It looks like the first case of 'granny dumping' of the season. Every year, around this time, families will do their best to get their elderly relatives admitted to hospital. I've personally see quite a few cases of it. It isn't helped that, because no-one wants to get sued for sending someone home who isn't suitable to be discharged, people are sometimes admitted for 'social reasons'. This ties up hospital beds in acute wards because the patient has nowhere else to go.

It is a sad state of affairs - and in this case I would want to see the family prosecuted, if only because I think Oldchurch is an awful hospital...

I'm back at work, and it's 4am on a grotty Thursday morning. Our Control contacted us and told us that we had a job to go to, while she was telling us this the dispatcher kept apologising, so I knew it was going to be a rubbish job. We got a Category 'A' call to a man who is "Not alert, severe respiratory distress, unable to talk properly, intoxicated". So we race around to the bus garage that the call came from, to find three, very well looking people standing around talking.
Apparently our patient (who is as fit as a fiddle, and not even that drunk) managed to fall asleep at the bus station while waiting for his nightbus, and another man became concerned and called for an ambulance. Luckily for the caller, I was driving - and so I didn't ask him why the hell he told our control that the patient had severe difficulty in breathing, or why he thought that calling an ambulance was a good idea. The patient didn't want to go to hospital, and wondered if we could give him a lift home (his home is about six miles away) and when we said we couldn't take him home, the patient decided to wait for his bus , much to the surprise of the caller.

Once more, a bystander/good samaritan is confused and frightened by someone who is asleep - and that they believe that this warrants an ambulance, and then when we turn up they try to tell us that the person 'needs to be in hospital'. I would be mortified if anyone called an ambulance for me whenever I fell asleep on the train/bus/tube.

Can I also ask that if you phone an ambulance because you are having a baby - can you at least wait the 11 minutes it takes us to traipse across our area to reach you, before making your own way to hospital. This is especially true if it is five o'clock in the morning. Either wait for us, or make you own way to hospital without waking my crewmate up from his sleep on the sofa.

This is the final post about my Toronto trip - I'm back on night shifts for a bit, so if you are lucky I'll have to pick up something other than a drunk/unwell child/maternataxi, and will therefore have something interesting to post about.

As I believe I mentioned before, the trip to Toronto was great. There were a load of great people that I met, essentially because of this blog, and I'd like to thank them all for making the trip so enjoyable. I'd like to thank Joey for letting me come to his party and somehow arranging two wild racoons to turn up in his garden for me to look at - also I'd like to thank Eldon and a couple of others who reminded me that it would be a bad idea to try and stroke those same racoons. I'd like to thank those who took me to the 'secret swing', and let me know about the first of the two Canadian laws I broke on the duration of the trip. I'd like to thank Andrew for the ex-pat information, and the drinks before I flew back, it was nice to see someone who remembered London before it all went wrong. I'd also like to thank Jovanna and her family and friends for a lovely breakfast. I'd also like to thank Jovanna and her friend (who's name I have rather shamefully forgotten) for the tour they gave me 'backstage' at the Royal Ontario Museum, I never knew that Egyptian mummies weren't stored in hermetically sealed hi-tech boxes, but instead were wrapped in a bit of plastic. I saw some very interesting items stored there, and even got to smell some mummified crocodiles - and they smelt quite a bit like some of the houses I get called to.

I'd like to apologise to Lee for not being able to meet with her, but our schedules just clashed, perhaps next time, or if she ever comes to London I can make it a point to see her.

I was impressed by the cleanliness of the streets (although apparently the Toronto inhabitants are up in arms about a recent increase in street rubbish), I was also impressed by what seems a genuine desire to recycle rubbish - possibly due to recent changes in how their rubbish is disposed.

I never managed to get to talk to an ambulance crew - when I visited the hospital there were no ambulances there, and then I got escorted off the premises by a very polite security guard, who appeared within seconds of me getting my camera out. I only saw one ambulance, and that was driving along the street, but I did see a couple of fire trucks running on blues. On this evidence alone I'd suggest that Torontonians are a bunch of healthy arsonists.

The flight back was not as bearable as the flight over - there was a two year old child who insisted on crying throughout most of the trip, the food was awful, I was in a middle seat, the in-flight entertainment was a bleeding awful 'chick-flick' and the legroom was a lot less.

But the plane landed safely, which is always a bonus - and the final tube ride home was uneventful.

I would like to offer drinks, and a tour of a local ambulance station for anyone who I met during those few days who may find themselves in London - I appreciate everything that you folks did, and I apologise for anyone who I have forgotten about, and haven't mentioned here.