Sometimes, normally around this time of year as I lay in my bed thinking of reasons not to get out of it, I get a melancholy upon me. So I watch the hours tick away, huddled under the duvet while things that I should be doing get put aside for another day.

And I think of the ambulance jobs I've done and I get a little sad.

I think of the twenty-something victim of drunken driving who we pulled from the seat of his car because we knew he was dying. Of the blood pissing from his ears, an obvious huge head injury. Of our ambulance becoming a mortuary for two bodies.

I remember the thirteen year old girl whose heart just stopped. Of the futile attempts to save her, of her mother wailing outside the Resus room.

The only time I've cried actual tears, my first sudden infant death. Carrying the tiny baby in to the waiting doctors, knowing that there was nothing that could be done.

Thinking on how sad I was when one of our pleasant semi-regulars died in a way completely unrelated to her long term health problems. I wonder how her husband, also not a well man, will cope.

I think of all the Ethels and Alberts I've been to, laid on their beds in lonely 'nursing' home rooms. The ones who have died, and the ones who would wish themselves dead.

The woman, beaten by her husband and promising my crewmate that she wouldn't go back to him, walking hand in hand with him out the A&E department.

The house full of twenty year old alcoholics, wasted lives, refusing help, happy to be unwell and dirty and dying. Just so long as that next drink is around the corner.

The good man who loved his son and who died suddenly with no ID on him. The family only finding out after they went to the police.

The mother of two young children - dying on Christmas eve.

The stream of lovely old folk, with cancer, with dementia, with other fatal and painful diseases.

The things I can't change, the small neglects that one person visits on another, the luck of the draw.

These are the things that stop me getting up when I have no work to do, and when the days are like nights. These are the things that I think of when all motivation to 'do something' has left me.

This is why I wait for Spring.