I came across this heartening story while browsing the BBC News site.

A mother from Bristol resuscitated her baby boy four times when he stopped breathing - with the help of a 999 operator on the phone.
Driving instructor Cordelia Nolan, 25, said she was "petrified" when her 10-week premature baby, Emrys, lost his colour and turned blue.
Ms Nolan started resuscitation straight away and a cousin dialled 999 and relayed the operator's instructions.

I'm glad that the baby is doing well. If the baby had stopped breathing then the mother did exactly the right thing.

-----

I can usually count on a few 'Baby not breathing' calls each week the number of calls that I've actually been to when a child hasn't been breathing can, thankfully, be counted on the fingers of one hand*.

Often the 'child not breathing' is actually a child having a febrile fit, by the time we get there the fit has normally stopped and the child is either asleep or crying. It's scary but incredibly common, when an infection is spreading through my area it seems that the only calls I go to are for febrile children. I sometimes joke to parents that the only children that I see are either fitting or vomiting.

During a febrile fit a child can get blue lips, if a child holds their breath they can get blue lips - blue lips tend, on their own, to be 'not terribly worrying' on the scale of things us ambulance types worry about.

Rather obviously a child who has blue lips is a scary prospect for a parent and so they, quite rightly, call for an ambulance. Sometimes they say that the child has stopped breathing, after all that's why lips go blue.

When we arrive the child has normally made a full recovery from it's breath holding, but as we are not doctors we recommend that the child comes in to hospital with us.

What is less common, but a bit funnier is when you have a drunk who has seen his friend 'die' and managed to 'save' him with a bit of CPR. Or as we like to call it 'waking him up by pushing on his chest'. A tip - if he's pink and trying to push you off he's probably not dead**.

*After an accident with a threshing machine.

**Except when you are doing really good CPR on a dead person and they open their eyes and look at you - it's only happened twice with me and it freaked me out both times - especially as neither of them survived.

The last week was a week off from my 'day job', (is it still a day job if you work nights I wonder), what this let me do was catch up on all the things that I can't do when I'm working. What this really means is that my 'week off' was a week spent in meetings, plotting plans, doing writing work and other such things.

This week is also going to be a busy one, not only do I have forty-eight hours of ambulance work, I also have a PR conference where I am a panel guest. I also have the final changes to the sequel to Blood, Sweat and Tea to have in by the end of the week - with some luck I'll have some interesting news about both books in the near future.

Then I need to start planning out the narrative arcs for my third book, which will be fiction - something that I've never really done before.

I'll also hopefully have some good news about a gig that is quite unlike anything else that I've done before - I'll let you know what that is as soon as I can.

Finally I'm chasing yet another writing job that could be extremely interesting.

But tucked away at the end of everything else is a regular podcast and the possibility of another website.

Oh yes, and I should write some blogposts for this blog before I get carried away...

I think I need to employ an assistant.

All of this means that my time spent doing my 'day job', my ambulance work, will be one of the few moments that I'll have to relax - which is obviously a bit strange.

For those that want to take part, this Monday's question (to be answered in the comments) is, "Tell me about a teacher that made an impact on you". I ask this because I'm reading 'Moab is my washpot', the early autobiography of Stephen Fry where he talks about his teachers. Due to my shocking memory I can't remember any of my teachers, so I'd like to hear about yours.

All I can hear is the sound of traffic passing beneath me but I know that will soon change.

I've parked the ambulance on the raised slipway where the accident has taken place. Two cars trying to take the same space space at the same time means that we have been called to help the driver of one of the cars.

I park the ambulance so that the drivers going past have no option but to slow down, lights making that familiar blue pattern in the night.

My crewmate is the one looking after the patients today and her quick assessment and a nod to me makes me realise that it's going to get noisy.

I call for the fire service, we need them to cut the roof off the car.

It's my job to sit on the back seat and hold the head of the driver so that he doesn't move it around thereby possibly aggravating any neck injury.

I have to hold it tight as he keeps wanting to turn around and tell me to make sure that his papers are retrieved from the boot of the car. And that we don't forget to collect the GPS holder on the windscreen.

It's quiet, just the traffic driving beneath me and the cars driving slowly past my ambulance.

Then the fire engines turn up and it gets noisy.

Hydraulic machinery is pulled from the back of the appliances, firefighters chock the car so that it is a stable platform to work on and they start to break all the windows - covers placed to avoid the glass going on me or the patient.

My arms are getting tired, it can take a long time to remove the roof of the car.

The cutters start snipping at the car, first the doors come off then the rear pillars. They wrap a big bit of plastic sheeting over me and the patient, its like being in a tent.

I can imagine what is going happening on the other side of the sheet even if I can't see it. The cutters snip away at the other pillars and the roof is peeled back. From my side I'm in an opaque white cocoon with weird bangs and shakes coming from outside. Not for the first time I'm glad I'm not claustrophobic, instead I concentrate on my arms - the burning sensation of holding the patient's head is starting to turn into a painful numbness.

I wish I was on the other side of the plastic with my crewmate, she's getting the trolley out of the ambulance and is preparing the back board and head blocks.

Because of the helmet I'm wearing all the noises are muffled, I've taken my glasses off to stop the helmet pressing on them so my vision is blurred - not that there is much to see, just the back of the driver's seat and the plastic sheet.

And my arms, that now feel like they are falling off.

Then the sheet is thrown back and I can raise my head into the air again. Lovely.

It is then a simple task to get the patient out and tucked up in the ambulance, the fire service have, once more, done their job with expert professionalism and have made our job much simpler. They slide him up the back board while I try to rub some life back into my arms.

We wave goodbye to the firefighters who are sweeping the debris off the street and then speed our patient through the night to the hospital.

Halfway down the stairs his head rolled back and he stopped breathing.

-----

It was one of our usual types of daytime calls, a person who is housebound calls out their GP for a long running health problem, the GP arrives, assesses them and decides they need to go to hospital. The GP then phones for an ambulance and asks for one in a given time frame.

On some day shifts this can be the sort of jobs we go to all the time. We do so many as a service we have a 'Green Bus' that does mostly this type of call. It works for us because the staff on these ambulances aren't trained as much as EMTs and so their pay packets are smaller (quite a lot smaller I think).

We had been asked to get to this patient within an hour, the GP had told our Control that he had difficulty in breathing. This was our second 'Green' call of the day, something that doesn't require lights and sirens. The flat was only a little way from the hospital but as the patient was housebound and ambulance was needed.

The third floor flat was situated in a really awkward place, big gates stopped us parking the ambulance nearby - they have padlocks on them that we should have keys for, but I've never seen any such keys in existence - I suspect that the Fire Service has the keys though. Due to this we had to park the ambulance 200 yards away from the entry to the flats, not ideal at all.

We were let into the flat by the next door neighbour who does a bit of volunteer care for our patient, as soon as I entered the patient's flat I could taste cigarette smoke, it was so bad my crewmate (who is young and has baby pink lungs) stayed outside.

Our patient was sitting on the edge of his bed smoking a cigarette, he was obese, edging on the weight limit of our carry chair. I'll be honest and admit that my heart sank a little when I realised that I'd be carrying him down three flights of stairs.

It also struck me that this patient was really rather ill, I could hear their bubbly breathing from across the room, the signs of heart failure were obvious and it was plain to see that this patient needed hospital treatment sooner rather than later.

"I'm not going to hospital", he said between puffs on his cigarette.

Great.

So began the long process of persuading the patient that hospital was their best solution and that they shouldn't really wait for tomorrow when they would be 'ready' for hospital. It was only after I got the GP to phone the patient up again and essentially order them to go to hospital that the patient finally agreed to go.

I sensed that the patient was agoraphobic, he probably hadn't been outside of his house in years. During the discussion to get the patient attend hospital he smoked another two cigarettes.

After gathering all the things that our patient would need we wrapped him in a blanket an strapped him to our carry chair. It was going to be a heavy lift down those three flights of stairs.

The first flight went well, but halfway down the second the patient started to become agitated and complained that he was slipping out the chair - we stopped and checked that this wasn't the case and spent some time reassuring the patient.

Then halfway down the final flight of stairs his head tipped back and he looked me in the eyes. Then stopped breathing.

There is a moment, just a moment when your mind refuses to parse the fact that the person you are looking after has stopped breathing, you just aren't sure and can't quite believe that they have just died.

"He's suspended", I grunted at my crewmate. By now the effort of carrying this patient down the stairs had sapped me of much of my strength but the shock of what had just happened flooded my system with adrenaline as we flew down the final few steps.

I started CPR, unfortunately the only place that we could lay the patient flat was under a stairwell, it was incredibly cramped - my crewmate ran the 200 yards back to the ambulance to call for help and grab some more equipment, she had to do this again to get the trolley. The running backwards and forwards had turned her cheeks a rosy red.

Our patient had rapidly taken on the pale and waxy colour of the dead.

We worked on our patient, help came in the form of another ambulance and we moved the patient to the ambulance. Doing CPR under the stairs followed by running to the ambulance with the remnants of our equipment caused by back to seize up, at one point it was all I could do to sit on the floor of the ambulance and whimper.

Which gave me plenty of time to realise that the last thing that my patient had seen was my face, with an expression that showed my shock at having them suddenly die in front of me.

The other ambulance crew took him to the hospital, my crewmate travelling with them while I followed up behind n our ambulance. The hospital did their best but there was nothing that they could do.

I sat at the hospital filling out my paperwork while my crewmate restocked and cleaned the ambulance - it gave me plenty of time to sit and think about the job.

It seemed undeniable that our carrying the patient down the stairs had frightened them so much that his, already failing, heart had given out. We'd killed him.

We hadn't had any choice in the matter, there was no way that he could have walked down the stairs, so the chair was the only route. If we'd left him at home he wouldn't have survived the night. If we'd blue lighted to the call it wouldn't have made any difference. There was no possible treatment that the patient could have had at home. There was no treatment that we could have given that we didn't already give.

It was just that person's time to die, sadly not in their own bed but in our carry chair, halfway down the stairs.

The computer terminal in the cab of the ambulance rang.

The description of the job was blank. The address we were supposed to go to was blank. The ORCON start time wasn't blank.

The terminal continued to ring, it wanted us to press our 'on the way to the job' button.

But where were we supposed to go?

Twenty seconds later a postcode arrived on the screen. Still no proper address, still no patient complaint.

Another twenty seconds later and we had a full address, there was still nothing in the 'patient complaining of' section. We didn't know if it was one of the addresses in our area that was flagged as 'dangerous'.

Finally, a minute and a half later, the job description arrived - a young man with abdominal pain.

Then a few moments later we were cancelled as Control sent the call to our Clinical Telephone Advice desk, to see if they could determine if an ambulance really was required.

Finally I let the handbrake up and started to drive.

'Call Connect' was the new way of measuring ORCON (our eight minute response), brought in to standardise the way that ambulance trusts reported their response time. Until call connect came in, some trust started the clock when they had the address and complaint, some started in when the phone rang and some seemingly started it once the ambulance arrived on the scene...

Obviously this was unfair - so a new national standard was brought in to start the clock from the moment the patient phoned the ambulance service - as soon as BT connected the call the stopwatch starts.

What this means is that, via caller line identification, the service knows the rough area that the call is coming from and an ambulance is automatically assigned - even if we don't know the full address.

No longer do we start the clock with an address and a complaint - so we could be sent into 'man walking around shooting people indiscriminately' without back up and without warning. All to make a (pointless) government target.

It doesn't just mean that we are placing ambulance crews in more danger (because, being generally cynical swines, we'll sit by the side of the road until we get some relevant information). If you go racing off to a call that you get cancelled on a few moments later you are putting the general public at risk.

On more than one occasion I've been sent on, and cancelled, five times in the space of a minute - you end up dizzy while continuously doing three point turns in the middle of the road only to be cancelled and sent in the direction you were originally travelling in.

Crew safety is no longer a priority it would seem (if it ever was), instead it's just more chasing of the clock.

I wish someone up in our management would have the bollocks to take the government to task over the utterly pointless and now dangerous ORCON target.

But it was my boss, and governmental advisor, that thought up the new way of recording the time, so I don't think it'll be him.

I'm bunkering down at the moment, I need to have the sequel to 'Blood, Sweat and Tea' in to my publishers this Friday - I really should make a start on it...

I am a known lightweight when it comes to laughing gas.

The evidence...

So, when you are a patient in my ambulance it really isn't in your best interest to breath this painkilling and euphoric gas so hard and fast that the majority of it is blowing out your nose.

Into the cab.

Where I am.

Because if you do, I will be getting high like yourself - and feeling sick...

(Currently struggling with a post that is resisting being beaten into shape and tackling statistical analysis for another, as yet unwritten, post).

We'd just been kicked off our ambulance station for 'Active Area Cover' - the psychic computer that tells us where the next call is coming from obviously had a headache as this call was next door to our ambulance station.

Category 'A' response blue lights and sirens. Fast car also sent.

She's in her twenties, she has a cold.

Category 'A' response blue lights and sirens. Fast car also sent.

The call has been given as a 'severe difficulty in breathing' It's one of our highest priority calls.

Category 'A' response blue lights and sirens. Fast car also sent.

We've been doing calls like this for the last few days, this is just like the others.

Category 'A' response blue lights and sirens. Fast car also sent.

When we reach her, she's standing at the top of the stairs smiling at us.

Category 'A' response blue lights and sirens. Fast car also sent.

Her husband follows the ambulance to the hospital in his car.

Category 'A' response blue lights and sirens. Fast car also sent.

The hospital is less than half a mile away.

Category 'A' response blue lights and sirens. Fast car also sent.

When I *politely* remind him that the 999 number is for life-threatening emergencies and that he could have taken her in the car he gets defensive and tells me that he is not a doctor.

Category 'A' response blue lights and sirens. Fast car also sent.

They went to hospital two days earlier for the same problem. The hospital gave her Paracetamol for the temperature and told her to take it regularly.

Category 'A' response blue lights and sirens. Fast car also sent.

She last took it fourteen hours ago

Category 'A' response blue lights and sirens. Fast car also sent.

We tried to give her advice, but she ignored it.

Category 'A' response blue lights and sirens. Fast car also sent.

We take her to hospital, I grind my teeth, the husband follows behind in his car, Control call out on the radio - looking for an ambulance to attend to an elderly chest pain.

Category 'A' response blue lights and sirens. Fast car also sent.

It's not news anymore, it's not unusual, it doesn't seem to matter. Our 'No Send' policy is foiled by a patient reporting a blocked nose.

Category 'A' response blue lights and sirens. Fast car also sent.

Elsewhere in our area a man was dying from a heart attack.