Another call, oh well. Never mind, it's a nice day and it's better than being cooped up in an office. Let's get there while waving at the small children who wave at blue lighting ambulances. Hmmm, one of our regulars drunk in the street - still it gives me faith in humanity to know that someone on a bus driving past was concerned enough about their fellow man to call an a ambulance. Let's get him up. Hello Fred, another trip to the hospital? I wonder what drove him to drink, I wonder why he keeps losing hostel places. Its a shame really, wasted lives and all that. Why can't we provide a decent detox programme, I'm sure if we spent the money on him it'd save the NHS in the long run. Oh well, easy enough job - walk on, walk off, no hassle. Time for our next job.
NOVEMBER
A call? Bet it's some bastard pissed in the street. And why is no wanker getting out the way of our ambulance - can't you see big yellow ambulances with blue flashing lights you twat? Oh great, it's Fred, yet another pisshead. Some 'good Samaritan' who didn't actually want to stop to see if the obvious homeless guy is alright. Suppose they'll feel like a hero now calling us out to this waste of space. Blimey, he smells worse than usual - has he been rolling in his own piss? How weak willed do you have to be to get like this - the bottle is never a god idea for solving problems. I bet he gets thrown out of hostels because he takes a dump in their corridors, just like he did to my ambulance yesterday. Pull him up and throw him on the back, off to the hospital while we wait for him to die. Then we et to do it all again once the hospital discharges him.
The trick, of course, is to remain the professional while these different thoughts are rattling around in your head. It gets a bit hard in winter. Actually the hardest part is dragging yourself out of bed to go into work, knowing that these are the sorts of people you'll be spending most of your time with.
It can be awkward trying to hide your feelings when all you want to do is curl up in a corner and sleep.
My phone keeps buzzing from the Twitters of my friends. The big topic of conversation is the hailing rain and the gales.
I know all about it, I'm dripping wet at the side of the road. Two cars have collided and I'm standing in the dark in an attempt to stop any bystanders from stealing something from the wrecked cars. It's a November night at that indeterminable time of the night that could be ten, or midnight, or 3 a.m.
The leaking oil is reflecting streetlights and it makes pretty patterns beneath my feet.
I'm waiting for the police, our Control has let us know that they have no units to send. It's a shame, but the police station is only a little way up the road. I can just about see the 'Police' sign through my water-covered glasses. My crewmate is in the ambulance dealing with the two people who only have minor injuries from the crash.
Then from up the road appears a police sergeant. He's walked up from the station to come and give us a hand.
It seems that the local police are a bit thin on the ground and the sergeant talks into his radio to call some police away from paperwork to help make the place safe. It's dark and the immobile cars are a hazard to traffic. We've already tried to push it out the way ourselves but some hidden bent bit of metal is making that impossible.
The officers arrive and we all turn our hands to pushing the cars out of the way, finally they start rolling and we soon have them on the side of the road.
I'm left standing in the rain as the back of the ambulance is getting a little crowded, patients and relatives - none with coats. As I'm the only one wearing something approaching weatherproof clothing I'm left standing outside.
My phone buzzes, more Twitters arrive. Apparently it's raining. I'd never have guessed.
Eventually more relatives of the two women who have been sheltering in our ambulance turn up. They shake our hands and thank us, then the people are away. No need for hospital and they have things that they need to do.
I climb into the cab.
I steam slightly. At least it's the end of the shift, actually it's past the end of the shift and I now have less than eleven hours before I have to do it all again.
Normally if I get sent to someone who isn't 'sick' I'll start grinding my teeth and begin composing angry blogposts in my head. However, sometimes it's great to go to someone who isn't acutely ill.
We were on the edge of our patch following our last job and were dismayed to find that the current job was going to send us far, far out of our area. We assumed that it wasn't going to be an easy job either as it was sent to us as 'Mentally ill man, walking down middle of the road'. The last job I remember like this the man was 6'2" tall, naked and covered in his own faeces...
But the police were the ones who called us, so we guessed that the scene would be safe.
Our patient turned out to be in his fifties and suffering from dementia. A check showed that he hadn't suffered any physical harm. The police had already determined where he came from - he'd escaped from his care home two days ago. He'd also crossed the river so in order to return him home we'd have to head into the dreaded South London.
To be honest, I don't know why the police didn't return him themselves - I suppose that there was a fear that they would miss some tricky medical condition. Or maybe it was just that they share our dislike of crossing the Thames.
It's their own fault then that they didn't get to meet the care staff, nor have the satisfaction of being thanked and seeing the patient returned home safely.
It actually seemed like a nice home, the carers seemed decent people and
I commented on the security bars over the windows of the home to one of the staff, suggesting that it should have made it harder for our patient to escape.
"Oh", she said, "that's not to keep the residents in, it's to stop the locals from smashing the windows and stealing the residents property".
Please note, all disparaging remarks about being South of the River, and of the inhabitants of South London being the sort of people who eat their own children have been made purely for comedic effect.
It's a small pleasure we take in our patients sometimes, take one lady. She's in her eighties and originally from India, during the day she felt dizzy and fell to the floor. By the time that we'd arrived the next door neighbour had picked her up and sat her in the kitchen.
She greeted us politely and we all started to have a little chat, the thing that brought warmth to the cold hard nugget of coal that was my heart was that when she laughed she giggled like a schoolgirl. A laugh of that 'age' means a life well lived.
On the other hand I find that, in the words of a certain Mr John Lydon, 'anger is an energy'.
Another old woman, with us called by one of the 'carers' who visit he four times a day in order to clean her and her house.
The first thing that the carer did was complain about how long the ambulance had taken (half an hour, it wasn't a priority call), she told me that she had been there for an hour and a half.
...and for that hour and a half the patient had been left swimming in a bed full of piss.
The room stank, it stank of ammonia and it stank of flesh slowly being burned in ammonia.
No attempt had been made to clean her, nor change her clothes. We were instead 'ordered' by the carer to take the patient to the hospital.
My crewmate interrupted my discussion with the 'carer' because she could see the direction that it was suddenly taking...
(Methinks it's good for my career to work with people like this, while making crap 'carers' break down in tears is good for my sanity it isn't that helpful for the patient).
So we cleaned the patient and put her into a new dress, which took all of three minutes, and took her to hospital for her very minor injury.
Then it was time to turn all that anger into making sure that our patient was referred to the proper social services department. Which made me feel much better.
Oh yes.
Although I may have pushed a little too heavily on the paper in some parts.
"19 year old male, chest pain", that's a blue light, sirens, whizzing through the streets sort of call. Not because he's nineteen, but because it's a chest pain. Remember, chest pains are one of the things that we need to get to in eight minutes or the government will slap us on the wrist.
Nineteen year olds don't often have heart attacks, not unless they have been hitting the cocaine rather hard. Where they do have heart problems it sadly tends to be of the sort that causes the heart to stop suddenly.
So we arrived and the young man was very pleasant. He certainly didn't look like he was having a heart attack, he was upright, he wasn't sweaty, he wasn't dizzy and he wasn't having any trouble with his breathing.
"I've had this pain for half an hour, and I've seen those posters, the one with the belt around the chest, so I thought I'd call you".
So we popped him into the ambulance and did all the tests that we normally do including an ECG and a full history.
He'd been working out at the gym the day previously, the pain got worse if he took a deep breath in and the ECG was more normal than my own.
I told him that we couldn't be sure, that the only way to be certain would be with blood tests, but the patient seemed happy that he wasn't having a heart attack.
"I suppose you think I'm silly", he said.
"No mate, I'd rather come out to someone who is thinking they are having a heart attack than to come out to someone lying dead on the floor because they ignored their heart attack".
Sometime I moan about people calling the ambulance for inappropriate reasons, the verrucas, the runny noses, the period pains - but I never moan about people calling me out for chest pains.
Chest pains are 'boring' jobs for us, you need to do a lot of things and run over the same questions and there is seldom any change in the circumstances of the patient.
But I don't go to work to be entertained. I go to work to get paid help people, and that is why you should call for an ambulance if you get chest pain.
She sits there, quietly she tells me about what has happened. She describes one of the worst things one human being can do to another. She's reliving it for me.
I shouldn't be here.
I should be waiting outside, waiting for the police to arrive to make sure that the scene was safe.
But as I sat outside with the message on my screen saying 'police have no units to send' all I could think of was her, alone in the house. Or with the person who did this to her.
So we went in.
As she tells me what happened my crewmate is in the room next door playing with her child, her child who seems thankfully ignorant of what has happened.
When I've been to a job like this before the police have always been there first, today I'm there first. I'm the first authority face that she sees.
So she unburdens herself onto me, there is nothing I can say to make things better, all I can do is offer her someone to listen to and a promise that the police will arrive soon.
Welcome to Random Acts Of Reality, a Blog based in London, England, written by an E.M.T working for the London Ambulance Service. Also, number one search result for "Womble porn". All names have be changed to protect the guilty. This Blog was previously known as "Why I Hate Humanity" but the antipsychotic medication seems to have kicked in.
All opinions on this website are mine alone, and may not reflect those of the L.A.S or other ambulance crews
