Warren Ellis' webpage/blog Diepunyhumans has a lovely example of the two ends of camera technology. In one posting you have the Mars Express pictures with a camera that cost millions, and a picture from a millions of miles away; in another posting you have phonecam pictures that cost a tiny amount of money; and come in from all over the globe.
It puts me in mind of something, but I can't think what...I'm reading some Alvin Toffler right now, so that might explain it; thinking about technology and its impact on culture.

Sorry folks, bit of a rant here...but I last slept 22 hours ago...

We got a call to a patient who was "Depressed - not moving", normally it's some teenager having a strop, but this time it was a little different. Basically the patient suffers from depression, was discharged from the local psychiatric unit three weeks ago and has recently had her dose of anti-depressants reduced. Yesterday she was crying all night, and tonight she was just sitting staring into space, refusing to make eye contact and not talking at all.
One of the things that we as an ambulance crew cannot do is physically remove someone to hospital if they don't want to go - that would be kidnapping and is frowned up by the law. This young girl wasn't going anywhere despite my best attempts to persuade her - she just wasn't communicating.
The solution would be simple - call the Community Psychiatric Nursing Team to come and assess her, and if needed arrange her compulsory removal to the psychiatric unit ( called a "Section" under the Mental Health Act). The problem? It was 11pm...
First off I phoned the psychiatric unit that she had received treatment under, after talking to two idiots who had trouble understanding plain English, I finally managed to get the number of the CPN team. Now the LAS is quite smart; when we want to arrange an outside agency we go through our control and all the telephone conversations are recorded...so if someone says they are going to attend they damn well better. I got onto Control, passed the details to them and waited for them to get back to us.

I'd just like to say that in eight years of medical experience I have never had a simple referral to a psychiatric service, they always seem to try shirking any form of work - by "forgetting" you or by being just plain obstructive. Maybe I'm just lucky and get the idiots every time.

Needless to say we waited...and waited...and waited...from 22:20 until 23:00 we waited; then at 23:02 Control got back to us. Apparently the CPN team all goes home at 23:00 and hadn't answered the phone until 23:00 on the dot. So they refused to visit the patient - the moral so far is if you are going to have a psychiatric breakdown in Newham - don't do it after 22:00.
So we switched to plan "B" which is to arrange the out-of-hours Social Worker to come and visit as they double as Psychiatric liaison. Again we went through Control and waited...and waited...and waited...Finally we heard back that the social worker would ring the family and would like to talk to me. (Outside agencies try this trick, as they know the patients phone isn't being recorded, and so can say whatever they want with any disagreement being my work against theirs) The social worker explained that she was very busy and so would prefer not to come to see the patient and have I tried the out-of-hours GP?
Back to Control I went and got them to try and contact the out-of-hours GP (A GP for those not in the UK is the patients "Family Doctor") Can you guess what we then did? We waited...and waited...and waited... Finally Control got back to us and informed us that the out-of-hours GP hadn't arrived for work yet and that when they did, they would have to see two other patients first.
All through this time the patients family were very understanding and were happy when I explained that the GP would call at some point in the night. All I could do was advise them to remove anything that the patient could use to hurt herself, and keep an eye on her - calling us back if they felt the need.

Total amount of time an Ambulance was tied up trying to get outside agencies to DO THEIR DAMN JOB - Two Hours and Nineteen Minutes. And not the worlds most satisfactory outcome.

As I mentioned to our Control - sometimes you feel very lonely out there on the mean streets of Newham.

More runs of twelve hour night shifts, which at this time of year is really tiring. The human body needs to see some daylight, and the short days of winter are not conducive to this. Last night I was asked to work out of Tottenham which, for those of you who don't know the geography of London, is about 20 miles away from where I normally work. No worries I thought, a change is as good as a rest - and rest I did, we had 3 calls all night, only one of which was serious.
The "proper" work was a Farsi speaking gentleman who was having a heart attack - it's important to try and keep the patient calm in those situations, and the language barrier is a big hurdle to jump. But despite not working with this particular crewmate before the job went as smooth as silk - it's always nice when that happens.
I also got to go to two of the hospitals that I used to work at in my nursing days, all my old friends had to say was that I looked "fatter", which I can only put down to my happiness at my current career and the diet of chips/kebab/burgers that this job seems to force on you. (I'm 6"1' and around 12 1/2 stone - not exactly a lard-arse).
So I'm working tonight (typing this from work at the moment) and then I have four days off until I need to start working from 7am. More unfortunately I'm busy over the whole of my break - so sleep will be a treasured thing. My best bet is to try and grab a few moments of sleep between jobs.

ZZZzzz...

Much fun and games last night, working out of Poplar. Not only did some German bloke graffiti on the back of one of the ambulances - but he also called the crew from a payphone and ran off, repeating it twice.
There are a lot of strange people out there...
MacMedic gives a rundown of what his shifts are like, so I thought I'd do the same, in honour of our brothers in foreign climes.

All these people called an ambulance by dialling "999".

(a) Fractured Wrist - Young lad at the Boat show.
(b) "Frequent Flyer" who has just been released from prison...We thought we'd got rid of him for good.
(c) 15 year old with a runny nose.
(d) Very minor R.T.A.
(e) Domestic Assault, with no actual injury, but police already on scene.
(f) "Facial Injury" which turned out to mean "Some bloke kicked my door".
(g) Assault with a cut hand, actually a decent injury with tendon involvement (which means surgery and physiotherapy).
(h) Varicose Vein that had burst, plenty of blood everywhere.
(i) 29 year old with chest pain, hyperventilating with very upset relatives.
(j) Overdose in a house filled with young men with short hair and tight t-shirts (ifyouknowwhatImean).
(k) R.T.A with a traffic light pole coming off the worse in a two car collision.
(l) 8 month pregnant "lady" who had fallen earlier that day.
and...
(m) A fitting 9 year old, only one of the parents spoke English, and so decided to stay at home and send the father who doesn't speak English with us, because "The hospital has interpreters..."

Now, out of these thirteen jobs, only five actually went to hospital...a prize if you can tell me (via the comments) which five went to hospital

A sixteen year old boy was killed in broad daylight. Apparently he was involved in a fight between two gangs of youths; there are a lot of gangs in Newham and as far as I can tell they are fairly nebulous things. Having had my ambulance kicked and punched by a gang (luckily while I wasn't in it) I can easily see how the violence had escalated. Sympathies to the family; how do you keep your teenage sons inside during daylight hours?
When I next work out of Newham, I'll no doubt hear the full story, I suspect the police won't have many witnesses to the murder itself.

Baghdad Burning tells us that the Governing Council of Iraq (you know...the people who are all trying to carve out their own little piece of the country) are to introduce Shari'a (Islamic) law. This wouldn't be so bad if the men who run the religion could agree on the issues. Islam has always been for womens rights, yet it is the interpretation of the Quran, by men, that leads to oppression.
While Iraq had a secular government women had equal rights...now it looks like it's all going to change for the worse. Go read the link, and see how the Americans have "freed" the Iraqi people.

Newham General (the hospital I tend to find myself at most often) is to undergo improvements under a new Private Finance Initiative (PFI). The article says that the A+E has undergone improvement...but in my eyes it is still too small for the number of patients that it sees. The department was designed with 14 cubicles, but they have had to split each cubicle in two by using curtains in order to have enough trolleys to cater for patients. These cubicles are designed for one patient, yet are now holding two, which obviously has a detrimental effect on patient privacy, dignity and confidentiality. It also makes it a bugger to get a patient off my ambo trolley onto a hospital trolley.

Also they are selling St Andrews at Bromley by bow in order to pay for the shiny new Newham hospital. I suspect that there will be a further fall in the services for the mentally ill. No surprise there then...

Two posts back I told you that I had to study for an exam...well I have since passed the exam -sigh of relief- and am now bound into my work as an EMT. The exam itself is one of those things that you tink "Hell, I've been living the job, it'll be easy" until you turn over the page and the first question is "What is the minimum distance you should be able to read a license plate, in order to have the required eyesight to drive?"
I'm sure that its important to have decent eyesight, but I think the first "da Firm" would know about any failing vision would be by the trail of destroyed ambulances you leave behind.
Still, I managed to see some collegues who I hadn't seen for over a year and catch up on some of the gossip. I found out that the new computer MDT dispatch that my sector has been using for the past six months went "live" in North-East sector yesterday, so if you live there, the confused looks on ambo-crews faces are nothing to be worried about.

Now I'm just gearing up for a week of night-shifts by laying in bed until 14:00 (that's 2pm for normal people) and staying awake watching the Discovery channel until 04:00 (erm...4am...)

Should have something interesting ambo based for you on Sunday.

Gary Turner has had one of his genius synthesis moments, and now considers the SETI project a mission of intergalatic spam.

You may have seen this elsewhere...but I have an exam tomorrow so original thought isn't going to win today. I particularly like the male mind "humming"...

Taken from Here

WE'VE GOT THE DIRT ON GUYS' BRAINS

by Dave Barry

I like to think that I am a modest person. (I also like to think that I look like Brad Pitt naked, but that is not the issue here.) There comes a time, however, when a person must toot his own personal horn and for me, that time is now. A new book has confirmed a theory that I first proposed in 1987, in a column explaining why men are physically unqualified to do housework. The problem, I argued, is that men -- because of a tragic genetic flaw -- cannot see dirt until there is enough of it to support agriculture. This puts men at a huge disadvantage against women, who can detect a single dirt molecule 20 feet away. This is why a man and a woman can both be looking at the same bathroom commode, and the man -- hindered by Male Genetic Dirt Blindness (MGDB) -- will perceive the commode surface as being clean enough for heart surgery or even meat slicing; whereas the woman can't even see the commode, only a teeming, commode-shaped swarm of bacteria.

A woman can spend two hours cleaning a toothbrush holder and still not be totally satisfied; whereas if you ask a man to clean the entire New York City subway system, he'll go down there with a bottle of Windex and a single paper towel, then emerge 25 minutes later, weary but satisfied with a job well done.

When I wrote about Male Genetic Dirt Blindness, many irate readers complained that I was engaging in sexist stereotyping, as well as making lame excuses for the fact that men are lazy pigs. All of these irate readers belonged to a gender that I will not identify here, other than to say: Guess what, ladies? There is now scientific proof that I was right.

This proof appears in a new book titled What Could He Be Thinking? How a Man's Mind Really Works. I have not personally read this book, because, as a journalist, I am too busy writing about it. But according to an article by Reuters, the book states that a man's brain ''takes in less sensory detail than a woman's, so he doesn't see or even feel the dust and household mess in the same way.'' Got that? We can't see or feel the mess! We're like: ``What snow tires in the dining room? Oh, those snow tires in the dining room.''

And this is only one of the differences between men's and women's brains. Another difference involves a brain part called the ''cingulate gyrus,'' which is the sector where emotions are located. The Reuters article does not describe the cingulate gyrus, but presumably in women it is a structure the size of a mature cantaloupe, containing a vast quantity of complex, endlessly recalibrated emotional data involving hundreds, perhaps thousands of human relationships; whereas in men it is basically a cashew filled with NFL highlights.

In any event, it turns out that women's brains secrete more of the chemicals ''oxytocin'' and ''serotonin,'' which, according to biologists, cause humans to feel they have an inadequate supply of shoes. No, seriously, these chemicals cause humans to want to bond with other humans, which is why women like to share their feelings. Some women (and here I am referring to my wife) can share as many as three days' worth of feelings about an event that took eight seconds to actually happen. We men, on the other hand, are reluctant to share our feelings, in large part because we often don't have any. Really. Ask any guy: A lot of the time, when we look like we're thinking, we just have this low-level humming sound in our brains. That's why, in male-female conversations, the male part often consists entirely of him going ''hmmmm.'' This frustrates the woman, who wants to know what he's really thinking. In fact, what he's thinking is, literally, ``hmmmm.''

So anyway, according to the Reuters article, when a man, instead of sharing feelings with his mate, chooses to lie on the sofa, holding the remote control and monitoring 750 television programs simultaneously by changing the channel every one-half second (pausing slightly longer for programs that feature touchdowns, fighting, shooting, car crashes or bosoms) his mate should not come to the mistaken conclusion that he is an insensitive jerk. In fact, he is responding to scientific biological brain chemicals that require him to behave this way for scientific reasons, as detailed in the scientific book What Could He Be Thinking? How a Man's Mind Really Works which I frankly cannot recommend highly enough.

In conclusion, no way was that pass interference.

(c) Dave Barry, Miami Herald

Occasionally you get a job that makes you laugh, normally because the person who you are picking up is an idiot. We got called to a chip shop in one of the main roads in Newham, unfortunately there are about 20 chip shops on this road, but we managed to find it by looking for the shiny white police car parked outside. The call had been given as an "assault" which can mean anything from a slap on the face to a fatal stabbing.
In this instance it was a young lad, the spitting image of "Ali G", who was complaining that he had been hit on the nose, needless to say there wasn't a mark on him, and it turned out that he had been hit by his girlfriend. The police wanted to take statements, but he wasn't interested and when I tried to look at him he told me that I wasn't needed as "I'm St John's innit, and a security guard". This fella wouldn't scare a kid just out of Primary school, so I suspect he was telling a little bit of a lie. As he wasn't hurt and "refused aid" my crew-mate and I retreated to a safe distance to do our paperwork...
In the course of the night we found ourselves at the local hospital (dropping off some ill person or something) when who should walk in with another crew from my station, but our earlier "Ali G" lookalike. I asked him why he decided to call an ambulance when he'd already sent us packing, and it turned out that another woman had hit him...
...The prostitute he'd hired after his girlfriend had slapped him. Turns out she had hit him and then robbed him of his "bling", and he couldn't have put up much of a fight because he only had one scratch on him.

It's wallies like these we have to put up with...and call "sir"...