In the ambulance service we often require the help of the police. Sometimes it's to protect us if we are heading into a dangerous situation, sometimes a job that we go to will require crimnal rather than medical aid. Often we will be sent to a victim of an assault before any polce are able to attend - they have the same problems with manning that we do.

Sometimes an accident scene is so volatile that we need the police to manage it for us while we concentrate on the injured person. If we are dealing with a seriously injured person then the last thing that we ned to be concentrating on is a big crowd of people.

The Law Is A Donkey has a sad post that highlights the role the police have to play in these situations.

If you haven't come across this blog before it's written by a police officer in Camden, not too far from where I work. It's on my bloglines subscription as the author writes an excellent tale.

I've got to admit that we don't often 'worry' about the police, we expect that they are as prepared for the horrible sights that assail you as us ambulance people. Sometimes it's easy to forget that they have very little medical experience and that the things that we see as being a minor injury can look rather scary.

So from now on I'll try to be a bit more mindful about what the police get to see.

There is a little old lady.  She sits alone in her house.  Mainly she stays in one room – there is no radio, there is no television.

She sits at her table and shuffles paper.

She has a mild form of dementia.

Some carers arrive, they give her some medication.  They change her incontinence pad, they get her dressed and washed.

Meals on wheels arrive, she has something to eat.

In the evening there are more carers, they change her incontinence pads and give her some night medication.  They put her to bed.

She lives, isolated in her house.

Her carers don’t like her because she shouts and she repeats herself.

 

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One day she falls over.  She is found by her carers.

So the ambulance service is called.  We pick her up, but she doesn’t want to go to hospital.

We watch the carers bully her so that they can change her soiled incontinence pad.  The carers are aggressive.  Their tone of voice and the words that they use are harsh.

Our patient tells us that the carers that visit in the morning have hit her.  Given the attitude and actions of the carers that I have seen this doesn’t surprise me.

We contact her daughter – this isn’t the first time that she has made this claim, her daughter has reported it to the social services.

We leave the patient, we cannot kidnap her.  We return to station where we fill out a ‘vulnerable adult form’ – this goes off to our Control where it is dealt with by a specialist team.

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A week later I’m asked to phone the social services person dealing with the case.

They ask me what I’ve seen, what I’ve heard.

Explaining over the phone it feels that trying to express the atmosphere in the house is impossible.

But for once I have faith in the social worker, I don’t know why but I do.

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I don’t know yet how this story ends.

The little old lady needs people to not hit her, she needs company, she needs care.

Maybe our attendance will be the tipping point that will start that care.  Maybe the social services needed to hear from someone else the reports of abuse?  Maybe the carers tip-toe around the daughter when she is there, maybe something will get done.

I hope so.

 

 

 

Right – that’s it, I’m out of ambulance stories and I have a week off work.  I’m going to try and post every day – but I just don’t know what about.  Regular service will soon be resumed. You have been warned.

I never knew it, but it seems that us local ambulance crews have been having a holiday!

Two of our regular attenders (both alcoholics) had disappeared, while one had been in prison.  Oh, the glory of never having to go to the familiar call of ‘female fitting’ on Green Street, or the ‘Man collapsed’ at Woodgrange road.

Unfortunately it seems that with the nice weather the usual suspects have returned.

Three in particular have been particularly unwanted.  One, who is possibly the most disgusting smelling man alive has reappeared from who knows where.  He’ll have an ambulance called for him because he (a) Drinks too much and falls asleep in the street, and (b) Looks half dead – well…he smells half dead.  He was picked up eight times in one day.  I saw him as he was dropped off at hospital by the ambulance, then five minutes later he was staggering off looking for the nearest off-license.

We are a bit stuffed to be honest – people call us and we have to go to them, we have to take them to hospital because there is no other place we can take them and there is no chance of them being ‘cured’.  We just have to wait until they drop dead.  Then they are replaced by younger ‘up and coming’ alcoholics.

Our second caller is less smelly, although with the recent death of his landlord I don’t think that’ll last too long.  He has possibly the worlds most broken nose and phones us up to let us know that a man has collapsed.  If you aren’t quick getting there then he’ll sometimes wander off and you never find him – instead you waste spend twenty minutes trawling the streets.  I was sent to him the other night – I saw him standing in the public phonebox still talking to Control, so we sidled up to him.  He never noticed us.

“Control”, I called up on the radio, “Is our ‘collapsed’ patient still on the phone?”

“Roger that”.

“Well, he’s the most upright collapse I’ve been to in some time…”

I don’t mind this one too much as he walks onto the back of the ambulance, sits fairly quietly while we have a chat, and then walks off the back of the ambulance at the hospital.

The final of the regulars I’m going to write about today (for have no doubt, there are many more) vanished for nearly a year.  She also is particularly smelly, occasionally abusive and will call us four or five times a day.  She had been living with some nuns, but the nuns got fed up with her and threw her back out on the streets.

So there you go – too annoying for nuns…

 

It’s sad to have people in this state, there is nothing anyone can do to help them and their lives are disappearing down the neck of a bottle of cheap cider.  Sometimes I think that their whole social circle revolves around drinking, riding in ambulances and sitting in hospital waiting rooms.  It also drives you crazy when you are just about to have your first cup of tea of the shift and you get sent out to them.  Once or twice I’ve had to bite my tongue as I sit in the back with them while Control is desperately radioing for a free ambulance to go to a sick child.

But what can you do?

UPDATE: For those who don't read the comments, Luis Enrique has pointed me in the direction of an exceedingly interesting article by Malcolm Gladwell about an innovative way to solve the problem that my post talks about. From my view on the shop floor he has got me convinced.

As the subject line says – it’s so that when I get sprayed in the face with someone else’s blood it goes onto the glasses rather than into my lovely, virus absorbing, eyes.

Apologies for the poor quality of the photo, it’s taken at night with my pda/phone internal camera – if you can’t see it properly…well, I got sprayed with blood.

It was the last job of the shift, pretty much down the road from the hospital – it was given to my crewmate and I as, “Throat cut.  Serious bleeding”.  Now, I’ve been at this game long enough to realise that a cut throat can be anything from a near beheading to a shaving cut.

As an aside, my mate got sent to a ‘stabbing’, it turned out that the landlord of our ‘victim’ had poked him in the chest with a finger…

So we rushed down there, fully prepared to see a man with a slight scratch to his neck, probably from an irate girlfriend.

As we got there, the first few things that I saw made me think that this was a ‘proper’ job.

• There was someone laying on the floor in the street with a dark puddle of liquid around him.
• There were two policemen leaning over our patient.
• The police were looking worried.
• There was already police ‘incident’ tape strung around the area.

I leapt out the cab of the ambulance, grabbed my response bag and jogged over to the patient while my crewmate parked the ambulance and started getting the stretcher out the back.

...I felt the familiar feeling of someone else’s blood being splattered across my face.

Our patient was an eighteen year old black man, he was covered in blood although thankfully he was screaming.  Screaming is good, it means that you are alive.

The police had saved his life – one of them had bunched up the patient’s t-shirt and was pressing it against the wound.  When I removed the t-shirt to look at the wound I found a small cut under the jaw, but one that had severed an artery (quite possibly the one marked Mylo-hyoid in this diagram).  The wound was still spurting blood at high force which caught us all a little by surprise.

Through this cut of perhaps one inch, the patient had lost about a litre of blood.  Without the quick thinking of the police, he would have bled to death on the scene.  As it was the patient was entering the second stage of shock brought on by lack of blood.  This was serious.

I jammed a couple of dressings on the wound, and knowing that just tying them wouldn’t work I spent the rest of the job applying pressure with both hands while trying to reassure the patient.  It was here that the patient gave a cough and I felt the familiar feeling of someone else’s blood being splattered across my face.  Given the proximity to the hospital we ‘scooped and ran’, putting the patient into the ambulance and blue-lighting it into Newham hospital.

One of the policemen travelled with us.  The patient was, quite understandably,  frightened by his predicament and asked for someone to hold his hand.  As I was clutching the dressings to his face I didn’t have a spare hand – yet the policeman, also covered with the patient’s blood, didn’t hesitate to hold the frightened patient’s hand.

Screaming is good, it means that you are alive.

When we got to the hospital the patient asked if we were all white.  I have no idea what was going through his head to ask that question, perhaps he had been brainwashed to believe that all us white people in uniform don’t give a damn about young black men.  To be honest I hadn’t given it a thought and I doubt that the policeman had either, all we saw was someone who needed our help.

It’s what drives me nuts about the media, and to a certain extent members of the public and ’community leaders’.  Everyone is so quick to jump onto the bandwagon of criticising the police over, for example, a raid where they believed they had good information about a chemical bomb – yet you never seem to hear about the numerous small acts of kindness that they perform daily.

I guess that this is what blogs are good for.

We got the patient to the hospital where he was seen by the trauma team.  The surgeons got a bit splattered by blood themselves, unlike me however they had plastic aprons on.

So then it was a simple case of washing my face and arms, mopping out the back of the ambulance and going home to sleep…

…only to be kept awake by drunken football fans.

 

And yes – I am playing with drop-quotes on this post.  Let me know what you think, does it make me look like a cheap magazine?

After posting such a nice post about the lovely people in Newham it was perhaps obvious that when I got into work last night I’d hear about some not so nice people.  Such is karma…

Some of my station workmates were parked at the hospital on Wednesday night booking a patient in.  Someone broke into their ambulance and stole the sat-nav monitor (which won't work as all the actual electronics of it are buried deep in the motor itself).

They also stole a drugs pack with little else in it besides some paracetamol and some vials of adrenaline.  So keep your eyes open for someone with a fast heart rate running around Newham with sachets of Calpol in their pockets.

What this means is that we will have one less ambulance on the road while it is getting fixed (the whole dashboard was pulled up).

Also that night there was a strange man walking around the station at 3am. He stole some cigarettes and when challenged replied, "You're open 24 hours ain't you".  He then acted threatening towards one of our female crews before leaving.

Shame I wasn't there...

Once more it’s the complete disregard that some people treat us underpaid, overworked ambulance staff who do our job because deep down inside we want to help folk.  I wonder if they care that they are robbing the community of an ambulance.

I suspect that they don’t.

I had an interesting job yesterday, but for various legal reasons I’ll have to wait a bit before posting about it.  You’ll see why when I do post about it.

One of the things that the newspapers seem to like to do is to stir up trouble between different racial groups, one need look no further than the amount of press given to the Forest Gate demonstration last week – less than 100 people turned up, and yet it was ‘important’ news.

Actually living and working in Newham gives you a much better picture of how people get along, and it has nothing to do with mainstream media’s attempts to split us apart on behalf of various vested interest groups.

I was sent to a ‘little old lady’ who had fallen over earlier in the day, she had been found by her next door neighbour who looked after her.

My little old lady was White British, while the family who looked in after her were Bangladeshi Muslim.

For a number of years they had helped her and her husband, checking in with them to make sure that everything was alright, the son of the neighbours would help out around the house,

When my patients husband had died, the family only stepped up the amount of help they gave her.

So it was the neighbours son who had found her and called us.  It took us some time to deal with the patient – she had an obviously broken hip and we needed to give her a large amount of painkillers before we could move her.  During this time the Bangladeshi mother and son stood watching, making sure that she was alright.  The mother spoke no English, but even I could recognise her prayers.

As we loaded the patient into the ambulance both the mother and father were praying, and it brought a smile to my face when their son shouted at then, “Will you both stop that, we aren’t in the village anymore”.

When the patient’s real son turned up he appeared more concerned about the inconvenience that his mothers fall was causing him.  The neighbour’s son was more concerned with her health.

 

This is what I see – I see communities working together and looking after each other, not because of government sponsored ‘multi-racial community days’ but because, quite simply, we all live together.  The only thing is that you don’t hear about these small acts of humanity when so-called ‘community leaders’ are shouting about perceived unfairness.

NeeNaw lets us know how busy it was the other day – although the call rate by midnight was closer 5,700 than 5,000.

so why is it that I dislike football so much?

Despite being an atheist, I still feel uncomfortable walking in my boots into a Mosque – especially while the prayers are still going on.  At least the people who ask me to remove my boots are understanding about why I can’t do as they ask.

You’ve got to be careful in this job, because the thought that will keep you lying awake at night covered in a thin film of sweat is simply this,

“Any action, inaction or wrong action tomorrow at work may well mean I kill someone”.

I suspect doctors have this a lot worse than us ambulance people.

Second least fun thing yesterday – Trying to hold the leg of a five year old boy still while he waved it around.  I was feeling the broken ends of his leg grinding together.