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So we carefully restrained him (for around 25 minutes), while he explained how he was either going to kick my head in or sue me. By then the police had tracked down a, now mortified, relative who came and took him away.
No damage done to me, although I would think that as he wakes up this morning he’ll have a number of bruises. I hopped in my car and told Control that I had been assaulted twice in two jobs, so I asked if I could head back to the station for a calming cup of tea, which they allowed. They also made sure that I was all right and didn’t need any other help.
When my mother found out about my being assaulted, did she ask how I was? Did she ask if I had been hurt or damaged?
No.
Her comment was, ‘At least you’ll have something interesting to blog about.’
Bloody lovely that is…
Complaint (#ulink_40459158-787f-5375-b460-84e19a587a95)
It is a constant danger in this job that a patient, or more likely a patient’s relative, will make a complaint against you. While a member of the public can moan about a perceived insult (and half of the complaints against the ambulance service are due to ‘attitude’), there is little that we can do about a patient who is generally acting like a twit.
I have been pretty lucky in my career in that I’ve only had two complaints made against me: once while a nurse and once while working on the ambulances.
The nursing complaint was that I checked the correct dosage of a drug with another nurse before giving it to a child. For some reason this person had decided to complain about me for following the sensible rules laid down by my superiors. My boss at the time called me into the office, patted me on the head and told me I was a good boy and should keep up the excellent work.
The ambulance complaint went to a local investigation.
I was called into the office and asked if I remembered calling a patient a ‘bitch’. As I have a poor memory I didn’t remember until the ambulance officer gave me the paperwork for the job.
We had been called to a patient who had been arguing with his family, he’d drunk a bottle of wine and pretended to be unconscious. As he didn’t want to ‘wake up’, we decided to take him to hospital. While in the back of the ambulance he slapped my leg.
I told him that he ‘slapped like a bitch’ and that he really shouldn’t do it again or I might get upset.
I know, not the best insult in the world. He’d surprised me and I had to come up with something witty on the spur of the moment. If he’d hurt me then I would have thrown him off the ambulance, but as it was such an ineffectual strike I found it more amusing than anything else.
The officer had to investigate the allegation so he interviewed the other staff present and they supported my side of the story. He then had to travel to the patient’s home and interview him there. Luckily the officer saw the character of the patient and convinced him not to go any further with the complaint.
If I’d complained to the police it would no doubt have been considered ‘not worth prosecuting’ by the CPS, but if the patient had continued to complain I could have been seriously disciplined.
All of which only makes me think that I shouldn’t leave any witnesses alive…
Snapshots (#ulink_5b6d28f8-0f5d-5be8-96ab-5392ed56a448)
…We get the call to the RTA, a car has crashed into a bus; normally these things are ‘nothing’ jobs. We put on the blue lights and head towards the crash…
…The radio bursts into life, there is an officer who ‘lucked’ onto the scene—he tells Control that he needs a lot of ambulances, the fire service and the police. The injuries are all serious. We wonder if he is talking about the same crash we are going to…
…We crest the hill, with one look at the car and the bus we know it’s going to be serious…
…I jump out of the ambulance and head to the car; I ask the officer what he wants us to do. He tells me that we can’t wait for the fire service to arrive to cut out the first patient as his breathing is so ragged. We agree that he needs to be out of the car immediately and that a possible neck injury is a low priority…
…We get him out and I watch as he takes his last breath…
…We work on him; he is so young we have to make the attempt. The DSO (duty station officer) and other FRUs work on the other people in the car…
…He is lying lifeless in my ambulance and the BASICS doctor declares him dead—then we rush off to the next casualty…
…This one gets sedation. I write the dose and time on his chest so that the information doesn’t get lost in the chaos. Another ambulance crew speeds him to hospital…
…The next one is declared dead as the firefighters cut him out…
…The other dead man is left in the car, there is nothing to do for him, it will be some time before the firefighters are able to free him…
…I check on the people in the bus, there are some injuries that will need hospital treatment. I’m trying to keep them calm and relaxed. My crewmate and I move from our ‘all-business’ personalities to our ‘reassurance’ ones in the time it takes us to walk to the bus. I deal with the multiple casualties one at a time, my crewmate helps me out…
…My ambulance becomes a mobile mortuary; the police are checking for identification. The blood is pooling on the floor…
…I’m sitting on the back step of the ambulance, two of the dead are in my ambulance; one, wrapped in a sheet, is at my feet. We are waiting for the undertaker…
…The police investigation team is chalking the outlines of vehicles and taking photographs of the scene…
…My paperwork is done. It seems like such a little bit of writing for such a serious call where three men have been killed…
…Medical equipment and wrappers mix with the debris of the accident. There is the familiar ‘tick-tick-tick’ of our blue lights revolving in their housings…
…Back at the station I have a face mask on as I clean the floor and trolley of the ambulance with the jet spray we normally use on the outside of the vehicles. My crewmate is doing the gentler job of cleaning the equipment. The blood comes off eventually…
…It’s time for our next job.
Repeat Offender (#ulink_d79b66f8-892a-55d5-9c96-16b59a7235ba)
On Saturday one of the first jobs was to go to someone whose name my crewmate recognised.
‘He’s a nice old boy,’ he told me. ‘When his wife was alive she’d call us every time he coughed. He’s deaf and blind. He used to be a British champion boxer. He’s a big fella so I hope we don’t have to carry him downstairs. We don’t see him much now; he hasn’t called us out in ages.’
The patient was sitting alone in his flat, scattered around him were books that he could no longer read. In the corner was a television that probably hadn’t been turned on in years. He was just a frail man sitting quietly in his chair marking time. On the table next to his chair were the remains of some ‘meals on wheels’. I could see that he had once been a ‘solid’ man, like the old men still living in our area who used to work on the docks—tall and thick with muscle. He wasn’t that man any more. He was frail, shaking, and seemed nervous of everything, not something that you’d expect from an ex-boxer.
It was hard getting his history as I needed to lean close to his ear and shout. At one point he let out a hacking cough just as I was up close to him so we took him to hospital with a possible chest infection.
Our last job of the day was back to the same address—he’d been discharged from hospital and just wanted someone to ‘check his pulse’.
We didn’t mind.
Algesia (#ulink_de7855fe-1f38-553e-b6c9-eccf5cc9d92c)
Seven-hour shifts are really easy to do, especially when you have spent the last year doing only twelve-hour shifts.
The jobs tonight were pretty easy—even easier for me as I was driving the ambulance rather than treating the patients. We had a 16-year-old girl with a sore throat, a pair of drunks, one of whom had a twisted ankle, a little old lady who’d fallen over indoors and had a nasty scrape to her arm, and a young woman, twelve weeks pregnant, who had been assaulted at work and struck in the stomach.
The real standout job for me shows just how daft some people are.
The patient was a twelve-year-old boy. We got the job as ‘child banging head on walls and floor’ and when we turned up the child was indeed clutching his head and hitting it against a wall. The parents and child spoke poor English, but we easily managed to learn that the child was suffering from an earache, and that this was the cause of the head-hitting.
‘How long has he had the pain?’ asked my crewmate for the night.
‘Five years then, three hours now,’ replied the father.
We understood what he meant—the child had an earache five years ago, but this current episode, and the reason why we were called out, had lasted three hours.
‘Have you given him any painkillers?’
‘No,’ the father looked confused.
‘Do you have any painkillers?’ my crewmate asked.
‘Yes, but we haven’t given him any,’ said the father.
So the family could see their child rolling around the floor, screaming in pain and banging his head against the walls, and didn’t consider that a painkiller might have—oh, I don’t know—helped with the pain.
I can imagine the scene in the hospital when the nurses give the child some pain relief—the parents looking at each other, slapping their foreheads and saying, ‘Doh! We could have done that!’
There are a lot of daft people out there—and I get to meet most of them.
Back on the Car… (#ulink_c838af95-e199-53c4-a8b3-5f868e0d440a)
There is a slight problem I have with returning to the ambulances, and that is my new partner is currently on sick leave, and has been for some time. No one knows when she will be fit to return—so I often find myself ‘single’ with nobody to work with.
When you are single you can be teamed up with another single pretty much anywhere in London.
At the moment our sector is having trouble reaching our government targets (which are calculated at the end of February). Of particular concern is Poplar ambulance station which, because of atrocious manning, is struggling to meet them. To counter this management have made it known that any shortfall in manning Poplar must be corrected as a priority.
So, when I’m single I’m often going to find myself making my way over to the Poplar area.
Last night, however, there was no one for me to work with at Poplar so they asked me to work on the FRU.
Fear of being asked to travel over to the other side of London if I refused meant that last night I was once more a solo responder.
This meant I had the right hump.
Thankfully it wasn’t too busy; the usual complaints of ‘my child hasn’t eaten properly for two days’, ‘I’m having an angina attack’ and ‘I’m drunk’ were quite enough. There was one interesting job though—a policeman hit a pedestrian with his car.
Thankfully he wasn’t travelling on blue lights, nor going too fast for the road. The woman apparently ran out into the road without looking, which given some of the pedestrian activities I normally see wasn’t out of the ordinary. Luckily for the woman involved there was an anaesthetist walking past, and he managed the immediate need to keep her neck still. After our examination our main concerns were that she was concussed and that she was cold from lying in the road—thankfully the ambulance was pretty quick, and she was soon in the warm, where our further examination showed no immediate injuries.
The area was cordoned off and as the woman was being looked after by the crew I went to make sure that the policeman who had been driving was all right. He was quite shaken up by the event, and I hope he gets support from his work.
Wee-Wee (#ulink_832922d8-0f71-5742-a494-aab0ae141a9e)
The plan was perfect—we’d just taken a drunk to hospital and the patient (a 45-year-old man, married, father of two) had decided to urinate in the back of our ambulance. Both my crewmate and I were happy at this as we would have to return to our station to mop out, and on the way my crewmate could grab a chicken takeaway meal.
And I could get a cup of tea.
This apparently flawless plan was spoilt when we stopped for the food and a man came running out of a pub to tell me that a friend had ‘a fuckin’ big gash in his head’ from when he had fallen over.
So I dutifully entered the pub, to find a 50-year-old man with a cut down to the skull running from his hairline to his eyebrow. Most impressive.
Less impressive was his friend telling me that the patient had taken some speed earlier.
I don’t know about you, but I consider myself too old to be taking that stuff, let alone someone old enough to be my father.
Not that I’ve ever taken speed myself. I like my brain cells exactly how they are, thankyouverymuch.
Luckily another ambulance turned up and took the patient off our hands, and so we returned to the station where I completed the job of mopping out the urine that had been washing backwards and forwards on the floor as we drove along.
I just wish I could be a fly on the wall when our original drunken patient tries to explain to his wife exactly why he has pissed his trousers.
Swagger (#ulink_d584c32c-f2dc-5d9d-9229-01d3830afa92)
‘He’ll end up in the bush,’ I said.
‘Nope—the road,’ replied my crewmate.
‘Bush.’
‘Road.’
The man we were watching dropped to the floor—in the road.
It was the last call of the night—a police CCTV camera had seen a man sitting in the middle of the road in what can only be described as a ‘dangerous’ part of town.
We arrived to find our patient rather drunk and sitting in the road under a CCTV camera. Circling him was a hungry pack of feral children who scattered when they saw us arrive.
We had a pleasant little chat with him—he had scraped his face when he had fallen over, and had no desire to get out of the road.
We spent twenty minutes trying to persuade him to get out of the road. We tried being nice, we tried reverse psychology and we even tried explaining that the police would soon be here and they would make him move on. He refused to move, and he refused to go to hospital—he was a very stationary object.
We got back into the ambulance, where it was warm, to await the police. We’d already parked in a ‘fend off’ position so that a passing car wouldn’t hit our patient.
I don’t believe in making work for myself.
‘Control, have we got an ETA for the police please?’
Control replied, ‘I can only tell you what they have told me—there are no policemen in the big policemen storage box, as they are all out dealing with other things.’
Great.
Right, I thought, time to try a little trick I learnt while reading a book about how the human brain works. Certain gestures and objects have ‘hard-coded’ responses in your brain. So if you walk up to someone who is sitting in the road and give them your hand (as if you were about to shake theirs), they will often take it, and from there it is fairly easy to get someone standing.
Success! Our patient was now standing (well…swaying) and indicated that he wanted to go home. His home was about 400 yards away in one of the tower blocks that surrounded us.
He took two steps and started to fall—he grabbed at my crewmate’s jacket, spun himself around her and by some miracle remained upright.
‘I’m fine,’ he said. ‘I don’t want you helping me walk home.’ He pulled his arms out of our grasp and started to stagger home.
We got into the ambulance and slowly followed behind him.
