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I told him that I’d be more than happy to point him in the direction of where my thoughts lay.
The brand-new Zafira was parked in the garage at Newham so I hopped behind the wheel and, after some struggling with the new design of handbrake, managed to reverse it out and into the parking area.
Where to the absolute horror of the station officer I drove into another car.
Oops.
Luckily there was no damage to the Zafira (which had less than 600 miles on the clock) and very slight, if any, damage to the other car.
The first accident I had in over 18 months and it was in front of a station officer…
Not a good start to the shift.
My thoughts on the Zafira are these; if you wanted a rapid response vehicle, the Zafira shouldn’t have been chosen. It is too top heavy and wallows like a hippo in thick mud. The acceleration is awful, you hit the pedal and it takes one and a half seconds before the diesel engine gives you any sort of power. It is comfortable to pootle around town in, and the high-up viewing position is quite nice.
But there is no way that it could be considered a ‘Fast’ car.
I think the reason why we have them is because they are able to carry patients, and I imagine that soon FRU drivers will be asked to take the coughs and colds that we see so much of to hospital.
NYE Night (#ulink_2ea4fc7c-1e33-5dbf-963a-d2dc4ff3c316)
New Year’s night was a busy one for the London Ambulance Service. There were 38 stabbings over the course of the night. I spoke to my workmate who was on the FRU that night; he attended four stabbings one after another.
By 5 a.m. there had been in excess of 2000 calls (we normally do a shade under 4000 calls over 24 hours).
On the television one of our top-ranking management people described the night as ‘horrific’, which I would say is a pretty fair assessment.
I am extremely glad I wasn’t working that shift.
Ten Deep Breaths (#ulink_46e6b6d0-4402-5b60-9935-31e9f61cebe4)
The call details appeared on the computer terminal in the FRU:
‘Nineteen-year-old male—Patient has lump on ribs—difficulty in breathing.’
Halfway to the address, a private house, my screen was updated:
‘Patient has taken cocaine.’
I was met at the front door by a young male, stripped to the waist and obviously agitated.
‘Comein, myribsfeelfunny, andmyshoulderbladedon’tfeelright.’
‘Slow down,’ I said, taking his pulse—110, a bit on the high side, but he was bouncing off the walls.
‘My ribs man! They don’t feel right! Have a feel.’ He then started running his hands up and down his chest.
‘Have you fallen over? Been hit? Anything unusual happened?’ I asked.
‘No man—just feel them…FEEL THEM!’
‘Look, you need to calm down,’ I replied. ‘I can’t do anything while you are hopping all over the place.’
He started shouting, ‘FEEL THEM! JUST FUCKIN’ FEEL THEM!’
He turned his back to me, indicating that I should feel his normal-looking ribs.
A sudden wave of anger passed over me—it was all I could do to not punch him in the back. I examined his ribs; they felt perfectly normal to me.
‘There,’ I said, ‘your ribs are fine.’
‘What about my shoulder blades man?’
‘Look, you’ve taken cocaine right? You are feeling paranoid, it’s normal, just try to relax a little.’
‘WHAT…ABOUT…MY…FUCKIN’…SHOULDER BLADES!’
He turned his back on me again. I gritted my teeth and grabbed his shoulder blades. ‘They are fine. Now. Sit. Down.’
He sat down. Then he stood up, then he paced around the kitchen, then he did a few circuits of the sofa, then he sat down again, then he stood up and hopped around a bit. I was getting tired just watching him.
‘Look,’ I said trying to calm him, and me, down, ‘is this the first time you’ve taken cocaine?’
‘No man!’
‘OK, well if you want we can take you to the hospital, get you checked out if you’d like?’
‘NO!’ he shouted. ‘I’m not going to hospital.’
Fine, I thought, not that the hospital will thank me.
‘OK mate, then are you alone in the house?’
‘Nah, my dad’s asleep upstairs.’
‘Well, I’d like to have a chat with him, so he can keep an eye on you.’
‘NO! Get out of my house.’ He started advancing towards me. ‘No hospital, no waking my dad up, just get the fuck out of my house!’
I left the house. While a fight with the patient would have done absolute wonders for my stress levels, it certainly wasn’t worth the hassle, the risk of injury and, most importantly, the paperwork.
But what should I do now? If a patient isn’t transported then we should leave a copy of our patient report form with them. Should I post it through the letterbox? The problem with that was if his father saw the report I’d be breaching patient confidentiality. I guessed that the police wouldn’t be too interested in paying him a visit either. So I left the form sitting in my car—there was little else I could do for him, as he didn’t want help.
I sat in my car, filled out my forms and took a couple of deep breaths. It would be a long Christmas…
Taxi? (#ulink_03c71ebb-32d0-57a7-9646-556c8b85c368)
I’ve had a couple of people send me a story that appeared in the newspapers.
Nursing staff from a Telford hospital have been accused of using an ambulance as a taxi after a night out.
It was claimed some of the nursing staff got into an ambulance outside The Swan in Ironbridge on Sunday.
The ambulance service has found a crew did provide unauthorised transport to staff but said it was not in operation and returning to base at the time.
To be honest this tends to happen a bit with nurses asking if you can give them a lift to the train station and the like. You tell the nurse ‘Hop in the back, we’ll give you a lift—if we get a call you’ll have to hop out again.’ It helps keep relations good between the hospital staff and ourselves. It doesn’t hurt anyone and it definitely doesn’t remove an ambulance from service.
In fact, it can do good. A crew I know was giving a nurse a lift to the train station after her shift finished when they then got a call to a cardiac arrest and the nurse was able to help out. As long as the crew wasn’t refusing calls then I can’t see the harm in it. In London I’d imagine that our Control would love it as it would mean we are out roaming rather than sitting on station, something our management is eager for us to do.
And if I’m going to spend all shift taxiing drunks around, I don’t see why we can’t sometimes help out the poor buggers who work their fingers to the bone looking after those same drunks.
I wonder if the person who complained is the sort who expects an ambulance to turn up seconds after they’ve cut their finger?
Chickenpox (#ulink_1918193a-1e09-53cd-904c-3ccbb1babf93)
I went to two cases of adult chickenpox last night. The hospital says that there was another adult with chickenpox the day before that. It seems like we have a little outbreak here.
As both my patients were Nigerian, I have a sneaky feeling that the big (mainly Nigerian) church in Newham may be where the disease was spread and the timing of the symptoms would support this.
As one of the families had school-age children with the disease, I’m going to guess that a lot of children will be ill over the next few days.
Off the top of my head, I can’t remember if I have been vaccinated against chickenpox—but I do know that I had it twice when I was a child, both times at Christmas.
Rough (#ulink_0edff383-a604-5f56-a104-27f8d8995c80)
It was cold, it was dark and it was raining the sort of thin greasy rain that soaks straight through your clothes. I was making my way to one of the Docklands Light Railway stations for a ‘Male—collapsed, caller not willing to approach patient.’ I’d been to this station in the last week for a hoax call and I wasn’t sure if this was a repeat performance.
At the bottom of the stairs just sheltered from the rain was a young man in his twenties, dirty, dressed in filthy clothes and curled up next to a plastic bag. Standing over him was another man, this one dressed in a suit, looking a bit concerned.
(The London borough of Tower Hamlets has both the richest, and the poorest population in London.)
‘He’s just laying there, not talking,’ the smartly dressed man said. ‘I didn’t really know what to do…’
I let him know that I’d take care of the patient, and that he had done the right thing and could go home.
It was just me and the patient. Given the way he looked it was a reasonable assumption that he was homeless. If he was homeless then there was a reasonable assumption that he was drunk and given that he was in such a public place there was a chance that there was something physically wrong with him.
I attempted to wake him up—he was keeping his eyes closed when I tried to open them, so I knew that he wasn’t really unconscious.
‘Look mate,’ I said, ‘if you don’t open your eyes, I’ll have to check your blood sugar, which means poking a needle into your finger. If you open your eyes then I won’t have to do that.’
No response.
So I checked his blood sugar along with the rest of his vital signs; everything was fine.
I crouched down opposite him.
‘Look, you can open your eyes and talk to me you know—we’ll still take you to hospital. To be honest, I can’t blame you, an A&E waiting room has got to be a pretty good option on a crappy night like this.’
Some commuters walked between us; they didn’t look at us. I looked in his plastic bag; there was a sociology textbook.
‘Sociology? I could never enjoy reading that sort of thing.’
He opened his eyes. ‘’S’ all right.’
Excellent. He was talking to me, which meant that the paranoid voice in the back of my head telling me that he might be seriously ill could shut up. It is something that always worries me—that despite my experience I’d miss something serious on a drunk or homeless guy.
We had a little chat while I was waiting for the ambulance to arrive. He’d been a rough sleeper for two years; he admitted to drinking too much. He seemed a nice enough person.
‘Bloody freezing tonight,’ I said to him. ‘I reckon the hospital has got to be a fair bit warmer and drier tonight.’
‘I don’t want to go to hospital,’ he said back to me.
I was surprised. ‘Are you sure mate? It’s no skin off my nose if we take you in.’
‘Yeah, I’m sure. I’ve just had too much to drink.’ He mentioned a hostel nearby. ‘Which way is it from here?’
I pointed him in the direction of the hostel and he wandered off down the road.
I’ve got to admit that I felt sorry for him. I didn’t know why he was homeless, and I’m not a strong believer that all homeless people are victims, but because I’d sat and spoken to him, because he hadn’t tried to hit me and because he seemed like a reasonable person I felt some sympathy for him. He must have made some sort of impression on me as I can still remember the job six weeks after it happened.
Maybe I’m just getting soft in my old age.
The Black Dog Has Been Taken Outside and Shot (#ulink_3024563e-ea35-5ba5-b0de-e1e5f9445b7a)
I left work this morning with a song in my heart and joy in my step; last night was my final shift on the FRU car.
No longer will I be standing around with my hands in my pockets for 45 minutes while a six-month-old child lies in front of me with possible meningitis. No more will I be told by Control to go and drive around and look busy when there is something good on telly, and no longer will my only conversation with people consist mainly of ‘Where does it hurt?’ for twelve hours straight.
The letter that I wrote my boss telling her that I wanted to come off the FRU takes effect from Friday. I’ll soon be back to working on a ‘truck’, a nice big person-carrying medical-taxi truck.
Lovely!
I was hoping that this last shift would fly by in an exciting cascade of trauma, life-saving and dramatic illness.
Ahem.
It was actually a fairly quiet night. I did seven jobs, four of them being people with coughs (one cough having lasted three weeks before the patient decided to call an ambulance at five in the morning). My last call was to an elderly gentleman with emphysema (and a cough) who actually needed hospital treatment.
However, my first two calls were to drunks.
My second job was a ‘classic’—‘Male collapsed in street, unknown life status—caller refusing to go near patient or answer any questions.’ So I rushed there and found two female police officers standing over a drunk male who was asleep in the street. I did all my normal checks to make sure that he was only drunk (as opposed to being drunk and in a diabetic coma, drunk and has had a stroke, or drunk and has been stabbed). Everything pointed to him being just drunk.
We woke him up and were prepared to send him on his way. He stood up—took one look at me, and smacked me in the mouth.
I ‘assisted’ him onto the floor. The police officers and I then stopped him from injuring himself by sitting on him in a professional manner.
The police have been trained in restraint—they are all careful because they don’t want people dying of positional asphyxia. I haven’t been trained in restraint (well, not in the ambulance service) but I’m guessing that someone isn’t going to die because I’m kneeling over their arm while holding their wrist.
