My shift ends at 6:30 in the morning, so I was very happy to be left alone from 11pm.

Except that at 6:20 I get a job (I ask them if they are joking – they aren’t).  The job is a chest pain on a bus, in a bus garage.

It is also so far out my normal area I have to study the map for some time before I can work out how to get there.

I turn up to find out that the ‘patient’ is an alcoholic who is asleep in one of the buses.  She denies any chest pain, injury or illness – and after some persuasion she leaves the bus under her own power and leaves the scene.

If I were being cynical, I would be thinking that the bus company, unable to actually touch her for fear of assault, has called for an ambulance purely so that someone else is responsible for getting her off the bus.

Previous experience would suggest that this is indeed the case.

Why would they say she had chest pain – perhaps they know that this gets the quickest response from us…

Oh well – it’s all overtime.

I've just got back from a stabbing which took place in one of our busier streets.
The patient had a single stab wound in the back - I was around the corner having dealt with an abdominal pain (nothing too serious), when Control phoned me up and asked me if I wouldn't mind having a look to see if I could lend a hand.

I turned up, and there was already a Paramedic on scene (he has asked me to call him a superparamedic here - I have kindly refused). He had already done most of the assessment and treatment, the patient had a single stab wound in his back, to the right of his spine. He was treated as if he had a sucking chest wound, and was quickly transported to hospital.

During transit he developed a cough, and when the dressing to his stab wound was removed, it looked like his pleural membrane (the bag around the lung) had herniated (poked through the hole) which might explain the cough.

The patient was later transferred to another hospital because there was some concern that air had entered his spinal column.

I also had another patient with a potentially life threatening condition - an eight year old girl with a serious asthma attack. The child was calm and collected, although her breathing was seriously impaired. Her mother however was going to bits - she was running around crying, and screaming, and generally getting in the way. Luckily the patients gran had her head screwed on right, and I could get a history from her.

I started the required treatment, and the ambulance quickly turned up and took her to hospital. But I think I'd spent more time dealing with the mother than the child...