For the past five nights the majority of my patients have been sick with one or more of the following…

• High temperature.
• Runny nose.
• Vomiting.
• Night sweats.
• Lethargy.
• Cough.
• ‘Generally unwell’.

So there must be at least one highly infectious disease epidemic in the area, while you or I might want to curl up in bed with some Lemsip and paracetamol, it would seem that a large number of Newham would rather sit in an A&E waiting room.

Madness.

Which leads me to the point of this post.  Us ambulance crews spend a lot of time around these infectious patients, patients who have often never been taught the good manners of putting their hand over their mouth when they cough.

So is it any wonder that I’ve got painful eyes, a streaming nose, a constant mild headache and a feeling that I’m suffering from a mild hangover.

But.

Us ambulance crews mustn’t have more than three periods of sick in an eighteen month period.

So I’m having to drag my potentially infectious body into work – where maybe I can infect some more people…

So in conclusion.

Send me nurses – pretty female nurses with plenty of drugs.*

 

 

*With apologies to another writer/blogger who also asks for nurses and never seems happy when I mention my previous career.

Gordonjcp sent this link to me via email.

The auction is of a nice new car…after an encounter with a local ambulance and firefighter crew.

Thus the message is…don’t move people who have been in car crashes.

(Besides the worry about getting your car chopped up, it’s not good if they do have a neck or back injury –  I’m guessing the patient involved in this didn’t have a neck or back injury, but ambulances crews need to err on the side of caution).

 

With the first draft of the book given to the publisher, it’s time to get this blog back on the regular track.

Canary Wharf has a skating rink at the moment and my crewmate and I were sent there to attend to a ‘fall, head injury’.

“Excellent”, we thought, “a nice simple job – nothing complicated”.

We were met by a worried looking ice rink worker who wobbled across the pavement on his skates to meet us.

“We wouldn’t normally bother you guys, but we think it might be serious”.

Grabbing my bags I was led to a woman sitting in the changing area with two youngsters, both of which were looking a little concerned.

“Hello there.  I’m the ambulance, what seems to be the problem”, I normally start with a version of this as a conversational opening gambit.

The patient replied, “Well, I had a bit of a fall….”, she paused, “I…”, she paused again, “Head…hit…migraine…”.

She seemed to be having trouble finding the right words to use.  I quickly examined her, and was happy that she hadn’t hurt her neck and the small lump on the back of her head didn’t look serious either.  So why was she acting so strangely?

“I get migraines”, she told me, “I…lose…um…er…um…words, and I…eyes…eyes…go blind”.

This is a pretty rare presentation of migraines, but not unheard of.

We got her into the back of the ambulance and all my examinations there were normal.  She was complaining of ‘losing her words’ (expressive dysphasia) and of going blind in her right eye.  She didn’t seem too upset by this and had already taken her normal migraine medication, although I’m not sure on how Paracetamol and Metoclopramide would help with these symptoms as I’m not an expert on migraine treatment although I know that Triptans can sometimes be used.

Her symptoms started to get worse, she couldn’t find any of the words that she wanted to use, and so I needed to get a more thorough history from the two youngsters.  They were her nephews and she had been treating them to a trip down to London.  Although young, they were both very mature and helpful and after some prompting from the patient (“Laptop…look…laptop”) we found a patient information card in her purse.  The card let us know that all the symptoms that she was experiencing were indeed part of the presentation of her migraine.

It was a short trip to the hospital, during which she started to make a slight recovery and we left her in the capable hands of the A&E nurses.  Unfortunately for the patient, the hospital was extremely busy, so I’m guessing that she had to wait a little while for any treatment.

The three of them had come from Surrey, so they didn’t know the area well, although we were able to give them directions home from the hospital, we had chosen this hospital over another slightly closer one so that it would be easier for them to get home after any treatment.

A day out into London turning into a trip to the hospital – it happens more often than you would think.

We help the people of Newham.

One of these people has seen fit to ‘tag’ one of our ambulances with grafitti.

This means that the ambulance will be taken off the road so that it can be cleaned.

This will cost money.

It will also remove an ambulance from the road.

This means an ambulance might get delayed coming to a call.

I hope it is a call to the ‘tagger’, and I hope that they are in a great deal of pain.

Tosser.

Another fine post from Bill Stickers today, as he writes about saving the life of a driver.

See how far you get through the post before you can guess a diagnosis, Bill’s writing is so clear I guessed what it was once he described the patient.

As I mention in a comment on this post, it’s a good thing that he came along when he did, as without him acting ‘outside of protocols’ the driver would now be dead.  It’s good to see someone making an effort for the sake of another human being.

Congratulations Bill!

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'm sent to an alcoholic who has just had an epileptic fit and I arrive to find his fiancè looking very worried.

She tells 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 reassure her that this isn't a problem, and that she has done the right thing.

I look after the patient, it's an easy job and I spend some time waiting for the ambulance to arrive (I was 'single', so I was asked to work on the RRU, the alternative was to work out of Waterloo station).

I look around the room they are staying in. It's not what you would call 'homely', it's the typical house of a young alcoholic (he's the same age as me). Cans of cheap cider are laying around the place, there is no furniture apart for a settee and a T.V, empty cigarette packets litter the floor and the pictures haven't been mounted on the walls.

There is an axe leaning against the fireplace.

His fiancè is young and not obviously unattractive, she doesn't seem particularly stupid and she doesn't look like a fellow alcoholic. So I'm 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.



Maybe I'm just emotionally stunted?

After much deep consideration and thought trial and error, I’ve managed to get the Talkr link for individual posts working.  This will let you hear my posts without having to subscribe to the Talkr RSS feed.

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 in the hospital, 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 tend to be 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 hospital on the other side of London.  We were told that there we no ambulances available in the originating hospitals sector.

The patient was a young lady who may have been in premature labour at 30 weeks pregnancy.  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 navigation screen and avoiding the cars that insist on trying to crash into you.  I have 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 to the hospitals in our area – it was clean, it had comfy chairs, and the doctor who met the patient at the hospital 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 job”.

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.  The picture in this post is of St Mary’s ‘welcome mat’.  You don’t get welcome mats at Newham.  At Newham you have to force open the ambulance bay doors…

Then we managed to get back to Newham, where we had an hour to relax on station before the morning crew turned up and sent us home.

I know on Thursday I told you about having a rapid 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 other than ‘X to 1’ (where the larger ‘X’ gets the more unlikely something is going to happen).  ‘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.  In fact I’d rather visit a sex-shop, which as at least one of my readers will know, is a tricky proposition.

Occasionally I do find myself, due to 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 were junkie related.

The first job was to a fifty 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 around.  All of our investigations showed nothing unusual, so we concluded that it was just a ‘simple’ faint, if a slightly prolonged one.  Once he had fully recovered he was a fairly nice man to talk to, and we took him to hospital for a few more tests.

The second job to a betting shop was for a sixty year old male who was having a critically low blood sugar.  He was a diabetic, and when we arrived 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.

We checked his blood sugar (it was very low at 2.2 mmols), and this explained 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 that he would come out of his confusion for long enough 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 nice 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’s 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 is a good couple of inches taller than me.

Then a police car drove past us.

They 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 the patient 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 cafe 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.

“He’ll end up in the bush,” I say.

“Nope – the road,” replies 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 a scrape to his face when he had fallen over, and 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 ambulance, where it was warm, to await the police.  We’d already parked in a ‘fend off’ position, so that our patient wouldn’t get hit by a passing car.

“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 policeman storage box, as they are all out dealing with other things”.

Great.

Right, I thought, time to try a little trick I learned while reading Mind Hacks.  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 their hand), 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 of flats 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.

A message from the police (via our Control) appeared on our display terminal.  “Are you alright?  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 it was just his stumbling around.

We kept following the patient.

He stared to swagger.

He started to sway.

He swaggered some more.

We quickly laid bets on him falling into some bushes on onto 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 frog-marching 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 the 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.