so kind as to convey the man and his buddies to the East (miles away). Despite the prospect of a fat fare, the cabbie declined, citing imminent vomiting and bad behaviour in the back seat as reasons for refusing. I had to agree with his perspective and thanked him anyway.
Earlier, the crew had turned up and I’d asked them to ignore this young drunken fiend because a) he was hostile and b) another collapsed person had been found down the street. They went to investigate what may have been a more serious running call while I waited for the police to arrive.
It turned out that the second collapse was a 15 year-old boy who was locked out of his friend’s flat – he’d been sleeping outside after attempting to wake his host up but it was impossible because the flat was on the first floor and there was no way in or up. And the host was obviously a) deaf or b) dead to the world in sleep, which is the same as deaf but with your eyes closed.
Meanwhile, my annoyingly obnoxious patient was un-cuffed and taken to the ambulance. He had become very, very pale, so he was going to hospital, like it or not. The 15 year-old was taken away to a safe place by the police and all ended well – I don’t think the Frenchman projectile vomited on the crew but I wouldn’t guarantee that.
A 50 year-old man with Liver problems and abdominal pain was given as ‘chest pain’ but I’m used to that now so I didn’t make a fuss – the crew was on scene soon after me, so I didn’t get beyond the basics.
Then a 40 year-old man who was ‘unconscious’ on a bus assaulted me as I tried to wake him up and get him off the vehicle. He didn’t like being prodded and pinched, so he swung at me and forced his way into my space – luckily I’m the world champion pinner-downer of such individuals (I’ve had a lot of practice) and he got no further than that with his aggression.
I waited with the driver for fifteen minutes and gave the drunken man plenty of opportunities to leave the bus but he refused and the police arrived to drag him off physically. He was less inclined to violent behaviour when they were on scene strangely enough but he remained lippy.
‘How old are you?’ asked one of the cops.
‘Ten’, the drunken man replied without a hint of humour. See? Alcohol does age you!
I wasn’t required for my last job – an unconscious 25 year-old man in the City – the crew was on scene and he was fully conscious.
Be safe.
Stats: 1 DIB; 4 ETOH; 1 Alcoholic fit; 1 Hyperventilation; 1 GI bleed; 1 Abdo pain.
We’ve been taking an average of 4,000 calls a day over the weekend and tonight (a Monday night) has been crazy. Don’t people have work to go to in the morning?
A 75 year-old man with DIB, cardiac problems, liver failure and cancer deserves my attention first off and I arrive to find him surrounded by worried family members as he lies on his bed wheezing. I put him on a nebuliser, which gives some relief, and carry out my obs until a crew arrives and takes him away. More family members show up and spill out onto the street as he is taken to hospital. I think they're expecting the worst.
Into Soho next for a 55 year-old ‘unconscious’ man who couldn’t be seen at first because people were sitting at tables drinking and chatting around him as he lay slumped on the pavement. Typically, nobody seems to notice him and the ambulance crew are about to call it a no-trace when I spot him, legs first.
He is an old queen and he is instantly annoyed by our presence as we wake him from his drunken slumber. ‘Go away!’ he barks before we can get a kind word in. We spend ten minutes getting him on his feet to move until he plants himself back down in someone’s doorway. A couple are trying to get into their flat but he’s obstructing them, so we move him again and this costs the NHS another three minutes. He wanders into a bar and is ejected very quickly. Then he finally shuffles off with his eye liner and painted nails; the only evidence that he was a coordinated person at one point.
A couple of colleagues were on a night out and I chatted to them as I did the paperwork for that patient. I left the scene wishing I was just another jolly MOP myself…a long night was ahead of me.
My next patient was a 35 year-old alcoholic who’d had a fit outside a gym and had been taken inside by the kind staff as he waited for the ambulance to arrive. He was face down on a massage bed in his own private world when I walked in to see him. He didn’t stir – I think he was asleep. He stank of booze and his clothes were filthy; he was giving the place a bad name – at least the regular clients were sweating for healthy reasons.
I got him to turn over and sit up and began my obs after establishing his name and what had happened. His clarity and demeanour made me doubt he’d had any kind of fit at all and this is a common enough game played by homeless alcoholics who just want a bed for the night, so what the hell. I asked him for his finger so that I could put my sats probe on it (the device slips on a finger and measures blood oxygen saturation levels (sats), normally they are above 94% in most people). He sneezed into his hand and offered me said germ-ridden mitten by reflex. I declined the offer and asked for a clean(ish) one. Since he had only one more to put forward for testing, I got that instead and a grin. I got no apology and I gave no blessing. Such is the straight-forward nature of this job sometimes.
It took me so long to get access to the road in which my next patient lived that she had recovered from her panic attack and was sitting on the sofa as if nothing had happened. Her friend had called the ambulance when she started to hyperventilate; she thought there might be a connection between the breathing problem and her mate’s bulimia.
The 25 year-old’s heart rate and blood pressure were low but this was normal for her and she was as thin as a rake (how did we get to that? Isn’t a shovel or a brush just as thin when looked at the right way? Oh wait, brushes are reserved for daftness, aren’t they?). She had recently fallen out with her boyfriend and this had triggered an emotional state in which her breathing rate had rocketed but she was absolutely fine now and I left her at home with her friend and a ‘get out of jail’ form. The ambulance had arrived with me earlier but I’d told the crew what was going on and that they weren’t needed.
Gastrointestinal (GI) bleeds can be life-threatening emergencies and the 74 year-old woman with abdominal pain, a low BP and who looked like death warmed up (pale, cold, clammy) was in real trouble. She had been reported as ‘not alert’ by her family and at times she wasn’t, otherwise she seemed to communicate quite effectively, insisting that she was in good shape, even though her body argued with her.
A patient I can only describe as a nutter on drink stormed off and walked into traffic, almost getting himself injured when I tried to get him to wake up from his ‘unconscious’ state on the pavement. The French 24 year-old and his gathering of equally French friends (who were all able to handle their alcohol sensibly I should say in their defence) had been out all day drinking but he collapsed on the way home and now no bus or taxi on Earth (or in London) would touch him. I know this because when he became aggressive and started physically pushing me and others around I called the police in. He was cuffed and told to behave, then one of the cops flagged down a taxi and I asked the driver if he’d be so kind as to convey the man and his buddies to the East (miles away). Despite the prospect of a fat fare, the cabbie declined, citing imminent vomiting and bad behaviour in the back seat as reasons for refusing. I had to agree with his perspective and thanked him anyway.
Earlier, the crew had turned up and I’d asked them to ignore this young drunken fiend because a) he was hostile and b) another collapsed person had been found down the street. They went to investigate what may have been a more serious running call while I waited for the police to arrive.
It turned out that the second collapse was a 15 year-old boy who was locked out of his friend’s flat – he’d been sleeping outside after attempting to wake his host up but it was impossible because the flat was on the first floor and there was no way in or up. And the host was obviously a) deaf or b) dead to the world in sleep, which is the same as deaf but with your eyes closed.
Meanwhile, my annoyingly obnoxious patient was un-cuffed and taken to the ambulance. He had become very, very pale, so he was going to hospital, like it or not. The 15 year-old was taken away to a safe place by the police and all ended well – I don’t think the Frenchman projectile vomited on the crew but I wouldn’t guarantee that.
A 50 year-old man with Liver problems and abdominal pain was given as ‘chest pain’ but I’m used to that now so I didn’t make a fuss – the crew was on scene soon after me, so I didn’t get beyond the basics.
Then a 40 year-old man who was ‘unconscious’ on a bus assaulted me as I tried to wake him up and get him off the vehicle. He didn’t like being prodded and pinched, so he swung at me and forced his way into my space – luckily I’m the world champion pinner-downer of such individuals (I’ve had a lot of practice) and he got no further than that with his aggression.
I waited with the driver for fifteen minutes and gave the drunken man plenty of opportunities to leave the bus but he refused and the police arrived to drag him off physically. He was less inclined to violent behaviour when they were on scene strangely enough but he remained lippy.
‘How old are you?’ asked one of the cops.
‘Ten’, the drunken man replied without a hint of humour. See? Alcohol does age you!
I wasn’t required for my last job – an unconscious 25 year-old man in the City – the crew was on scene and he was fully conscious.
Be safe.
Tuesday, 22 July 2008
Update on stuff
Just a quick note to let you know that I am aware that the poll has lasted almost two months but I wanted to get a bigger 'sample' on that one, so it's staying for a couple of months. Also, I have real trouble with the company that provides these for me...their software lets me down a LOT.
I'm writing another book and it will be radically different. Fiction for a start. If you haven't already bought my first book, please do...it will help encourage me to carry on writing (which takes a lot out of me) and will help YOU to understand the terminology I use here. You'll also get to know me better. The book is NOT a copy of the blog; it's full of original material which has never been used here.
If you can't bear to part with cash, join the Facebook site that Pollyanna started - just type in 'A Paramedic's Diary' and it should come up in the groups section. That way you can 'talk' to me and other readers, as well as keep right to date on what I'm doing.
I'm still toying with the possibility of moving this entire site to my own domain but not sure if I'll cause more problems than I solve. Any help would be appreciated.
Am in the garden tidying up today (a rare day of rest) and waiting for Scruffs to re-appear after he ran off when I brought the lawn mower out.
Xf
I'm writing another book and it will be radically different. Fiction for a start. If you haven't already bought my first book, please do...it will help encourage me to carry on writing (which takes a lot out of me) and will help YOU to understand the terminology I use here. You'll also get to know me better. The book is NOT a copy of the blog; it's full of original material which has never been used here.
If you can't bear to part with cash, join the Facebook site that Pollyanna started - just type in 'A Paramedic's Diary' and it should come up in the groups section. That way you can 'talk' to me and other readers, as well as keep right to date on what I'm doing.
I'm still toying with the possibility of moving this entire site to my own domain but not sure if I'll cause more problems than I solve. Any help would be appreciated.
Am in the garden tidying up today (a rare day of rest) and waiting for Scruffs to re-appear after he ran off when I brought the lawn mower out.
Xf
Cycling drunk
For all you Scruffy fans - here he is with that famous penile cactus I showed you earlier in the year. The plant is growing well, as you can see and no longer resembles the meat and two veg that made some of you gasp (by email). Scruffs is not impressed, however.Night shift: Seven emergency calls; one assisted-only; six by ambulance.
Stats: 1 drug overdose; 1 emotional; 1 high BP; 3 ETOH; 1 sickle cell crisis.
GHB and cocaine might make for a happy party at your house when a new friend has been invited to join you for the night but it can result in an ambulance being called for an unconscious stranger. As was the case with my first call. The two young gay men had brought a man they barely knew home with them and together they’d taken a cocktail of drugs, most of which was snorted and ingested by their guest. He now lay on the bed, completely unresponsive and with a less than competent airway.
The crew arrived as I remedied the airway problem and we got some Narcan into him before moving him. This had an effect and he became a little more active, although not fully conscious until he reached the ambulance, where he quickly relapsed to such an extent that he had to be ‘bagged’ in order to keep him breathing.
His hosts knew nothing about him, apart from his first name. This is the second patient I’ve had in the past few months in such circumstances. It’s a dangerous game to play and one day the guest is going to end up dead.
The 31 year-old was ‘blued’ in and the anaesthetist continued what we’d started. He wasn’t in good shape when I left.
An emotional 20 year-old woman lay crying on the floor when I arrived after receiving the call that she’d ‘fainted’. The crew was on scene with me and I left them to it. I compared her with my last patient and couldn’t decide who was more deserving of an ambulance – both were tax payers, one caused his own problem and the other couldn’t control her emotions and thought 999 was the answer. If we had one ambulance available and a 93 year-old with DIB came up and it was up to me, I know who'd get it first.
Those hallway timer switches that you get in shared flat buildings are very annoying when you are trying to get obs on the stairs. I had been called out to a 41 year-old woman with chest pain, a headache and high BP. She’d walked out to meet me and I’d asked her to return and sit down. Now I was struggling to see her as the light kept going out every thirty seconds. I ran between her and the push-button on the wall like a comedy paramedic. I must eat more carrots.
Falling asleep is natural (mostly and except if you never wake up). Falling asleep when you are drunk is expected, so when I got a call for a 43 year-old man who ‘keeps falling alseep’ at a hostel for known alcoholics, I wasn’t too wildly concerned. Neither was he because he was wide awake and disputing the need for an ambulance when the crew and I arrived to assess him. Inside his dirty, smoky, dark little flat there were a number of other, similarly drunk, people – the skinny people of wasted lives. All of them ganged up on the man to tell him to go to hospital for his sleepiness – none of them seemed to realise that alcohol might be the culprit (I ruled out the possibility of him having worked hard all day).
None of the lights were on and nobody bothered to use any of the switches for us, so we were standing in the dark and the hallway became a void of black space as we took the man to the ambulance. I’d had enough of the game however and switched on one of the lights – I had no idea why we were being so shy about it. Now we could see and the man stood at the top of the stairs, arguing with his mates. He looked much better with the lights off.
I went ahead to the car and watched as the crew brought the man and his friends out of the hostel. They loaded him on board and I thought that was that but as I drove down the road five minutes later, I saw two police cars arriving and a message appeared on my screen asking if the crew was still in the back of the ambulance or on the premises. I u-turned and headed back to the vehicle. I got a quick nod from one of the crew to say that everything was ok but I learned later on that one of the guy’s friends had kicked off and become aggressive and threatening towards them as they ‘treated’ the patient. More often than not we are put at risk for people with no medical emergency whatsoever; this was a good example. If the crew hadn't arrived with me I would have been up there with that psycho on my own in the dark until they did. I may or may not have been able to contain him myself - who knows. I really do get the feeling that time is running out for me.
For some reason I’m going through a period where I’m having difficulty getting a cannula into sickle cell patients. Their veins tend to be challenging at the best of times but I’ve had a run of fails and multiple attempts recently. So when I got to the 23 year-old sickle cell crisis patient and attempted to put a line in for morphine (entonox was working but only marginally), I had no luck and I’m wary of wasting a crew’s time by delaying the trip to hospital just so that I can prove a point, so I gave up after one attempt rather than try again. It meant my patient wasn’t getting the pain relief he should have received but it also meant I acknowledged the possibility of delaying hospital treatment. I’m sure it’s just a phase I’m going through – I don’t have any trouble with other patients, honest.
Then a Red1 ‘life status questionable’ where the caller was too scared to approach the patient, who was lying in the street motionless. As I drove towards it I knew I’d be wasting my time (or rather, a genuine patient’s time). He was on his back and reluctant to respond to me or the crew (they arrived with me) and we spent ten minutes trying to persuade him that we knew he was alive and well…and drunk. The MOP who’d called it in stood around with a can of Stella in his hands, nursing a long dead cigarette. I wondered why he couldn’t recognise a fellow drunk.
In the end, we hauled him onto a trolley bed and wheeled him into the back of the ambulance where a miracle took place. He sat bolt upright, stood up and walked off without saying a word. Not even a thanks. I have a theory - maybe the ambulance has a specific 'aura' for waking up faking drunks, or maybe they suddenly realise that once inside the vehicle, we have control...enough control to slip them down to the morgue to sleep it off.
He tried to rest himself in a doorway and I warned him to keep moving or the police would be called. This guy was going to generate calls all night if he didn’t behave. He shuffled off in a huff, leaving me and the crew with smiles on our faces.
At the end of a long night shift I am asked to find a cyclist who’s come off his bike and has sustained a head injury. The address is vague and when I turn up with the ambulance, we can’t see him. It takes a few calls to clarify the location and we find him fifteen minutes later, sitting on a wall with an off-duty fire-fighter (he identified himself) looking after him. The cyclist is very, very drunk. His bicycle has no pedals, just stumps of metal to rest his feet on and he has a heavy bag on him. I can’t imagine how he stayed on the bike for more than a few seconds but he must have cycled as far as here without coming off and his luck ran out on a dark residential street. Luckily, it’s 5.30am and there’s no traffic about.
The man has no recollection of what happened – the gash in his head has been bleeding heavily and nobody knows how long he’s been on the ground before he was found by the passing fireman. He looks like a student to me and if his bike is anything to go by, he’s a poor student.
We get him into the ambulance and the crew carry out their examination – they collar and board him because we simply don’t know how hard he fell and at what speed. We don’t even know if he’s been hit by another vehicle and been left lying there for hours. His body temperature is low but alcohol will do that.
The fireman offers to take the man’s bike to his house nearby and gives me his details to pass on to the patient. This is a kind act and I hope the man thanks him properly when he recovers and returns to collect it. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if he didn’t bother though – the bike is a wreck, much like he is.
Stats: 1 drug overdose; 1 emotional; 1 high BP; 3 ETOH; 1 sickle cell crisis.
GHB and cocaine might make for a happy party at your house when a new friend has been invited to join you for the night but it can result in an ambulance being called for an unconscious stranger. As was the case with my first call. The two young gay men had brought a man they barely knew home with them and together they’d taken a cocktail of drugs, most of which was snorted and ingested by their guest. He now lay on the bed, completely unresponsive and with a less than competent airway.
The crew arrived as I remedied the airway problem and we got some Narcan into him before moving him. This had an effect and he became a little more active, although not fully conscious until he reached the ambulance, where he quickly relapsed to such an extent that he had to be ‘bagged’ in order to keep him breathing.
His hosts knew nothing about him, apart from his first name. This is the second patient I’ve had in the past few months in such circumstances. It’s a dangerous game to play and one day the guest is going to end up dead.
The 31 year-old was ‘blued’ in and the anaesthetist continued what we’d started. He wasn’t in good shape when I left.
An emotional 20 year-old woman lay crying on the floor when I arrived after receiving the call that she’d ‘fainted’. The crew was on scene with me and I left them to it. I compared her with my last patient and couldn’t decide who was more deserving of an ambulance – both were tax payers, one caused his own problem and the other couldn’t control her emotions and thought 999 was the answer. If we had one ambulance available and a 93 year-old with DIB came up and it was up to me, I know who'd get it first.
Those hallway timer switches that you get in shared flat buildings are very annoying when you are trying to get obs on the stairs. I had been called out to a 41 year-old woman with chest pain, a headache and high BP. She’d walked out to meet me and I’d asked her to return and sit down. Now I was struggling to see her as the light kept going out every thirty seconds. I ran between her and the push-button on the wall like a comedy paramedic. I must eat more carrots.
Falling asleep is natural (mostly and except if you never wake up). Falling asleep when you are drunk is expected, so when I got a call for a 43 year-old man who ‘keeps falling alseep’ at a hostel for known alcoholics, I wasn’t too wildly concerned. Neither was he because he was wide awake and disputing the need for an ambulance when the crew and I arrived to assess him. Inside his dirty, smoky, dark little flat there were a number of other, similarly drunk, people – the skinny people of wasted lives. All of them ganged up on the man to tell him to go to hospital for his sleepiness – none of them seemed to realise that alcohol might be the culprit (I ruled out the possibility of him having worked hard all day).
None of the lights were on and nobody bothered to use any of the switches for us, so we were standing in the dark and the hallway became a void of black space as we took the man to the ambulance. I’d had enough of the game however and switched on one of the lights – I had no idea why we were being so shy about it. Now we could see and the man stood at the top of the stairs, arguing with his mates. He looked much better with the lights off.
I went ahead to the car and watched as the crew brought the man and his friends out of the hostel. They loaded him on board and I thought that was that but as I drove down the road five minutes later, I saw two police cars arriving and a message appeared on my screen asking if the crew was still in the back of the ambulance or on the premises. I u-turned and headed back to the vehicle. I got a quick nod from one of the crew to say that everything was ok but I learned later on that one of the guy’s friends had kicked off and become aggressive and threatening towards them as they ‘treated’ the patient. More often than not we are put at risk for people with no medical emergency whatsoever; this was a good example. If the crew hadn't arrived with me I would have been up there with that psycho on my own in the dark until they did. I may or may not have been able to contain him myself - who knows. I really do get the feeling that time is running out for me.
For some reason I’m going through a period where I’m having difficulty getting a cannula into sickle cell patients. Their veins tend to be challenging at the best of times but I’ve had a run of fails and multiple attempts recently. So when I got to the 23 year-old sickle cell crisis patient and attempted to put a line in for morphine (entonox was working but only marginally), I had no luck and I’m wary of wasting a crew’s time by delaying the trip to hospital just so that I can prove a point, so I gave up after one attempt rather than try again. It meant my patient wasn’t getting the pain relief he should have received but it also meant I acknowledged the possibility of delaying hospital treatment. I’m sure it’s just a phase I’m going through – I don’t have any trouble with other patients, honest.
Then a Red1 ‘life status questionable’ where the caller was too scared to approach the patient, who was lying in the street motionless. As I drove towards it I knew I’d be wasting my time (or rather, a genuine patient’s time). He was on his back and reluctant to respond to me or the crew (they arrived with me) and we spent ten minutes trying to persuade him that we knew he was alive and well…and drunk. The MOP who’d called it in stood around with a can of Stella in his hands, nursing a long dead cigarette. I wondered why he couldn’t recognise a fellow drunk.
In the end, we hauled him onto a trolley bed and wheeled him into the back of the ambulance where a miracle took place. He sat bolt upright, stood up and walked off without saying a word. Not even a thanks. I have a theory - maybe the ambulance has a specific 'aura' for waking up faking drunks, or maybe they suddenly realise that once inside the vehicle, we have control...enough control to slip them down to the morgue to sleep it off.
He tried to rest himself in a doorway and I warned him to keep moving or the police would be called. This guy was going to generate calls all night if he didn’t behave. He shuffled off in a huff, leaving me and the crew with smiles on our faces.
At the end of a long night shift I am asked to find a cyclist who’s come off his bike and has sustained a head injury. The address is vague and when I turn up with the ambulance, we can’t see him. It takes a few calls to clarify the location and we find him fifteen minutes later, sitting on a wall with an off-duty fire-fighter (he identified himself) looking after him. The cyclist is very, very drunk. His bicycle has no pedals, just stumps of metal to rest his feet on and he has a heavy bag on him. I can’t imagine how he stayed on the bike for more than a few seconds but he must have cycled as far as here without coming off and his luck ran out on a dark residential street. Luckily, it’s 5.30am and there’s no traffic about.
The man has no recollection of what happened – the gash in his head has been bleeding heavily and nobody knows how long he’s been on the ground before he was found by the passing fireman. He looks like a student to me and if his bike is anything to go by, he’s a poor student.
We get him into the ambulance and the crew carry out their examination – they collar and board him because we simply don’t know how hard he fell and at what speed. We don’t even know if he’s been hit by another vehicle and been left lying there for hours. His body temperature is low but alcohol will do that.
The fireman offers to take the man’s bike to his house nearby and gives me his details to pass on to the patient. This is a kind act and I hope the man thanks him properly when he recovers and returns to collect it. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if he didn’t bother though – the bike is a wreck, much like he is.
Be safe.
Saturday, 19 July 2008
Random
Night shift: Nine calls; all taken by ambulance.
Stats: 3 Head injuries; 1 time waster; 2 drug overdoses; 1 DIB; 1 stabbing; 2 ETOH.
The first drunken patient I was called to had walked into a moving car as he crossed the road. As he fell, he grabbed the open window of the vehicle (which was still moving) and clung on as he hit the ground, cracking his head open on the road. The driver got a bit of a fright and braked in time to stop his wheels from rolling over the inebriated 25 year-old.
Thankfully, his injury was fairly minor but he still needed to go to hospital because his wound would have to be checked and closed. His friends became obstructive at times and had to be told to quieten down. She was taking the ‘you are a public servant and will therefore answer my inane questions, even if it is interfering with patient care’ approach and I can’t stand people who do that. It ranks up there alongside ‘I pay my taxes and you will obey me’.
The Lithuanian alcohol-gel thief was back in action tonight and I only had to look at the call description to know it was him: ‘30 year-old male fitting, second fit worse than before’. It’s all getting so tiring now. I arrived with the crew and as soon as I recognised him and he recognised me (that strange exchange takes place where I acknowledge he’s wasting our time and he doesn’t give a damn) the game was up. The crew didn’t know him, so he continued to play on it for a while longer…at least until he was in the back of the ambulance.
A strange skinny man was seen ‘shaking’ and behaving oddly in some bushes outside a block of flats, so the neighbours called the police. The cops dragged him out of the hedges with his trousers around his ankles and he promptly collapsed. A crack pipe was found nearby but they weren’t sure if it was his or not. They called us out and I arrived to find him lying on the ground with handcuffs on. He was either truly unconscious or faking it really well.
I asked for the cuffs to be removed and carried out my obs, finding nothing untoward and deciding not to give him Narcan because he wasn’t at risk and I didn’t want him awake and aggressive. I waited for the crew and they arrived ten minutes later. He was hoisted onto the trolley bed and woke up immediately.
His recovery continued in the ambulance as the crew and police interviewed him. He wouldn’t tell them what he was doing in the bushes but I’ve seen this behaviour before (the man with the porn magazine underneath him who’d been found unconscious and half-naked in a doorway). It’s possible that after taking drugs, they become aroused and don’t care where they are when they act on that impulse.
A 70 year-old lady with DIB and sats in the high 70’s said ‘I’m not coming home, am I?’ as she was wheeled from her home by the crew. I couldn’t answer her because I didn’t want to lie. She wasn’t well and her breathing had deteriorated suddenly overnight. I had nebulised her but it had barely had an effect.
Stabbings are becoming common in London and my next call was to a random knifing on a 25 year-old tourist who just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time (if that’s even fair to say). He was walking down a street in the West End when a passing stranger allegedly lunged at him, stabbing him once in the back. That was it, no other exchange took place. The assailant walked off and he was left collapsing on the pavement. It’s frighteningly possible that it could have been anyone…you or me, your brother or sister.
Luckily for him, the wound wasn’t deep enough or near enough any vital organs to cause a life-threatening injury but that was just luck. He could just as easily be dying for nothing.
Drunken people’s drunken friends can be very annoying and very entertaining. Another young woman with no tolerance for alcohol – a 23 year-old, slumped in a doorway after being hauled out of a club had vomited a pool of yellow liquid then lay on the ground waiting for the world to go away. Her friends drifted in and out of the scene to make comments as I tried to get her to talk to me.
‘Oh my God, is she going to be alright? What’s wrong with her?’ a random friend asked in a shrill, high pitched and panicky voice (these are the people who won’t survive the next crisis in their lives).
‘Yep…she’s drunk’, I answered. I hope to inspire confidence but I really want to say ‘serves you right’.
This young woman had downed a bottle of Malibu on her own and now her friends were actually surprised to see her puking it all back up as the alcohol kept her in a semi-conscious state.
‘Yeah, I get like that sometimes. You know how you get so drunk that you can’t feel your own legs?’ the shrieker asked me.
‘No, not really’, I answered, wondering if she was decribing this or a stroke..
A cat fight broke out yards from us and this made the loud friends go away but it also made the area that little bit less friendly for me and the crew when they arrived. At least three women were scratching it out for who knows what reason and the men were, predictably, doing nothing to stop it. They were happy to form a circle around the battling females and grin en masse (this, I believe, is the same as chanting but in a more subtle, socially-acceptable way).
I got another mouthy friend later on when I went to deal with a drunken 20 year-old woman who fell on her head when she tripped over herself. She lay on the road with a bleeding scalp and her mate, who was probably twice as drunk as the patient, attempted to stand her up, pushing me out of the way to get to her. She had to be warned again and again to step back and let me get on with it but she wasn’t having any of it. ‘She’s my best friend’, she told me, as if that gave her a licence to make her condition worse. Eventually, one of the club doormen took her aside for a chat.
When she was loaded onto the ambulance, friend in tow, I climbed aboard to put a line in and give her fluids because her BP was low. Her friend was still misbehaving and was allowed to go to the toilet as we carried out another full set of obs on the patient. This pause seemed to cure her of bad behaviour and when she returned, she was quieter and apologetic.
As I tried to finish the paperwork on that last job, I was asked to go into the club to treat a member of staff who’d collapsed in the toilet. She was slumped on the floor and had been unconscious for a few minutes. She’d been given a drink or two by customers and now she could barely keep her eyes open or make any sense. It looked to me like she’d been slipped something in her alcohol – she certainly wasn’t drunk.
The toilet was like a sauna and I had to wait a fair amount of time before an ambulance came to get this lady out. I was sent another FRU pilot in the meantime and he helped me with obs until we could move her. Meanwhile, I was beginning to drip with sweat.
When the crew arrived and we got her out into the cooler air, she was taken to hospital straight away. If the drugs didn’t get her, the heat of that bunker toilet would.
In the late early hours I was sent south for a 25 year-old man who’d been shot. I passed the armed cops as they suited and tooled up in the street and I arrived to find other police officers pinning a man to the ground as he wept. I was told he was the assailant and that the victim was around the corner - I had no idea why he was crying like a baby. I drove a few metres and pulled up beside another man who was nursing his eye. He’d been hit by a bottle, not a bullet, during a scuffle in the street. He was in a state of shock because he couldn’t believe anyone would hit him like that after a minor disagreement (about what I know not). His injury was minor – he had a laceration above his eye – and he was lucky the other man wasn’t armed, especially in this neck of the woods where real stabbings and shootings take place.
I went home contemplating the random nature of the assaults I’d dealt with. It’s easier to become a victim of violence than ever before simply because there are greater influences on the instigators; drugs, alcohol, theft, anger, social circumstances, territorial jealousy. If someone wants to have a go at you he will and it may well be because you looked at him the wrong way. Of course the Press may not have helped by keeping knife crime in focus because this may have bred a culture of status among those who carry deadly weapons but we still can’t ignore the increase in violence proportionate to the growing discontent of our young in society. We give them little or nothing to aspire to.
Be safe.
Stats: 3 Head injuries; 1 time waster; 2 drug overdoses; 1 DIB; 1 stabbing; 2 ETOH.
The first drunken patient I was called to had walked into a moving car as he crossed the road. As he fell, he grabbed the open window of the vehicle (which was still moving) and clung on as he hit the ground, cracking his head open on the road. The driver got a bit of a fright and braked in time to stop his wheels from rolling over the inebriated 25 year-old.
Thankfully, his injury was fairly minor but he still needed to go to hospital because his wound would have to be checked and closed. His friends became obstructive at times and had to be told to quieten down. She was taking the ‘you are a public servant and will therefore answer my inane questions, even if it is interfering with patient care’ approach and I can’t stand people who do that. It ranks up there alongside ‘I pay my taxes and you will obey me’.
The Lithuanian alcohol-gel thief was back in action tonight and I only had to look at the call description to know it was him: ‘30 year-old male fitting, second fit worse than before’. It’s all getting so tiring now. I arrived with the crew and as soon as I recognised him and he recognised me (that strange exchange takes place where I acknowledge he’s wasting our time and he doesn’t give a damn) the game was up. The crew didn’t know him, so he continued to play on it for a while longer…at least until he was in the back of the ambulance.
A strange skinny man was seen ‘shaking’ and behaving oddly in some bushes outside a block of flats, so the neighbours called the police. The cops dragged him out of the hedges with his trousers around his ankles and he promptly collapsed. A crack pipe was found nearby but they weren’t sure if it was his or not. They called us out and I arrived to find him lying on the ground with handcuffs on. He was either truly unconscious or faking it really well.
I asked for the cuffs to be removed and carried out my obs, finding nothing untoward and deciding not to give him Narcan because he wasn’t at risk and I didn’t want him awake and aggressive. I waited for the crew and they arrived ten minutes later. He was hoisted onto the trolley bed and woke up immediately.
His recovery continued in the ambulance as the crew and police interviewed him. He wouldn’t tell them what he was doing in the bushes but I’ve seen this behaviour before (the man with the porn magazine underneath him who’d been found unconscious and half-naked in a doorway). It’s possible that after taking drugs, they become aroused and don’t care where they are when they act on that impulse.
A 70 year-old lady with DIB and sats in the high 70’s said ‘I’m not coming home, am I?’ as she was wheeled from her home by the crew. I couldn’t answer her because I didn’t want to lie. She wasn’t well and her breathing had deteriorated suddenly overnight. I had nebulised her but it had barely had an effect.
Stabbings are becoming common in London and my next call was to a random knifing on a 25 year-old tourist who just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time (if that’s even fair to say). He was walking down a street in the West End when a passing stranger allegedly lunged at him, stabbing him once in the back. That was it, no other exchange took place. The assailant walked off and he was left collapsing on the pavement. It’s frighteningly possible that it could have been anyone…you or me, your brother or sister.
Luckily for him, the wound wasn’t deep enough or near enough any vital organs to cause a life-threatening injury but that was just luck. He could just as easily be dying for nothing.
Drunken people’s drunken friends can be very annoying and very entertaining. Another young woman with no tolerance for alcohol – a 23 year-old, slumped in a doorway after being hauled out of a club had vomited a pool of yellow liquid then lay on the ground waiting for the world to go away. Her friends drifted in and out of the scene to make comments as I tried to get her to talk to me.
‘Oh my God, is she going to be alright? What’s wrong with her?’ a random friend asked in a shrill, high pitched and panicky voice (these are the people who won’t survive the next crisis in their lives).
‘Yep…she’s drunk’, I answered. I hope to inspire confidence but I really want to say ‘serves you right’.
This young woman had downed a bottle of Malibu on her own and now her friends were actually surprised to see her puking it all back up as the alcohol kept her in a semi-conscious state.
‘Yeah, I get like that sometimes. You know how you get so drunk that you can’t feel your own legs?’ the shrieker asked me.
‘No, not really’, I answered, wondering if she was decribing this or a stroke..
A cat fight broke out yards from us and this made the loud friends go away but it also made the area that little bit less friendly for me and the crew when they arrived. At least three women were scratching it out for who knows what reason and the men were, predictably, doing nothing to stop it. They were happy to form a circle around the battling females and grin en masse (this, I believe, is the same as chanting but in a more subtle, socially-acceptable way).
I got another mouthy friend later on when I went to deal with a drunken 20 year-old woman who fell on her head when she tripped over herself. She lay on the road with a bleeding scalp and her mate, who was probably twice as drunk as the patient, attempted to stand her up, pushing me out of the way to get to her. She had to be warned again and again to step back and let me get on with it but she wasn’t having any of it. ‘She’s my best friend’, she told me, as if that gave her a licence to make her condition worse. Eventually, one of the club doormen took her aside for a chat.
When she was loaded onto the ambulance, friend in tow, I climbed aboard to put a line in and give her fluids because her BP was low. Her friend was still misbehaving and was allowed to go to the toilet as we carried out another full set of obs on the patient. This pause seemed to cure her of bad behaviour and when she returned, she was quieter and apologetic.
As I tried to finish the paperwork on that last job, I was asked to go into the club to treat a member of staff who’d collapsed in the toilet. She was slumped on the floor and had been unconscious for a few minutes. She’d been given a drink or two by customers and now she could barely keep her eyes open or make any sense. It looked to me like she’d been slipped something in her alcohol – she certainly wasn’t drunk.
The toilet was like a sauna and I had to wait a fair amount of time before an ambulance came to get this lady out. I was sent another FRU pilot in the meantime and he helped me with obs until we could move her. Meanwhile, I was beginning to drip with sweat.
When the crew arrived and we got her out into the cooler air, she was taken to hospital straight away. If the drugs didn’t get her, the heat of that bunker toilet would.
In the late early hours I was sent south for a 25 year-old man who’d been shot. I passed the armed cops as they suited and tooled up in the street and I arrived to find other police officers pinning a man to the ground as he wept. I was told he was the assailant and that the victim was around the corner - I had no idea why he was crying like a baby. I drove a few metres and pulled up beside another man who was nursing his eye. He’d been hit by a bottle, not a bullet, during a scuffle in the street. He was in a state of shock because he couldn’t believe anyone would hit him like that after a minor disagreement (about what I know not). His injury was minor – he had a laceration above his eye – and he was lucky the other man wasn’t armed, especially in this neck of the woods where real stabbings and shootings take place.
I went home contemplating the random nature of the assaults I’d dealt with. It’s easier to become a victim of violence than ever before simply because there are greater influences on the instigators; drugs, alcohol, theft, anger, social circumstances, territorial jealousy. If someone wants to have a go at you he will and it may well be because you looked at him the wrong way. Of course the Press may not have helped by keeping knife crime in focus because this may have bred a culture of status among those who carry deadly weapons but we still can’t ignore the increase in violence proportionate to the growing discontent of our young in society. We give them little or nothing to aspire to.
Be safe.
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