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Chapter 170 – Wheelchair (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 171 – More of the (Shameful) Usual (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 172 – Violence (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 173 – Increasing Calls (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 174 – Mr Grumpy (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 175 – Yellow Card (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 176 – Fat Bastard (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 177 – On the Failings of My Stab Vest (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 178 – Broken Finger (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 179 – Returnee (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 180 – Another Good Job (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 181 – Infested (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 182 – Small Annoyances (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 183 – Friday (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 184 – The Same Old Story (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 185 – Yellow (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 186 – Hive Mind (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 187 – From Sun to Scum (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 188 – More Real Work (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 189 – More Strokes (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 190 – Midwife to Tragedy (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 191 – Rat Poison (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 192 – Filth (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 193 – Why I Like Old Folk (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 194 – Cordoned Off (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 195 – Invisible Dogs (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 196 – Why the Government Hates Us (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 197 – Thanks to a Bystander (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 198 – Smoky (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 199 – How to Fix the Ambulance Service (Part One) (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 200 – HOW to Fix the Ambulance Service (Part Two) (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 201 – Hidden Abuse? (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 202 – The Term of the Day (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 203 – A Good GP (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 204 – Twit One and Twit Two (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 205 – Two Amusing Things (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 206 – Deceased (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 207 – Fuming (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 208 – Night Swimming (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 209 – A Sheet of A4 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 210 – Tough as Old Boots (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 211 – Strength (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 212 – Lexicon of the Ambulance Service (or What ‘Punter’ Means) (#litres_trial_promo)
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Also by the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
Prologue: A Good Job (#ulink_c67e21e4-d531-5c51-96a8-36ed153926d2)
Two a.m. and we are standing on the side of the road waiting for the fire service to take the top off the car in front of us. The wind whistles across the flats making us all shiver despite our fleeces and our jackets.
Two cars have been involved in a high-speed road traffic accident (RTA), the parked car that was hit has been shunted forward leaving ten-yard-long skid marks. The cars aren’t too damaged but the seats inside have shifted around, trapping the occupants.
There are seven ambulances here, four fire trucks, half a dozen police and three ambulance officers with clipboards. There are eight patients, all but one need cutting from the cars and collaring and boarding. The only woman involved is ‘walking wounded’.
The reason that it is taking so long for our car to get its lid removed by the fire service is because of the position of one of the patients inside. He looks rather unwell and the crew looking after him really would like to get to him sooner rather than later.
Our ambulance was fourth on scene. When I arrived I spoke to a stationmate to see what he wanted us to do, who he wanted us to look after. Normally he is the station clown, now he’s all serious and professional, no fake beards or silly glasses.
Everyone gets checked over, all the ambulance crews are calm, it’s serious but it doesn’t look like anyone is about to die; more a case of being careful moving the patients ‘just in case’.
The roof comes off the car and with the help of another crew and some firefighters we get our patient out safely and strapped to a board. He is freezing cold. He is not wearing warm clothing so the delay in getting him out and the terrible weather have us concerned for his body temperature.
We are in a new ambulance so the heater works. Turning it up to full we are soon sweating as we assess the patient and prepare for transport.
I get on the radio to pre-alert the hospital. For some reason the radio isn’t working properly and our Control can’t hear me, so I use my phone instead. Thankfully it works.
I travel a mile over speed-bumps to get to the hospital; there is no other route and every bump makes me aware of my patient in the back being jostled around. It’s not the first time that I curse the council.
After all our patients are safe at the hospital we stand outside and laugh and joke. We reconstruct the accident, we talk about the more injured ones and we mock the driving skills of one of the officers.
We occasionally help people.
It’s a good job sometimes.
Introduction (#ulink_b978fa46-02bc-5882-a7aa-dbd3d12da9d4)
I’m not special. All I am is one of the faceless people who work for an ambulance service. If you are lucky you’ll never meet me in a professional capacity. Most of the time you won’t even think about us; perhaps only occasionally sparing a thought for our work when an ambulance whizzes past you on the street, lights flashing and sirens sounding.
This book is a series of snapshots from the life of one ambulance worker. For the past few years I have been writing about ambulance work on the internet, regularly updating my website. From around the world people have come to read, and comment on, the sorts of jobs that I go to on a daily basis.
This book is not special—there are no tales of heroics, no exciting derring-do, nothing to compare with what the dramas on TV and film would have us believe. This is what ambulance staff the world over deal with day in and day out.
This is a book that lets you understand some of the situations that ambulance staff encounter every day, some of the pressures, and some of the humour that we use to let off steam.
Every time I talk about a patient in this book that situation has happened for real, to a real person.
Taxi (#ulink_14541dc0-c4c0-5061-a092-5a7d9577ea0b)
The staffing of ambulances at the moment is…to put it bluntly…poor.
Working on the fast response unit (FRU—a car that is designed to get to the sickest patients quickly) means that I often get to an emergency call within minutes of it being made. Unfortunately, with so few ambulances on the road, the patient and I are often left staring at each other for long periods of time; in a couple of cases up to an hour.
I was sent to a young man having an asthma attack. It was late at night, and he had been queuing to get into a nightclub when he had started to feel his breathing getting tight, the sign of an asthma attack, so had headed to a taxi office in order to go home. Unfortunatel, his asthma progressed and so an ambulance was called. What he got was me, on my own, in a car.
After dealing with the drunken group of teenage girls that had taken time out of waiting for a cab to start loudly ‘caring’ for my patient, I started my assessment. It was a cold night so I sat the young man in the taxi office and listened to his chest. I could hear a nice loud wheezing from his lungs so I started him on the first dose of our asthma medication. I got his details and checked his vital signs, and waited for the ambulance to turn up.
It takes between five and ten minutes for the asthma medication to finish, and by the end of it there was still no ambulance.
I listened to his chest again, still an audible wheeze, so I gave him a second dose of the medication. So there he was, sitting in a cab office at three in the morning with a mask over his face, ‘smoke’ pouring from it, and all around us were intoxicated people getting cabs home.
It was not very dignified.
We started chatting, and I was impressed by this polite young man with good manners and common sense. The second medication finished and so we continued to wait, and wait, and wait for the ambulance. I phoned up my Control and asked if there was an ambulance assigned.
‘Sorry EC50, we are still holding calls in that area.’
I was on my own with this patient for the foreseeable future.
Sometimes I can transport a patient myself to hospital, it’s not technically allowed. Actually, we’ve been told that we shouldn’t do it at all, but in some cases I think I’m doing the right thing for the patient. So I will load them into the car (which only has the front passenger seat, the rest of the car is taken up by equipment) and nip into the nearest hospital. Control is often happy for me to do this, as it means one less job that it needs to send a proper ambulance to.
I couldn’t transport this patient, though, because he wanted to go to his local hospital, which would mean driving past two other emergency departments and out of my area. I couldn’t see Control, or my bosses, being too happy with that.
So the patient, at his insistence, got a cab to hospital. The double dose of medicine had cleared his lungs up nicely, but he would probably need some short-term steroid treatment. I rechecked my assessment of him, and was happy that his physical condition was good enough for him to get a cab to hospital. I wasn’t happy, though, that there was no ambulance for this patient who actually warranted one.
As I write this I wonder what would have happened if he hadn’t responded to the medication that I gave him.
Leaving My Job (#ulink_84fb56fb-139e-5e3e-ac0a-3a07bd13c760)
I think I’m going to be leaving my job soon.
I went to a six-month-old baby with possible meningitis. The baby had the right sort of rash (although it was only on the back of the knee and, after checking, nowhere else). It had a temperature, but was one of the happiest, most alert children I’ve ever had the pleasure of meeting. It just didn’t seem as if it had meningitis, and trust me, I’ve seen a fair few children and adults with it so I have a pretty good idea what it looks like.
Then, as in the past, I was left waiting for an ambulance.
For around 45 minutes.
There was no way I was going to be able to transport the patient in my car. It’s just not equipped to carry such a small child. We don’t have baby seats and as the family didn’t have a car they didn’t have one either.
So the family ended up phoning a friend to take them to the hospital. The ambulance turned up just as they were getting into their friend’s car.
All I had going through my head was the potential newspaper headline ‘No Ambulance For Baby Dying Of Killer Bug!’
Later that night I went to a woman who was having an extremely painful miscarriage. There is nothing I can do for that on scene, the patient needs to be in hospital. Thankfully the ambulance wasn’t too far behind me, but if I had been waiting on scene then it would have been a very awkward and distressing wait (again, because of the pain, it would have been impossible to transport her in my car).
More and more I’m looking at my watch as an ambulance fails to arrive. It’s only a matter of time before I have someone die in front of me while waiting for an ambulance.
So, I’m seriously considering leaving the FRU and going back to work on an ambulance. That way I can pick up sick people, and take them to where they need to be: a hospital.
So after the holiday season, I think I’ll be sending a memo up to the office asking to return to my ambulance role.
Zafira (#ulink_0a0a5edd-12e1-56ed-8527-c43c6bf77014)
I’m not perfect.
I arrived at work to find that my FRU car was nowhere to be seen. There was no one on the early shift, so where had my car got to?
The week before a friend of mine had had an accident in the Newham FRU car (in front of a load of police officers, which had given them some amusement I would imagine). So the car that I would normally use was being borrowed by Newham station.
So the plan was for me to get picked up at my station by a station officer, go to Newham, get the keys to the brand-new Vauxhall Zafira, return to my station with the car and start working.
The station officer met me and drove me down to Newham station. He asked me, because I was leaving my secondment on the FRU, if I could write up my thoughts on what was good, bad and what could be improved about it.
