I sitting opposite my patient, the patient that the police have managed to stop from killing himself. This wasn't a cry for help, he had chosen three different suicide techniques, and then tried them all at once.

Blood drips from him onto the floor, he's crying as well so his tears mix in with the blood. Mucus is dribbling from his nose as he lets out huge heaving sobs. The police officer with him rubs his back with a gloved hand with her other hand she holds his arm, to stop him beating himself. The officer has formed a bond with my patient, one that I won't be able to replicate in the short time he is in my care. I leave the police officer to it as she's doing a fine job, one perhaps not in her normal job description.

We let him have a cigarette in the back of the ambulance with the doors open to let the smoke out, we are thankful that it's not a cold night. It's not 'allowed' but sometimes you have to break the rules for the patient. This is only the second time I've let someone light up in my ambulance. I'm away that the curtains are twitching in the tower blocks around us. A real life soap opera, entertainment illuminated by blue flashing lights.

He tells us the story of his life, one of pain and the worst forms of betrayal stretching from his childhood to the events that have brought him here tonight. Sometimes he has shown weakness, at other times a strength that I'm not sure I would have had. Often I wouldn't believe such stories, he won't meet my eyes as he talks but, instead of signifying deceit, it only makes his words truer. As his story comes to a conclusion I can see why he would want to kill himself. Everyone he has ever trusted has turned against him, not from simple neglect but from active abuse.

We leave him at the hospital, a side room with privacy. I thank the police officer for her help. I book him in, then head back to station to mop the floor of the ambulance - to remove the blood and the tears. It's my last job of the evening so I drive home. My car radio stays off, I drive in silence.

I have known him only for a moment, the police will know him for a little more, the nurses longer still.

But what he has told me will stay with me.

One of those jobs we get a lot of - 'male collapsed in street, facial injury'.

So we arrived to find him face down.

I rolled him over, he didn't have a pulse, he wasn't breathing.

We did what we do - we tried to restart the heart, to bring him back to life.

The details are unimportant. What is important is that on that day someone's husband died, someone's father, someone's son.

There was no warning, he just dropped dead.

One moment alive, the next moment gone.

He was only a little older than me.

If this job has taught me one thing, it's that our time on this planet is precious, and that time can end at any moment.

So live life to the full. Make yourself happy. Try to make those that you care for happy. Your life is the only thing that you truly own and you only get one - so don't sweat the small stuff.

"Come!", she said to me.

She didn't even glance over her shoulder as she repeated, "Come".

"Oi!", I said back to her, more than a little miffed, "Don't talk to me like I'm one of your clients".

-----

We'd been working on the edge of our area so it was a pleasant surprise to find ourselves sent back to our own patch.

Top priority call - a transfer from the Mental Health Unit to the A&E department. All of 400 yards.

But no matter, the patient apparently had a swollen foot, and the mental health unit can't treat that - given the nurses I meet there I doubt that they could treat a shaving cut. We do this all the time, transferring patients this short distance.

I wasn't sure why this was a high priority call, apparently the nurse wanted it to be so. As they are on the scene and are apparently a trained professional our Control follow their lead.

So, at risk to me, my crewmate and any members of the public dumb enough to get in my way we blue-lighted it to the unit.

At the unit we were met by the the nurse who said nothing to me except, "Come".

This is not the best way to get into the good books of the nice ambulance man.

She mumbled an apology as I followed her to the patient. There was another nurse in the patient's room and the patient was laying on the bed. I asked the nurses what the problem was; they looked at one another and umm-ed and aah-ed before telling me that she had a painful foot.

I looked at the patient's foot, it was a bit swollen and the blood test results in her notes showed an infection. She'd had the problem for at least four days.

"Who called the ambulance?", I asked.

One of the nurses admitted to being the guilty party.

"You see, by asking for a blue-light response I have had to drive to this call with the same speed and risk as if I was going to someone who is having a heart attack".

"She isn't having a heart attack", said the nurse.

"I know, that's why it is inappropriate to ask for a blue-light response for a case like this".

The nurse made no indication of understanding.

We spoke to the patient, she was refusing to go to the hospital, I tried persuading her but she was adamant that she wouldn't be leaving the bed.

I asked the nurses about the patients mental health issues.

"We don't know", one nurse said, "she's only been here four days, so we don't know much about her."

Ok - fair enough, maybe she has a long and complicated mental health history.

My crewmate flicked through her notes, "Says here that she is delusional and hasn't left her bed in two years".

Yeah, that'll do for a history - seems that my crewmate suddenly knew the patient better than the nurses who'd been looking after her for the last few days.

The patient was refusing to leave the bed, she told me that one reason for this was that her foot hurt.

I turned to the nurses, "You've been giving her painkillers?"

"Yes", they replied, "Paracetamol".

"O.K. Paracetamol is a painkiller, that's good. When did she last have a dose?"

"Yesterday".

"Errr, you know it only lasts about four hours".

The nurses looked sheepishly at each other.

I continued, "what you are saying is that this patient has been in pain, yet she hasn't been getting any painkillers. Is there any reason for this?"

The nurses said nothing.

We finally managed to get the patient to the hospital, accompanied by the traditional nurse escort that doesn't know the patient at all.

It was a stroke of luck that my complex manager was on station as we pulled up. I let her know what was going on, I let her know that we'd been run on blue lights across town so that we could quickly get to someone who'd been unwell for a few days, I let her know about the nurse being rude to me and I let her know that the patient hadn't been given painkillers.

She took our paperwork from us and promised to bring it up in the meeting that she has with them later this week.

It's nice to have a manager who supports you - but without having a complete turn-over of staff at the unit I can't see there being much of change. This isn't the first time I've had a problem with this unit.

The second thirteen hour shift on the trot has me rather tired.

So I'm off to bed.

Not enough energy to write the blogpost that is percolating through my head.

Up at five in the morning to do it all over again.

Nighty-night all.

Here's a thing - when there is an ambulance news story I often get emails from people asking if I've seen it. I've yet to see as many people email me over a story as this one. (And I like getting these sorts of emails, as sometimes I'll have missed the story).

An elderly couple say they are distressed as an ambulance worker wants to sue them after falling during a call to their Lincolnshire home.

The technician fell over on 82-year-old Joan Boardman's driveway in Louth as he went to fetch a stretcher.

The Boardmans have now received a letter from his solicitors saying he is seeking damages for personal injury.

Now the important thing is that I don't know any details of this case - so anything that I have to say on the subject is pretty much guesswork and supposition.

The first thing that I would suggest that if the ambulance worker suffered an injury, he would be off work on full pay for quite some time (I think it's six months down here in the LAS).

Secondly - I would suggest that if he had injured himself in a place of work, say a factory, then yes - health and safety law applies. I don't think, and I am certainly no lawyer, that health and safety law doesn't apply to homeowners in their own home. There isn't, as far as I know, any legislation saying that a path on private property has to be well lit.

Thirdly - We work in inherently difficult situations, lighting is often poor, sometimes there is a lot of rubbish around the place we work and occasionally there are some everyday hazards, like loose carpeting and the like. Accidents sometimes happen and falling over is often no-ones fault but your own.

I would also disagree with the comment from the Unison person who said,

"I can understand people finding it hard to believe but of course if someone is injured during work then somebody has got to take liability."

Now a disclaimer - I don't like Unison - but even with that said, has there ever been a dafter thing said? We don't live in a perfectly predictable world and sometimes things go wrong for no reason apart from blind chance. Actually without that randomness of life my work would be a lot more boring.

Sometimes I trip over my own feet - should I try to sue the maker of my boots? Or should I sue my mum for giving me 'clumsy' genes?

It all sounds incredibly silly to me. I'd sue a business if I went up on their catwalk and it collapsed, and I'd sue someone who assaulted me when I'd been sent to help them, but to sue because I fell over on their path is just plain wrong in my eyes.

Of course if a lawyer wants to point out how everything I've written here is wrong, they are welcome to leave a comment.

---

Second disclaimer - if the above makes no sense, my apologies. I've just got in from a long twelve hour shift and I'm utterly shattered - especially as we got a late job out of our area.

There are places in this job that become regular haunts for us ambulance lot. Often they are places that you wouldn't want to be in, the worse types of estates, the hostels full of drug users, the crack houses.

There is one place that lets me feel a little happy to be going there - just so long as it's for nothing too serious.

We have a borough special needs school on our patch and it's a lovely place. It's always clean and cheerful and colourful. The children all seem happy and, strangely for a school, so do the staff.

Some of the children there are regular customers of ours, normally because they are epileptic and while the staff can easily cope with a simple seizure, sometimes the child has more than one and so needs more medical assistance than the staff can provide.

Unlike some of the nursing homes that I go to the staff member that accompanies the child in the ambulance always knows them, and they will spend the journey trying their best to comfort the child - a far cry from the 'nurse' who neither knows the patient or does anything but sit motionless in the passenger seat.

We went there today, a new child with severe problems - the staff who came with us talked to the child all the way into the hospital and gently stroked his hair. You can see how much the staff care for even those children they are yet to know well.

And it's unforced, it just comes naturally to the staff. I've seen it in some nursing homes, where the care of people is as important as the job itself. The staff walk around with smiles on their faces and we often have friendly chats with them.

So I come away happy, knowing that out there, in little pockets, there are people who really do care for others, who don't tick boxes and count pay-cheques.

And I'm glad that I've never had to go to anything too serious there.

I'm a twit sometimes.

Take yesterday. I'm supposed to be working four night shifts, so I arrive in work with plenty of time to spare (and so I can pop across the road and get my dinner, a half-pound heart attack in a bun).

My crewmate turns up, we get our kit on the ambulance and wait for the first call.

Then the resource center (who handles the staffing of vehicles) phones up my crewmate and tells her that she's single and they are sending someone to work with her.

The shoe drops - I'd booked these four nights off early last year so that I could go to SXSW, but then money became a problem so I couldn't go. I'd then forgotten to cancel the leave.

What a nice surprise.

I'm back at work on next Thursday - so I have a chance to do a load of things that I've been putting off because I haven't had the time.

---

Just a quick comment on the news that the report on 24 hour licensing is to be positive.

It's not my opinion, there has been a 12% increase in alcohol related calls to the LAS in the last two years (without an increase of resourcing to deal with it). The Information Centre shows that admissions for alcohol have doubled in the last decade. And anecdotal evidence would suggest the same.

It just shows how detached from reality our policy makers are. Or how blatant the conspiracy between government and alcohol producers has become.

It's nearing the end of our shift - the job we are on is our last one.

We find ourselves looking out the bedroom window at the FRU driver, one of our officers and the new team leader he's showing around. They are talking to each other.

They had arrived to give us help, but we didn't need it.

Behind us the body lays on the bed. He's been dead some time, there is nothing that we could do to help him.

He's younger than me and only a bit older than my crewmate.

As we look out the window both of us deep in thought. I comment on the thinning hair of our officer. We are waiting for the police to arrive.

The death is unlikely to be suspicious but, as is often the case in these things, the last time he spoke to his mum was to have an argument.

She's the one who found him, she hadn't spoken to him since the argument and was getting worried.

I drew the short straw, the one to break the bad news.

English isn't her first language so I needed to make sure she understood.

"I'm sorry, he's dead. There is nothing we can do for him. He's been dead for a long time".

As we await the police I can hear her phoning the relatives in other parts of the globe. Our officer has lent her his phone, he'll have to explain it to someone further up the food chain why these international numbers have appeared on the bill.

As always our eyes are playing tricks on us, we imagine him breathing.

We've all looked around the flat, it's not nosiness - we are all trying to work out why someone so young would suddenly drop dead. We are looking for a reason, or just a reason why it couldn't be us.

There isn't one.