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A message from the police (via our Control) appeared on our display terminal. ‘Are you all right? Does the man have any warning signs?’
Warning signs?
‘Control,’ I was back on the radio, ‘I’ve got this message about “warning signs”. Well, I don’t think he has any signal flares, or any of those reflective red triangles you put behind your car when it breaks down.’ Yes, I know…I was being silly.
While trying not to laugh Control replied, ‘I wondered what the police meant by that as well.’
What I think had happened was that the CCTV operator had seen what looked like my crewmate being attacked by the patient when he was just stumbling around.
We kept following the patient.
He started to swagger.
He started to sway.
He swaggered some more.
We quickly laid bets on him falling into some bushes by the road.
I chose the bushes.
I lost.
We got out of the ambulance and picked him up again. This time we decided that ‘technically’ breaking the law and frogmarching him home would be in the patient’s best interest. So we grabbed an arm each and in a jolly fashion walked him home.
With the three of us all with linked arms making our way down a deserted street, it was inevitable that I’d start whistling ‘We’re off to see the wizard’.
The patient got home safely, although I’d guess that the family member who answered the doorbell wasn’t too pleased with him.
Scent (#ulink_15ffaa8b-199d-51f4-a41c-ee4d69cf662d)
Way back in my past I trained to be a teacher (of small to medium-sized children). Rather thankfully I’ve managed to block out much of the trauma from those days. My poor memory does have some positive sides.
However, I’ve just done a job in a primary school, and all those memories came flooding back.
To be honest I think it was the smell that did it. Smell is strongly tied to memory, which is why certain odours can transport you back in time, say to helping your mum bake a cake, or to painting a shed with your father.
In this case it was the smell of the floor polish coupled with the scent of the powder paints in the air that flung me back to my days of trying to control 33 mini-disaster machines (or as they are known to the general public ‘children’).
I’m sure that new parents must have the same experience when they first visit their child’s school.
The job itself was quite an easy one, one of the teachers was having a panic attack, which is fair enough really—I know that if I were still trying to teach, I’d be in a constant state of panic attack.
Betting Shops (#ulink_5554306f-2c9f-5c4e-9b85-2e60e9b449fd)
I know I’ve written about having a wager with my crewmate about which way a drunk would fall, but I don’t want to give you the wrong idea.
I think betting is silly.
I have no idea how to work out any odds. Terms like ‘odds of 11/7’, ‘each way’, ‘accumulators’ and ‘handicap’ make no sense to me at all. Since childhood the betting shop has always seemed to me to be a seedy place where hard-drinking, and hard-smoking, men flush their money down the toilet. Not somewhere I would ever visit.
Occasionally I do find myself, because of the duties of my job, frequenting these dens of vice. And to be honest most of them aren’t that bad. The most common reason why I am sent to these places is because someone has passed out in the toilets due to drugs, or less commonly, drink. For some reason betting-shop toilets seem to be really popular places to take drugs.
Don’t ask me why.
These jobs are fairly rare, so I was surprised to find myself called to betting shops on two separate jobs in one day. Even more surprising was that neither of these jobs was junkie related.
The first job was to a 50-year-old male who had collapsed, and when we arrived the FRU driver was looking a bit concerned. The patient was as white as a sheet and not talking. We were all worried that he was going to die while in the shop, so we quickly loaded him into our chair and removed him to the ambulance.
While trying to do this, every other user of the betting shop continued around us without batting an eyelid. Normally we’d get a bit of an audience, but not so in this case. At one point a man ‘tutted’ me because I was standing between him and some vitally important bit of paper on the wall.
I’ll leave it to you, dear reader, to guess my reply to that.
As soon as the patient was in the ambulance he started to come round. All of our investigations showed nothing unusual, so we concluded that it was just a ‘simple’ faint. As it was a slightly prolonged one we took him to hospital for a few more tests.
The second job to a betting shop was for a 60-year-old male who was having a critically low blood sugar. He was a diabetic, and when we arrived he was rooted to his stool watching the horses racing on the TV screens. His wife was starting to get frantic at his refusal to talk.
On checking his blood sugar we discovered that it was very low, and this would explain his strange behaviour.
We tried to persuade him to drink a can of coke but he refused so we made the decision to give him an injection of glucagon. This drug, when injected into a muscle, is often good enough to reverse a low blood sugar for a short period of time. The plan was to get his blood sugar high enough for him to come out of his confusion for long enough so that we could get some sugar in him.
That was the plan at least.
Instead, we just gave him enough strength to start fighting us, his wife and the betting-shop lady who threatened to ban him if he didn’t do what the ‘nice’ ambulance people told him to do.
In an effort to get him into the ambulance, we ended up wrestling with him in the street. It was a bit strange to be physically restraining a pensioner while trying to (a) not hurt him, and (b) not look like a bully, even though he was a good couple of inches taller than me.
Then a police car drove past us.
It did a U-turn in the middle of the road and pulled up in front of our ambulance.
A couple of police officers got out and helped us persuade the patient to get into the ambulance where we could finally get him to drink the can of Coke we gave him. Sometimes it just needs a couple of big men in black and white uniforms to get a patient to do what you want.
This is one of many reasons why we like the police.
What didn’t help was the wife who would alternately berate her husband for poorly controlling his diabetes, and then spend time telling us that she was a devout Christian.
Thankfully the Coke did the trick and the patient made a full recovery—we left him and his wife in the nearby café getting something more substantial than a can of Coke and a Mars Bar.
Two good jobs, and not a trace of drink or drugs on them.
Makes a nice change.
It Says ‘London’ on the Side (#ulink_371c3410-ff75-568c-abdf-455de624f52b)
Last night was a bit strange, which for a change had nothing to do with the patients I was seeing.
Newham hospital was packed to the gills with patients, there were no beds available there, so a lot of my workmates ended up transferring patients from Newham to other hospitals around the area. At one point it got so bad that for two hours Newham ‘diverted’, or closed to non-‘blue light’ ambulance jobs. Hospitals don’t like doing this as they get fined for restricting their services, but when the situation is dangerous it’s actually in the best interests of the patients.
But my crewmate and I had to be that little bit different.
We had managed to return to station for three minutes when the phone went. Control wanted us to transfer a patient from a hospital out of our area to another one on the other side of London. We were told that there were no ambulances available in the originating hospital’s sector.
The patient was a young lady who might have been in premature labour with a pregnancy of 30 weeks. The nearest SCBU (specialist care baby unit) with an empty bed was in Hammersmith. Hammersmith is on the other side of London. I suppose we should have counted ourselves lucky that it wasn’t in Brighton.
So I drove through our sector, into another sector to pick up the patient and the midwife. We then drove 30 miles through the centre of London to get her to Hammersmith hospital. I don’t drive through London very often—I don’t need to, London Underground is cheaper and easier than trying to find a parking space. Thankfully all our ambulances now have GPS navigation systems installed—so it’s a simple case of following the arrows on the little screen and avoiding the cars that insist on trying to crash into you. I had a strange feeling of pride that I managed to find the hospital without getting lost or crashing. I then cruised around the hospital looking for the maternity entrance, and managed to find it by sheer luck and good fortune.
The hospital itself was completely different from the hospitals in our area—it was clean, it had comfy chairs, and the doctor who met the patient showed us the staff kitchen so we could get a cup of tea.
The only thing the same as the hospitals ‘back home’ was the angry glare from the midwife as we entered the unit.
On our way back to Newham we managed to get a job.
‘Aha!’ we thought, ‘this might be an interesting one.’
But no—it was exactly the same sort of patient/job that we get in Newham: an elderly Bangladeshi gentleman with all over body ache and a heavy head.
Still, he was a very pleasant man so we didn’t mind.
This patient went to St Mary’s hospital by request, and I’ll admit that on my first attempt at getting him to the hospital I drove past the obviously well-hidden entrance ramp. So I had to enter the one-way system, adding an extra mile on our journey. St Mary’s have a ‘welcome mat’ outside their A&E department. You don’t get welcome mats at Newham. At Newham you have to force open the ambulance bay doors…
Good Job/Bad Job (#ulink_9514d7e6-0c37-5a41-b736-6cdf8e242aa0)
Good Job
Any time where a patient actually needs an ambulance.
People having an acute flare-up of a chronic condition (diabetes, asthma, heart disease)
People who can’t walk, but who live on the ground floor.
People who make an effort towards managing their chronic conditions.
Maternal emergencies.
Nice people.
Old people.
Children who don’t cry.
Any time a patient, or their relative, says a simple ‘Thank you’ at the end of their trip.
Bad Job
Runny noses, coughs and colds. Verrucas.
People who have had an argument with a family member.
People who can’t walk, but live at the top of a block of flats with no lifts. And are heavy.
People who abuse their bodies with drink or drugs.
5 a.m. matern-a-taxis.
Gangsters crying because they have been stabbed for dealing drugs on the wrong street.
Awful nursing homes.
Parents who weep over their child’s cut finger causing them to have hysterical screaming.
Mr ‘I know my rights’.
Valentine’s Day (#ulink_ddc331de-b713-5069-afeb-13b56616284d)
First off…
…Bah humbug.
(It’s not just for Christmas.)
I’ve just finished with a job that makes me question this whole ‘love’ idea.
I had been sent to an alcoholic who had just had an epileptic fit and I arrived to find his fiancée looking very worried.
She told me, ‘I’ve known him for ten months and I’ve only seen him fit once, so I’m afraid I got scared and called for an ambulance.’
I reassured her that this wasn’t a problem and that she had done the right thing.
I looked after the patient, it was an easy job, and I spent some time waiting for the ambulance to arrive. (I was ‘single’, so I had been asked to work on the FRU again; the alternative was to work out of Waterloo station.)
I looked around the room they were staying in. It was not what you would call ‘homely’; it was the typical house of a young alcoholic (he was the same age as me). Cans of cheap cider were lying around the place, there was no furniture apart from a settee and a TV, empty cigarette packets littered the floor and the pictures hadn’t been mounted on the walls.
There was an axe leaning against the fireplace.
His fiancée was young and not obviously unattractive, she didn’t seem particularly stupid and she didn’t look like a fellow alcoholic. So I was confused as to why she would want to marry an alcoholic.
I’m afraid it just befuddles me as to how you can love someone who loves their next drink more than you. In any partnership you will come second to an open bottle of cider.
I just don’t understand.
Tagged (#ulink_3a385e68-1d25-5cb4-81d2-997571e83415)
We help the people of Newham.
One of these people has seen fit to ‘tag’ one of our ambulances with graffiti.
This means that the ambulance will be taken off the road so that it can be cleaned.
