At last, I've finished the book. A complete re-write and an exercise in how to delay a publishing deadline. It'll be late, I'm afraid. Probably by a couple of weeks because I'll still have to refine the editing but at least the material is in there. It won't be structured like the diary and I have taken more than a few literary liberties to enhance the reading of it but I'm pleased with the result. I learned a lot too - the background research helped me understand a few things I thought I knew but didn't.
Croatia was a magical and humbling experience. I was over there on behalf of the service with twenty-odd other paramedics, EMT's and officers to take part in the training programme we were demonstrating to the people of the town and to make a documentary-type video diary about it (that's another hobby I have, film-making). Here's a link showing their local newpaper's story about our town square demonstration alongside their ambulance service (in white uniforms!). I'm in the photo somewhere but you'll have to guess whereabouts :-)
http://www.posavskahrvatska.hr/Novost.aspx?kat=18&id=18_20071005111441
I loved every minute of it and the people were so generous and kind. Those people endured hardships beyond our imagination during the Baltic conflict, One person told me they had suffered up to 100 rocket-propelled grenades exploding on their town square every single day. The hospital still has bullet holes in the walls and chunks missing from the structure where shells had landed.
We also went into Bosnia, which was eerie. I filmed the shattered houses and abandoned land. Very few people returned to their homes after the war. They never felt safe enough in that country after the ethnic cleansing that went on. Whole families were murdered in their homes, before being burned as the aggressor army razed the houses to the ground. There is evidence of the atrocities everywhere. Needless to say, we did not wear uniform in Bosnia. In fact, I almost got arrested when I was filming at the border. It's illegal but I didn't know that until I was told by one of our party. Luckily I wasn't seen by the mean gun-toting border guards.
I have dozens of photographs from the trip and great memories. I made a lot of new friends and will definitely be going back again next year.
I'm back and with the book on its way, I can get back to posting the backlog of stuff that's been waiting to be written (typed). Thanks for hanging in there!
Xf
Friday, 5 October 2007
Torture
Eight emergency calls; one assist-only, one hoax, one conveyed and five taken by ambulance, including a running call.
My day started out with a number of frustrating cancellations, some of which had me running for a few minutes before I was stood down. Sirens off, light off, sorry I split the traffic up – ‘false alarm, go about your business...nothing to see hear’. Road users hate me for this, I’m sure.
When I did get a call to run on, I wasn’t required. The 66 year-old man with chest pain had an ambulance crew in attendance when I arrived.
I fared better on my next call, which was to a 46 year-old female cyclist who had been knocked off her ride by a van, probably a white van, which promptly left the scene. She had a thigh injury and could barely walk or put weight on it and I was on scene long enough to chat to her but my hopes of affecting a rescue were dashed by the presence of another ambulance, already on scene. I don’t know why they call me sometimes. I wasn’t required, of course.
I met a lovely, if badly made-up, old woman outside the station today. She leaves biscuits for us every now and then. I think she had just bought a cheap batch because she left biscuits every day during my three day ‘tour of duty’. Either that or she thought I was looking a bit thin.
If she finds the station unoccupied (and hopefully locked) she leaves them on the windscreen, or wheel arch of the nearest ambulance. It’s only a matter of time before a crew take a vehicle out on an emergency, not knowing that there is a packet of biscuits secreted on the wheel, hear the crunch as it goes under and sit there, shocked in the belief that they have just run over the neighbour’s cat. Mind you, that thing is so fat it would probably make more of a pop, followed by a slushy squishing sound (I can hear it in my mind, even if I can’t describe it well).
I sat on stand-by in Trafalgar Square and was approached by a dizzy looking man who pointed twice, motioned to his head and then collapsed onto the car. I jumped out, looked for a dent and then looked at him, crumpled at the side of the vehicle.
‘What’s wrong with you?’ I asked.
He said nothing but signalled that he spoke no English. He was clearly drunk. I went for broke with my next question.
‘Are you Russian?’
He understood that and nodded. It almost never fails. It only backfires when they turn out to be Polish, Lithuanian or Bulgarian. If they’re English, they swear at you first, thus establishing an accent and possible country of origin. If they’re Scottish, they announce it to you – ‘I’m Scottish!’ and the connection is immediately established and if they are Irish or Welsh, they generally keep it to themselves until they have no choice but to speak.
He couldn’t or wouldn’t make himself understood, so I called an ambulance for him and hoped I wasn’t letting the team down. He had a bruised face, so I guess he had been hit at some point and when the crew arrived they too assumed he had been assaulted. There was nothing life-threatening going on here but, as a street person, he probably thought I was his only point of refuge. I guess I was.
From there I was asked to assist a crew that had been on scene with a lung cancer patient who had recently had a lung removed (pneumonectomy). They needed a working ECG monitor because theirs had given up on them. I ran (not literally) down there and went into the flat to find the patient in bed, looking very ill. He was on his last few days (or weeks) I think and had already refused to go to hospital. His acute deterioration had been expected by his doctor and we were there to try to make him breathe easier because right now his lung was filling with fluid.
My colleagues on scene were taking care of things and I was simply asked to set up the ECG and to consider the administration of drugs to help him with his present dyspnoea. After looking at the results of the ECG and carefully listening to his chest, I suggested we use GTN and Frusemide. He was on oxygen but very little of it was getting to his remaining lung, so we had to clear the fluid from in there to allow more of the good stuff to go around. It was a matter of patient comfort and perhaps of buying him a little more time.
We got on with it and within ten minutes of giving him what he needed, his breathing had improved, sats were higher and he was smiling again. He still had a bit of a rattle to his breathing but it was much quieter than I had heard earlier.
I shook his hand, said goodbye and left the crew with him to go to a 19 year-old female who was vomiting at a tube station. Again, a crew were already on scene, discussing possible food poisoning with her and I wasn’t required. I really was the spare part of the ambulance service today.
A hoax call from a phone box outside a railway station next. I want to catch this nutter in the act and have him arrested. He calls every week, at least three times a week and will often demand all of the emergency services. He only ever gets one – the ambulance service.
My last job was for a 62 year-old male who had fallen earlier in the day on his way to work. He had burst his lip when he hit the ground and had recovered initially. Now, his bosses were concerned about him because he had fallen off a stool at work and was continually dizzy. When I looked at him, he seemed pale and a little disorientated. I wondered if he had suffered an event, like a stroke, which made him fall earlier, or he had a head injury as the result of the fall.
His condition certainly warranted closer investigation, so he was taken to hospital by ambulance.
During my stand-by period on Trafalgar Square, the ‘London Week of Peace’ concert was taking place. The idea of this is to discourage young black men from using guns and knives to settle scores. I mentally wished them good luck, whilst cynically doubting their effect on the gangs of south London.
There was also a protest taking place, next to my car, against the detention of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay. As part of the demo, they had a young girl dressed in an orange jumpsuit - with a black hood over her head - kneeling in the ‘stress position’ used on detainees as a means of breaking their spirits by inducing painful physical fatigue. Bearing in mind what this is actually used for; an older man (the boss man I presumed) went up to her and adjusted her position, forcing her to kneel in the proper manner, legs crossed behind her, so that the physical effects became real.
She lasted five minutes before tearing the hood off and storming away in a huff.
Be safe.
My day started out with a number of frustrating cancellations, some of which had me running for a few minutes before I was stood down. Sirens off, light off, sorry I split the traffic up – ‘false alarm, go about your business...nothing to see hear’. Road users hate me for this, I’m sure.
When I did get a call to run on, I wasn’t required. The 66 year-old man with chest pain had an ambulance crew in attendance when I arrived.
I fared better on my next call, which was to a 46 year-old female cyclist who had been knocked off her ride by a van, probably a white van, which promptly left the scene. She had a thigh injury and could barely walk or put weight on it and I was on scene long enough to chat to her but my hopes of affecting a rescue were dashed by the presence of another ambulance, already on scene. I don’t know why they call me sometimes. I wasn’t required, of course.
I met a lovely, if badly made-up, old woman outside the station today. She leaves biscuits for us every now and then. I think she had just bought a cheap batch because she left biscuits every day during my three day ‘tour of duty’. Either that or she thought I was looking a bit thin.
If she finds the station unoccupied (and hopefully locked) she leaves them on the windscreen, or wheel arch of the nearest ambulance. It’s only a matter of time before a crew take a vehicle out on an emergency, not knowing that there is a packet of biscuits secreted on the wheel, hear the crunch as it goes under and sit there, shocked in the belief that they have just run over the neighbour’s cat. Mind you, that thing is so fat it would probably make more of a pop, followed by a slushy squishing sound (I can hear it in my mind, even if I can’t describe it well).
I sat on stand-by in Trafalgar Square and was approached by a dizzy looking man who pointed twice, motioned to his head and then collapsed onto the car. I jumped out, looked for a dent and then looked at him, crumpled at the side of the vehicle.
‘What’s wrong with you?’ I asked.
He said nothing but signalled that he spoke no English. He was clearly drunk. I went for broke with my next question.
‘Are you Russian?’
He understood that and nodded. It almost never fails. It only backfires when they turn out to be Polish, Lithuanian or Bulgarian. If they’re English, they swear at you first, thus establishing an accent and possible country of origin. If they’re Scottish, they announce it to you – ‘I’m Scottish!’ and the connection is immediately established and if they are Irish or Welsh, they generally keep it to themselves until they have no choice but to speak.
He couldn’t or wouldn’t make himself understood, so I called an ambulance for him and hoped I wasn’t letting the team down. He had a bruised face, so I guess he had been hit at some point and when the crew arrived they too assumed he had been assaulted. There was nothing life-threatening going on here but, as a street person, he probably thought I was his only point of refuge. I guess I was.
From there I was asked to assist a crew that had been on scene with a lung cancer patient who had recently had a lung removed (pneumonectomy). They needed a working ECG monitor because theirs had given up on them. I ran (not literally) down there and went into the flat to find the patient in bed, looking very ill. He was on his last few days (or weeks) I think and had already refused to go to hospital. His acute deterioration had been expected by his doctor and we were there to try to make him breathe easier because right now his lung was filling with fluid.
My colleagues on scene were taking care of things and I was simply asked to set up the ECG and to consider the administration of drugs to help him with his present dyspnoea. After looking at the results of the ECG and carefully listening to his chest, I suggested we use GTN and Frusemide. He was on oxygen but very little of it was getting to his remaining lung, so we had to clear the fluid from in there to allow more of the good stuff to go around. It was a matter of patient comfort and perhaps of buying him a little more time.
We got on with it and within ten minutes of giving him what he needed, his breathing had improved, sats were higher and he was smiling again. He still had a bit of a rattle to his breathing but it was much quieter than I had heard earlier.
I shook his hand, said goodbye and left the crew with him to go to a 19 year-old female who was vomiting at a tube station. Again, a crew were already on scene, discussing possible food poisoning with her and I wasn’t required. I really was the spare part of the ambulance service today.
A hoax call from a phone box outside a railway station next. I want to catch this nutter in the act and have him arrested. He calls every week, at least three times a week and will often demand all of the emergency services. He only ever gets one – the ambulance service.
My last job was for a 62 year-old male who had fallen earlier in the day on his way to work. He had burst his lip when he hit the ground and had recovered initially. Now, his bosses were concerned about him because he had fallen off a stool at work and was continually dizzy. When I looked at him, he seemed pale and a little disorientated. I wondered if he had suffered an event, like a stroke, which made him fall earlier, or he had a head injury as the result of the fall.
His condition certainly warranted closer investigation, so he was taken to hospital by ambulance.
During my stand-by period on Trafalgar Square, the ‘London Week of Peace’ concert was taking place. The idea of this is to discourage young black men from using guns and knives to settle scores. I mentally wished them good luck, whilst cynically doubting their effect on the gangs of south London.
There was also a protest taking place, next to my car, against the detention of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay. As part of the demo, they had a young girl dressed in an orange jumpsuit - with a black hood over her head - kneeling in the ‘stress position’ used on detainees as a means of breaking their spirits by inducing painful physical fatigue. Bearing in mind what this is actually used for; an older man (the boss man I presumed) went up to her and adjusted her position, forcing her to kneel in the proper manner, legs crossed behind her, so that the physical effects became real.
She lasted five minutes before tearing the hood off and storming away in a huff.
Be safe.
Thursday, 27 September 2007
Bear with me
I'm off to Croatia to do some stuff on behalf of the ambulance service. I'll be back next week, so I'll catch up with emails and comments then.
I've re-written the book. I wasn't happy to just reproduce the blog, so I haven't...it's a completely different format and a lot better, I think. There is a LOT of new and unpublished stuff in there now.
This has cost me time, of course, thus the few and far between postings. Sorry about that. It should all get back to normal after next week, so bear with me.
Xf
I've re-written the book. I wasn't happy to just reproduce the blog, so I haven't...it's a completely different format and a lot better, I think. There is a LOT of new and unpublished stuff in there now.
This has cost me time, of course, thus the few and far between postings. Sorry about that. It should all get back to normal after next week, so bear with me.
Xf
Wednesday, 26 September 2007
The first cut...
Twelve emergency calls and one running call; three assisted-only, one no trace and the rest went to hospital by ambulance.
A thirty year-old woman who ‘feels like she may have a fit’ was my first call of this long night shift. She was in a public place and it took me more than ten minutes to locate her because, even though I walked right past her, she failed to signal her whereabouts. By the time I did get to her, she was feeling better. The cycle responder had also arrived and he waited with me in case the lady decided she was unwell again.
She has a history of epilepsy and she suddenly felt dizzy.
‘My feet go strange when I know I’m going to have a fit’, she told me.
‘Ok’, I said, ‘just let me know if they start to feel strange and we’ll deal with it’.
Luckily for all concerned her feet decided not to misbehave and she was given ten minutes in the back of an ambulance to recover. By this time her boyfriend, with the two-tone hair (I think I mentioned a split personality) turned up and rescued her.
Straight after that I was winging my way to Soho for a 30 year-old female ‘choking on chewing gum’. These calls are almost always not as given. Choking to many people means they are having trouble swallowing, or they have a lump in their throat or they can’t get enough food in and it’s stuck in their mouths - that sort of thing. I’ve only ever been to a couple of genuine choking calls where I’ve had to intervene to save a life.
I stopped outside the alley leading to the address and as I got out of the car I bumped into one of our frequent flyers – our suspected hoax caller and general time waster.
‘I didn’t call you this time, boss’, he shouted.
I was reassured.
The flat was one of three in a tiny building in the middle of the alley and the minute I stepped inside I realised I was in a brothel. There were an awful lot of ‘beautiful and glamorous models’ being advertised. I was led up to the third floor just as one of the employees of the establishment brought in a customer. They went to the second floor.
In the front room there were a couple of women, one of whom was sitting on the sofa. They all looked tired and worn. Haggard is the word I’m fishing for. There was nothing beautiful or glamorous about any of them. Someone should point out the Trade’s Description Act or Advertising Standards or something.
‘I’m alright now. I don’t need to go to hospital’, said the sitting prostitute with a hoarse voice.
‘What happened?’ I asked.
‘I was chewing gum and it got stuck at the back of my throat. I’ve managed to cough it out, so I’m alright’.
‘I’ll have a look at your throat before I go then, if that’s okay with you’.
See? Gentleman to the end, that’s me.
I asked her to open her mouth and I had a look down her throat with my little torch (please, no crude puns or jokes at this juncture). It was red and painful looking, as I would expect but there was an additional medical problem that I didn’t mention because I thought it would be bad mannered of me and would probably result in my rapid and violent expulsion from the place. She had the worst case of thrush I had seen for years.
As I left I saw that a bedroom had been prepared for the next client. A grotty sheet and blanket with an incontinence pad laid out on it. My mind shuddered at the thought of it. Out I went, back into the Soho night.
A fall down concrete steps outside a church took me to the west. A 62 year-old man had tripped and toppled over on the top step as he left with his congregational friends. When I arrived a crew were on scene and they were working over him while a crowd of around thirty people mingled and jostled around them. He was lying conscious on the ground, with a head injury that was producing a lot of blood. The crew had quickly dealt with this and I assisted them with the immobilisation and lifting of the patient.
In the ambulance and on close examination, I could see that he also had a bad knee injury – it looked dislocated. I popped a needle in and asked him if he wanted pain relief. He refused at that point but my cannula left the option open if he changed his mind.
Then a 49 year-old diabetic with chest pain. When I checked his BM, it read 37.2 – that’s a wee bit high. His meter ‘wasn’t working’, according to the patient but when I checked it the machine was fine. I think he had been testing his blood glucose, saw the word ‘Hi’ on the screen and decide it was a fault of some kind. He went to hospital for his own good.
A serious RTC next, involving a 30 year-old motorcyclist and a car. I arrived to find the police just getting on scene, so I went straight to the first (and only) casualty I could see – the motorcyclist, who was lying on the road. I got the police to assist me while I kept him still because he was wriggling a bit and complaining loudly about pain.
I had been asked to report and I told my Control that I only needed one ambulance and that no further resources were required but when the crew arrived and I was telling them about my patient on the ground, a police officer walked another seemingly injured person from the car. I had completely missed that possibility because the cops had told me nothing about another person; I had assumed the driver was fine.
‘Is he alright?’ I shouted.
‘He’s got a bit of a sore neck’, the officer shouted back as he walked the man to the pavement.
‘Keep him still. Don’t move him at all until another crew gets here’, I told him.
I asked one of the crew with me to get on the radio and request another ambulance. The man on the ground had a chest injury and was having difficulty breathing properly, so he was our priority. A collar was made available for the other man; although he told the police that he didn’t need one.
The other crew arrived and took care of patient number two as I completed immobilising the motorcyclist with the first crew. His complaints about one side of his chest and the breathing problems he was experiencing became more urgent and we suspected he may have a pneumothorax, so he had to get to hospital fast.
While the crew were getting ready to take him to hospital, I asked the police officers how the accident had happened. They told me that an eye witness, himself a motorcyclist, said the injured biker had shot through the red lights at about 70mph, colliding with the side of the car, which then dragged him underneath at the back. The patient’s punctured lung could have been caused when he held his breath as he hit the car or the car itself had crushed his chest momentarily when he was dragged under. Either way, the mechanisms were significant.
I escorted the ambulance to hospital and as we made progress through the city, found the way blocked completely by one of those damned ‘road closed’ signs that have been popping up without warning as they dig up more and more roads to repair and replace water pipes. It wasn’t funny at the time and luckily we weren’t conveying a patient whose chest had just been decompressed because the delay could have killed him. Members of the public saw the dilemma and moved the cones away for us. The road had been prepared for digging but hadn’t yet been demolished, so we weaved our way through to the other side on an uneven, bumpy surface. The alternative was a long diversion.
The patient arrived in a stable condition and was taken straight into Resus.
A call for a 30 year-old female ‘drunk, dropped on head’ had me cruelly finishing the sentence ‘as a baby' as I made my way to the scene. She turned out to be a vomiting female who had fallen from her friend’s shoulders as they mucked about. She was fine but she was taken to hospital because she had initially been unconscious, according to her mates. More than likely fast asleep.
Another drunk, this one 21 years old, was said to be ‘fitting’ outside a pub. He was slumped in the corner, surrounded by the door staff who were obviously annoyed at his presence. He was drunk and looked younger than his age. No ambulances were available for me and I had waited with him for more than fifteen minutes before I decided to take him to hospital myself but he refused. He hadn’t fitted and wasn’t epileptic; he was just very drunk.
The door staff said they would get him a taxi to take him home and the young man agreed. I said I would stick around until they got him into a cab but as I sat in the car and watched them I saw that they were trying to get one of the local (and illegal) mini-cab drivers to take him. That wouldn’t be good. These guys would rip him off.
I got out of the car and stopped them, telling them that I would take him to hospital where it was safer for him. I reminded them and myself about my duty of care. The young man, despite his protestations about going to hospital, was vulnerable.
As I set off with him in the back, I was asked to help someone just around the corner who had a badly cut hand. Apparently he had been waiting for an ambulance for 30 minutes. I called it in and went round to have a look – my drunken friend was in the back moaning about his life.
I stopped outside a pub and a man was brought out with a large kitchen towel over his hand. He had fallen onto a glass, which had shattered and cut into his hand, across the fleshy part of the palm under the thumb. I unwrapped the crimson-soaked rag and a jet of blood shot passed me. He had a serious arterial bleed. He looked quite pale. I applied two dressings, one on the other because the first wasn’t stemming the flow. I put pressure on his radial artery for a minute and that seemed to help bring things under control. I was standing with him in the middle of a crowd of drinkers in Soho. There were no ambulances free to deal with this, so I called it in and told Control that I was going to take both patients to hospital. It would take me no more than three minutes to get there, as opposed to waiting another ten minutes or more for an ambulance.
I rushed him to hospital and my drunken friend continued to moan about his life. My bleeding patient’s wound was under control and his arm was elevated in a sling. He was stable and less ‘shocked’ looking than before. I got both of them to A &E in a few minutes. The bleeding man was taken into Resus and the drunken boy was taken to the waiting room, where he promptly fell asleep.
I had no break tonight and my next call was for a female ‘unconscious ? cause’. The location was a police station and I walked into the custody area expecting to be taken through to the cells but they knew nothing about the call. I called my Control and they said that it had come from someone who had seen the woman collapse outside the police station, so an officer came out with me to investigate. I certainly hadn’t seen anyone on the ground when I came in and nobody tried to attract my attention.
There was a small group of people milling about just up the road from the station and I suggested that they might have something to do with it. One of them was holding a girl who looked emotional. When we approached and asked them if they had called, the woman who was holding the girl said she had and that she was a nurse. This was a strange situation. She knew I was there but she ignored me completely, even though she had made the call for an ambulance in the first place. I went to check on the girl who had supposedly collapsed while the police officer spoke to the nurse, who was being very obnoxious.
‘Are you alright?’ I asked.
‘Yeah. I don’t need you’, she replied but she was a bit defensive, almost as if my presence offended her in some way. She wouldn’t make proper eye contact and I thought her behaviour was suspicious.
‘Did you collapse on the road?’ I asked.
‘No. That wasn’t me. That was someone else’.
‘Who?’
‘My friend but she got a taxi home. She’s alright.’
She was lying to me and I knew it. She didn’t want to tell me or the police officer anything. The nurse (if indeed she was a nurse) was still being a pain in the rear and the others turned out to be innocent passers-by who had helped. One of the men in the group took me aside and told me that the girl had been punched and knocked down by her boyfriend. This had been witnessed by the nurse who then called an ambulance. The young girl didn’t want the police involved but that had happened coincidentally because the location had been given as inside the police station.
The story made me very angry. This stupid little girl was wasting everyone’s time and had no apology or excuse to offer. To her, we were simply working and getting paid and were nothing more than an interruption to her life. If she wanted to let her boyfriend punch her lights out, fine, but women like her give the abuse a free licence I think.
I left them to it and the police officer went back to work just as fed up as me.
Another police station call, this time inside, for a 24 year-old male with a head injury who was ‘in and out of consciousness’. He had a small cut to his head but the police didn’t want to take a chance because he wasn’t responding to them. I gave him oxygen and played along with him until he decided to end the game and wake up. The crew arrived and he woke up even more when they lifted him to his feet and made him walk out to the ambulance. The guy just wanted a more comfortable bed to sleep in for the night.
A young man with a minor cut to his chin approached my car as I stopped to do my paperwork at The Haymarket. He had been assaulted and was waiting for an ambulance but on a night like this, he had little hope of getting one soon. I examined his injury, assured him that it was very minor and cancelled the ambulance. He was happy to go home with his mate after that.
A huge Russian, found asleep (drunk) under the seats in a bus next. He was firmly wedged between two rows of seats. I have no idea how he got there. He must have slid off like melting ice cream and slithered underneath as he dozed. I shook his shoulder, pinched it, thumped his back and did everything in my book of tricks for awakening the dead but he refused to budge. He shouted at me, threw his fists at me and was generally unpleasant, so I asked the police to assist.
They dragged him off the bus and stood him against a wall. He continued to sleep – standing up. I cancelled the ambulance and waited until I knew I could go. I asked him if he needed an ambulance but he didn’t reply. I pointed to the street and said ‘go home’. He seemed to understand and toddled off but he got no further than a few steps before he stopped and went back to sleep. He was still standing up. With the help of the police, I sat him down on a step and left him to sleep it off.
My last call was to a vomiting female who was slumped in the seat of a bus. I woke her up and spoke to her. During the conversation I found out that she had learning difficulties. She was also drunk and miles away from home. She had taken the wring bus.
‘Do you have psychiatric problems?’ I asked
She lifted her hand up and waved it in a ‘so-so’ fashion.
‘Are you a diabetic?’
‘I think I might be.’ She said as she dribbled saliva from her mouth as if she had no control.
Her BM was normal, as were her other signs. The crew arrived and as we took her to the ambulance I tried to persuade her to use her own two feet, rather than us lifting her from the bus.
‘You’re a grown up. You can walk for yourself’ I suggested.
She gave me an odd look and said ‘I’m only 22’. Then she grinned and said ‘How did I get all the way down here?’
‘The wrong bus’ I said.
Then with an even cheekier smile, she said ‘Do you have a cigarette?’
Be safe.
A thirty year-old woman who ‘feels like she may have a fit’ was my first call of this long night shift. She was in a public place and it took me more than ten minutes to locate her because, even though I walked right past her, she failed to signal her whereabouts. By the time I did get to her, she was feeling better. The cycle responder had also arrived and he waited with me in case the lady decided she was unwell again.
She has a history of epilepsy and she suddenly felt dizzy.
‘My feet go strange when I know I’m going to have a fit’, she told me.
‘Ok’, I said, ‘just let me know if they start to feel strange and we’ll deal with it’.
Luckily for all concerned her feet decided not to misbehave and she was given ten minutes in the back of an ambulance to recover. By this time her boyfriend, with the two-tone hair (I think I mentioned a split personality) turned up and rescued her.
Straight after that I was winging my way to Soho for a 30 year-old female ‘choking on chewing gum’. These calls are almost always not as given. Choking to many people means they are having trouble swallowing, or they have a lump in their throat or they can’t get enough food in and it’s stuck in their mouths - that sort of thing. I’ve only ever been to a couple of genuine choking calls where I’ve had to intervene to save a life.
I stopped outside the alley leading to the address and as I got out of the car I bumped into one of our frequent flyers – our suspected hoax caller and general time waster.
‘I didn’t call you this time, boss’, he shouted.
I was reassured.
The flat was one of three in a tiny building in the middle of the alley and the minute I stepped inside I realised I was in a brothel. There were an awful lot of ‘beautiful and glamorous models’ being advertised. I was led up to the third floor just as one of the employees of the establishment brought in a customer. They went to the second floor.
In the front room there were a couple of women, one of whom was sitting on the sofa. They all looked tired and worn. Haggard is the word I’m fishing for. There was nothing beautiful or glamorous about any of them. Someone should point out the Trade’s Description Act or Advertising Standards or something.
‘I’m alright now. I don’t need to go to hospital’, said the sitting prostitute with a hoarse voice.
‘What happened?’ I asked.
‘I was chewing gum and it got stuck at the back of my throat. I’ve managed to cough it out, so I’m alright’.
‘I’ll have a look at your throat before I go then, if that’s okay with you’.
See? Gentleman to the end, that’s me.
I asked her to open her mouth and I had a look down her throat with my little torch (please, no crude puns or jokes at this juncture). It was red and painful looking, as I would expect but there was an additional medical problem that I didn’t mention because I thought it would be bad mannered of me and would probably result in my rapid and violent expulsion from the place. She had the worst case of thrush I had seen for years.
As I left I saw that a bedroom had been prepared for the next client. A grotty sheet and blanket with an incontinence pad laid out on it. My mind shuddered at the thought of it. Out I went, back into the Soho night.
A fall down concrete steps outside a church took me to the west. A 62 year-old man had tripped and toppled over on the top step as he left with his congregational friends. When I arrived a crew were on scene and they were working over him while a crowd of around thirty people mingled and jostled around them. He was lying conscious on the ground, with a head injury that was producing a lot of blood. The crew had quickly dealt with this and I assisted them with the immobilisation and lifting of the patient.
In the ambulance and on close examination, I could see that he also had a bad knee injury – it looked dislocated. I popped a needle in and asked him if he wanted pain relief. He refused at that point but my cannula left the option open if he changed his mind.
Then a 49 year-old diabetic with chest pain. When I checked his BM, it read 37.2 – that’s a wee bit high. His meter ‘wasn’t working’, according to the patient but when I checked it the machine was fine. I think he had been testing his blood glucose, saw the word ‘Hi’ on the screen and decide it was a fault of some kind. He went to hospital for his own good.
A serious RTC next, involving a 30 year-old motorcyclist and a car. I arrived to find the police just getting on scene, so I went straight to the first (and only) casualty I could see – the motorcyclist, who was lying on the road. I got the police to assist me while I kept him still because he was wriggling a bit and complaining loudly about pain.
I had been asked to report and I told my Control that I only needed one ambulance and that no further resources were required but when the crew arrived and I was telling them about my patient on the ground, a police officer walked another seemingly injured person from the car. I had completely missed that possibility because the cops had told me nothing about another person; I had assumed the driver was fine.
‘Is he alright?’ I shouted.
‘He’s got a bit of a sore neck’, the officer shouted back as he walked the man to the pavement.
‘Keep him still. Don’t move him at all until another crew gets here’, I told him.
I asked one of the crew with me to get on the radio and request another ambulance. The man on the ground had a chest injury and was having difficulty breathing properly, so he was our priority. A collar was made available for the other man; although he told the police that he didn’t need one.
The other crew arrived and took care of patient number two as I completed immobilising the motorcyclist with the first crew. His complaints about one side of his chest and the breathing problems he was experiencing became more urgent and we suspected he may have a pneumothorax, so he had to get to hospital fast.
While the crew were getting ready to take him to hospital, I asked the police officers how the accident had happened. They told me that an eye witness, himself a motorcyclist, said the injured biker had shot through the red lights at about 70mph, colliding with the side of the car, which then dragged him underneath at the back. The patient’s punctured lung could have been caused when he held his breath as he hit the car or the car itself had crushed his chest momentarily when he was dragged under. Either way, the mechanisms were significant.
I escorted the ambulance to hospital and as we made progress through the city, found the way blocked completely by one of those damned ‘road closed’ signs that have been popping up without warning as they dig up more and more roads to repair and replace water pipes. It wasn’t funny at the time and luckily we weren’t conveying a patient whose chest had just been decompressed because the delay could have killed him. Members of the public saw the dilemma and moved the cones away for us. The road had been prepared for digging but hadn’t yet been demolished, so we weaved our way through to the other side on an uneven, bumpy surface. The alternative was a long diversion.
The patient arrived in a stable condition and was taken straight into Resus.
A call for a 30 year-old female ‘drunk, dropped on head’ had me cruelly finishing the sentence ‘as a baby' as I made my way to the scene. She turned out to be a vomiting female who had fallen from her friend’s shoulders as they mucked about. She was fine but she was taken to hospital because she had initially been unconscious, according to her mates. More than likely fast asleep.
Another drunk, this one 21 years old, was said to be ‘fitting’ outside a pub. He was slumped in the corner, surrounded by the door staff who were obviously annoyed at his presence. He was drunk and looked younger than his age. No ambulances were available for me and I had waited with him for more than fifteen minutes before I decided to take him to hospital myself but he refused. He hadn’t fitted and wasn’t epileptic; he was just very drunk.
The door staff said they would get him a taxi to take him home and the young man agreed. I said I would stick around until they got him into a cab but as I sat in the car and watched them I saw that they were trying to get one of the local (and illegal) mini-cab drivers to take him. That wouldn’t be good. These guys would rip him off.
I got out of the car and stopped them, telling them that I would take him to hospital where it was safer for him. I reminded them and myself about my duty of care. The young man, despite his protestations about going to hospital, was vulnerable.
As I set off with him in the back, I was asked to help someone just around the corner who had a badly cut hand. Apparently he had been waiting for an ambulance for 30 minutes. I called it in and went round to have a look – my drunken friend was in the back moaning about his life.
I stopped outside a pub and a man was brought out with a large kitchen towel over his hand. He had fallen onto a glass, which had shattered and cut into his hand, across the fleshy part of the palm under the thumb. I unwrapped the crimson-soaked rag and a jet of blood shot passed me. He had a serious arterial bleed. He looked quite pale. I applied two dressings, one on the other because the first wasn’t stemming the flow. I put pressure on his radial artery for a minute and that seemed to help bring things under control. I was standing with him in the middle of a crowd of drinkers in Soho. There were no ambulances free to deal with this, so I called it in and told Control that I was going to take both patients to hospital. It would take me no more than three minutes to get there, as opposed to waiting another ten minutes or more for an ambulance.
I rushed him to hospital and my drunken friend continued to moan about his life. My bleeding patient’s wound was under control and his arm was elevated in a sling. He was stable and less ‘shocked’ looking than before. I got both of them to A &E in a few minutes. The bleeding man was taken into Resus and the drunken boy was taken to the waiting room, where he promptly fell asleep.
I had no break tonight and my next call was for a female ‘unconscious ? cause’. The location was a police station and I walked into the custody area expecting to be taken through to the cells but they knew nothing about the call. I called my Control and they said that it had come from someone who had seen the woman collapse outside the police station, so an officer came out with me to investigate. I certainly hadn’t seen anyone on the ground when I came in and nobody tried to attract my attention.
There was a small group of people milling about just up the road from the station and I suggested that they might have something to do with it. One of them was holding a girl who looked emotional. When we approached and asked them if they had called, the woman who was holding the girl said she had and that she was a nurse. This was a strange situation. She knew I was there but she ignored me completely, even though she had made the call for an ambulance in the first place. I went to check on the girl who had supposedly collapsed while the police officer spoke to the nurse, who was being very obnoxious.
‘Are you alright?’ I asked.
‘Yeah. I don’t need you’, she replied but she was a bit defensive, almost as if my presence offended her in some way. She wouldn’t make proper eye contact and I thought her behaviour was suspicious.
‘Did you collapse on the road?’ I asked.
‘No. That wasn’t me. That was someone else’.
‘Who?’
‘My friend but she got a taxi home. She’s alright.’
She was lying to me and I knew it. She didn’t want to tell me or the police officer anything. The nurse (if indeed she was a nurse) was still being a pain in the rear and the others turned out to be innocent passers-by who had helped. One of the men in the group took me aside and told me that the girl had been punched and knocked down by her boyfriend. This had been witnessed by the nurse who then called an ambulance. The young girl didn’t want the police involved but that had happened coincidentally because the location had been given as inside the police station.
The story made me very angry. This stupid little girl was wasting everyone’s time and had no apology or excuse to offer. To her, we were simply working and getting paid and were nothing more than an interruption to her life. If she wanted to let her boyfriend punch her lights out, fine, but women like her give the abuse a free licence I think.
I left them to it and the police officer went back to work just as fed up as me.
Another police station call, this time inside, for a 24 year-old male with a head injury who was ‘in and out of consciousness’. He had a small cut to his head but the police didn’t want to take a chance because he wasn’t responding to them. I gave him oxygen and played along with him until he decided to end the game and wake up. The crew arrived and he woke up even more when they lifted him to his feet and made him walk out to the ambulance. The guy just wanted a more comfortable bed to sleep in for the night.
A young man with a minor cut to his chin approached my car as I stopped to do my paperwork at The Haymarket. He had been assaulted and was waiting for an ambulance but on a night like this, he had little hope of getting one soon. I examined his injury, assured him that it was very minor and cancelled the ambulance. He was happy to go home with his mate after that.
A huge Russian, found asleep (drunk) under the seats in a bus next. He was firmly wedged between two rows of seats. I have no idea how he got there. He must have slid off like melting ice cream and slithered underneath as he dozed. I shook his shoulder, pinched it, thumped his back and did everything in my book of tricks for awakening the dead but he refused to budge. He shouted at me, threw his fists at me and was generally unpleasant, so I asked the police to assist.
They dragged him off the bus and stood him against a wall. He continued to sleep – standing up. I cancelled the ambulance and waited until I knew I could go. I asked him if he needed an ambulance but he didn’t reply. I pointed to the street and said ‘go home’. He seemed to understand and toddled off but he got no further than a few steps before he stopped and went back to sleep. He was still standing up. With the help of the police, I sat him down on a step and left him to sleep it off.
My last call was to a vomiting female who was slumped in the seat of a bus. I woke her up and spoke to her. During the conversation I found out that she had learning difficulties. She was also drunk and miles away from home. She had taken the wring bus.
‘Do you have psychiatric problems?’ I asked
She lifted her hand up and waved it in a ‘so-so’ fashion.
‘Are you a diabetic?’
‘I think I might be.’ She said as she dribbled saliva from her mouth as if she had no control.
Her BM was normal, as were her other signs. The crew arrived and as we took her to the ambulance I tried to persuade her to use her own two feet, rather than us lifting her from the bus.
‘You’re a grown up. You can walk for yourself’ I suggested.
She gave me an odd look and said ‘I’m only 22’. Then she grinned and said ‘How did I get all the way down here?’
‘The wrong bus’ I said.
Then with an even cheekier smile, she said ‘Do you have a cigarette?’
Be safe.
Thursday, 20 September 2007
Bad manners
Six emergencies. One cancellation; the rest went by ambulance.
Sometimes I will go to a call and the family will behave strangely towards me, almost as if I am the enemy. I know that this is simply a different way of reacting to stress, especially when worried about a loved one but it can be unnerving and a little annoying when you are asking questions and getting nothing back.
My first call was to a '67 year-old male ?CVA'. He had a history of stroke in the past and now he stood in his kitchen looking confused and very flushed about the face, with his daughter and son-in-law . I asked him a few simple questions about how he felt and his answer was always the same.
‘I’m alright now.’ He’d say.
I checked his blood pressure and found it to be very high. I asked him what had happened and he wasn’t clear at all. I knew I was looking at a possible CVA but I wanted something a bit more conclusive from the history, so I asked the daughter.
She looked at me as if I was a gate-crasher at her birthday party. I almost felt there were issues between her and her father that were being left unsaid. It’s difficult to do the job properly with obstruction and that’s how it felt now. She wouldn’t give me a direct answer about anything, except to tell me that he was a drinker. She looked almost disgusted with him but at the same time worried. Maybe it was both and I was taking it too personally.
I continued my obs and questioning until the crew arrived. Evetually we were told that he had collapsed in the garden and called his daughter, telling her he was in trouble. He stood in his kitchen denying anything was wrong now, however.
Then I realised that she was so concerned and angry that I was just a necessary shadow in the world she currently inhabited. She didn’t like me or my colleagues being there because we reminded her of an issue she had obviously been avoiding for years. I was currently a see-through person and could only be answered if I asked loud enough. I was never to be spoken to voluntarily.
The man had a high BP, unequal pupils and was flushed. Regardless of what he said, he was going to hospital.
A 42 year-old woman with itchy skin and stinging urine walked out to meet the ambulance crew when we arrived at the same time on scene and I wasn’t required.
Then a vulnerable lady who had an epileptic fit and banged her head at home. She was nervous and tearful about me being there. She felt guilty because she didn’t call us, someone else did. It took me a while to convince her to go to hospital because she believed the staff at her usual hospital didn’t like her. I arranged to have her taken to an alternative hospital and she relented.
Luckily my next call wasn’t as serious as it could have been; my navigation system thought it would be funny to send me the longest way around to a 74 year-old male with DIB. By the time I reached the address, a crew was on scene and I wasn’t required.
A 29 year-old female who was ‘shivering and ? fitting’ needed an ambulance, so I sped to the address a few miles away and leaned on the buzzer. The call description had stated ‘when asked questions, caller said she didn’t know or care because she is drunk’. Now, I wondered if the patient was the caller or someone else had called and was describing themselves as drunk or the patient as drunk. Either way, it didn’t matter because after twenty minutes of leaning on the buzzer, chatting to the crew who had now arrived, banging on the entry door to the block of flats and requesting a ‘ring back’ to find out what was going on, the patient decided that an ambulance would be inconvenient.
‘An ambulance crew is standing outside the main door to your building, can you let them in please?’, Control had asked
‘Na, don’t need one now.’ Said the caller and promptly hung up.
I should have been furious but I was strangely calm – not like me at all.
Anyway, the shift ended with a call to a ‘diabetic, coughing’. I would have suggested no relationship between one and the other but who am I to argue?
I got on scene at the same time as the crew and went inside the building to the world’s smallest bedsit. As soon as we stepped over the threshold we were showered with a viral-filled mist from the man’s cough. He had to be asked three times to cover his mouth. Why in God’s name do people do this to us? If you have a cough, cover your mouth and don’t spread it to me – I don’t want it. Honestly, I don’t. It takes me ages to get over a cough. I still have the residue of a cough from the beginning of the year.
I could see that I wasn’t needed so I took off before I got any more of his unhealthy welcome. One day, I'll go home with a dose of bird flu. That's not even funny, really...
Be safe.
Sometimes I will go to a call and the family will behave strangely towards me, almost as if I am the enemy. I know that this is simply a different way of reacting to stress, especially when worried about a loved one but it can be unnerving and a little annoying when you are asking questions and getting nothing back.
My first call was to a '67 year-old male ?CVA'. He had a history of stroke in the past and now he stood in his kitchen looking confused and very flushed about the face, with his daughter and son-in-law . I asked him a few simple questions about how he felt and his answer was always the same.
‘I’m alright now.’ He’d say.
I checked his blood pressure and found it to be very high. I asked him what had happened and he wasn’t clear at all. I knew I was looking at a possible CVA but I wanted something a bit more conclusive from the history, so I asked the daughter.
She looked at me as if I was a gate-crasher at her birthday party. I almost felt there were issues between her and her father that were being left unsaid. It’s difficult to do the job properly with obstruction and that’s how it felt now. She wouldn’t give me a direct answer about anything, except to tell me that he was a drinker. She looked almost disgusted with him but at the same time worried. Maybe it was both and I was taking it too personally.
I continued my obs and questioning until the crew arrived. Evetually we were told that he had collapsed in the garden and called his daughter, telling her he was in trouble. He stood in his kitchen denying anything was wrong now, however.
Then I realised that she was so concerned and angry that I was just a necessary shadow in the world she currently inhabited. She didn’t like me or my colleagues being there because we reminded her of an issue she had obviously been avoiding for years. I was currently a see-through person and could only be answered if I asked loud enough. I was never to be spoken to voluntarily.
The man had a high BP, unequal pupils and was flushed. Regardless of what he said, he was going to hospital.
A 42 year-old woman with itchy skin and stinging urine walked out to meet the ambulance crew when we arrived at the same time on scene and I wasn’t required.
Then a vulnerable lady who had an epileptic fit and banged her head at home. She was nervous and tearful about me being there. She felt guilty because she didn’t call us, someone else did. It took me a while to convince her to go to hospital because she believed the staff at her usual hospital didn’t like her. I arranged to have her taken to an alternative hospital and she relented.
Luckily my next call wasn’t as serious as it could have been; my navigation system thought it would be funny to send me the longest way around to a 74 year-old male with DIB. By the time I reached the address, a crew was on scene and I wasn’t required.
A 29 year-old female who was ‘shivering and ? fitting’ needed an ambulance, so I sped to the address a few miles away and leaned on the buzzer. The call description had stated ‘when asked questions, caller said she didn’t know or care because she is drunk’. Now, I wondered if the patient was the caller or someone else had called and was describing themselves as drunk or the patient as drunk. Either way, it didn’t matter because after twenty minutes of leaning on the buzzer, chatting to the crew who had now arrived, banging on the entry door to the block of flats and requesting a ‘ring back’ to find out what was going on, the patient decided that an ambulance would be inconvenient.
‘An ambulance crew is standing outside the main door to your building, can you let them in please?’, Control had asked
‘Na, don’t need one now.’ Said the caller and promptly hung up.
I should have been furious but I was strangely calm – not like me at all.
Anyway, the shift ended with a call to a ‘diabetic, coughing’. I would have suggested no relationship between one and the other but who am I to argue?
I got on scene at the same time as the crew and went inside the building to the world’s smallest bedsit. As soon as we stepped over the threshold we were showered with a viral-filled mist from the man’s cough. He had to be asked three times to cover his mouth. Why in God’s name do people do this to us? If you have a cough, cover your mouth and don’t spread it to me – I don’t want it. Honestly, I don’t. It takes me ages to get over a cough. I still have the residue of a cough from the beginning of the year.
I could see that I wasn’t needed so I took off before I got any more of his unhealthy welcome. One day, I'll go home with a dose of bird flu. That's not even funny, really...
Be safe.
Tuesday, 18 September 2007
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.
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.
Saturday, 15 September 2007
I'm so lazy
Yep. Haven't been able to post a damned thing, even though I have enough of it written down.
I have been re-structuring the book and I only have a few weeks left before it goes to press so it's got to be right. Lots of new stuff going in there...stuff I've never blogged, so it should appeal to regulars and new readers alike.
I'll be off next week so should be able to post every day for you.
My apologies to those of you that I have agreed to publish as guest writers. I will create a link to a separate place for that. If you want to write something as a guest, feel free but here are the rules:
1. NO profanity at all.
2. It must be well written and as grammatically correct as possible...please.
3. No personal, racist, sexist or other 'ist stuff if you don't mind.
4. Humour. If you have it.
Thanks
Xf
I have been re-structuring the book and I only have a few weeks left before it goes to press so it's got to be right. Lots of new stuff going in there...stuff I've never blogged, so it should appeal to regulars and new readers alike.
I'll be off next week so should be able to post every day for you.
My apologies to those of you that I have agreed to publish as guest writers. I will create a link to a separate place for that. If you want to write something as a guest, feel free but here are the rules:
1. NO profanity at all.
2. It must be well written and as grammatically correct as possible...please.
3. No personal, racist, sexist or other 'ist stuff if you don't mind.
4. Humour. If you have it.
Thanks
Xf
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