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.

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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.

"Let's do great things."

-Warren Ellis

He's right.

For some time I think I've been coasting on this blog, much as I've been coasting in my life. The blog has degenerated into 'watch me have a nervous breakdown' while I write about the same old things. Likewise, while I have started hating my job and while feeling generally burnt out I've been doing very little to change this.

The credit crunch is a good excuse not to look for work, as is the lethargy brought on by working rotating shifts. Writing about the same old thing has worked out fine for me so far so why should I change it?

Before the Christmas break I applied for a different post within the LAS, that of 'Web communication officer', a role that I consider myself uniquely qualified for. Unfortunately I wasn't successful in getting it. I am not going to speculate on the reasons why I didn't get the post, but in any case 'on paper' I shouldn't have even been given the interview that I was granted.

As part of the preparation for trying for an internal promotion I've been keeping my blogging 'safe'. I've not been writing about the plummeting staff morale and some of the reasons behind it, about how our adherence to government targets has had a negative impact on patient care or how some of our ambulances have been dangerous to use.

Keeping these things quiet has been causing me no end of internal turmoil. When writing this blog I've always tried to be as honest and open as possible, yet I found myself sitting on stories that really should be made public. For the sake of my career I've been toeing the company line. It's been costing me sleep at night as the things that I should be writing about rattle through my head.

Well, no more.

Realising that I'm going to be stuck at my current level for as long as I work for the ambulance service has freed me to become honest again. While I will still write about the jobs that I go to and congratulate the ambulance service for the things that we do well, I will now also be writing about the things that we do poorly.

But it's not enough for me to just write about the things that directly impact me, I'm going to start digging for information. Using information gathered under the Freedom of Information act as well as talking to other people within the service I hope to bring the truth, warts and all, to this blog.

I'm going to try thinking like a journalist.

There will be some longer pieces by myself that will be properly researched and actually drafted and edited (unlike how I normally write which is 'first draft goes up after I run it through a spellchecker'). I will also be working on preparing a 'safety net' to enable me to keep paying my rent should I be disciplined by LAS management.

My goal? To have questions asked in the house of parliament, to try and change things for the better for as many people as possible and to change my own life for the better.

The other thing that I've been guilty of is that of letting things happen to me - Most of the good, interesting and fun things that I've done related to blogging have not been initiated by me, instead someone or some group has approached me with a request. What I need to do is be more proactive in seeking out opportunities and maybe creating some good things for myself and other people. To do this I'm planning some new projects and will be looking for collaborators to help me out with some of these.

As always the only resource that I have to spend will be my time and energy - something that I have in short supply. I plan to get around this by reorganising the way I run my life, streamlining things like the amount of RSS feeds I read and cutting down on playing World of Warcraft*.

So - I'm returning to this blog with new direction and hopefully some more vigour, reworking some projects that I've left fallow and hopefully joining up with some people to create new and interesting 'stuff'.

Let's see if I can do 'Great Things'.

*I've only managed to increase the level of my Warcraft character by four in the last two months which shows my flagging level of commitment to it...