Twas the night before Christmas, and all through Newham, not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse...

Apart from the hideously drunk Eastern European man, who couldn't speak English, but felt the desire to repeatedly bash his head against a window. And then threaten the police officers who asked him to stop.

And apart from the drunk who was upset that the people going to the church he was laying outside had ignored him for an hour (apparently), and that we had stopped him from commiting suicide by hypothermia. Then he decided that he didn't like me and so he tried to hit me while we were in the back of the ambulance. He was rather quickly shown the door, and the police were called.

Only two hours left to go on shift...

Having a great time.

There was no post yesterday, because I didn't have the time. Instead of going home and relaxing, I instead visited my mum and brother, partly to say hello, and partly because I like the dinners than my mum cooks me.

All was going well, until just after dinner I heard my brother shout for me - I ran up the stairs to find him crouched over the unconscious body of my mother. She soon came round, and after vomiting once, made a full recovery.

While I wasn't too worried, I thought that it would be best if she went to hospital for an E.C.G and blood tests to rule out anything sinister. There then followed much shouting as I did my best to 'persuade' her to let me take her to hospital - I may be a medical professional, but she doesn't believe that I know what is best for her.

I finally managed to get her to agree to come to hospital, so I took her to Newham, and booked her in at reception.

The funny thing is, although it seems I'm always at Newham, and the staff there know me well, without my uniform on they had trouble recognising me. There was a lot of confused looks as they took in my face and then wondered where they had seen me before. Seems that to some people at least - I am just a uniform...

We were seen to fairly quickly, although we didn't get any special treatment, (apart from me getting a cup of tea off one of the girls) and were discharged after less than three hours following the E.C.G and blood tests. Provisional diagnosis was a urine infection, although I suspect that it may have been a vasal vagal attack following the large dinner.

So everything turned out alright, I was very happy with the treatment she received and I got to spend a couple of hours 'back at work'. I just wish that mum stopped apologising for 'ruining my evening'.

Duh, I do it for strangers, why wouldn't I do it for my own family.

posted from my mobile

There is an excellent little article over at the Guardian here.

Sandra Laville
Monday December 20, 2004
The Guardian

As an icy wind blew in a flurry of snow, broken and discarded umbrellas rolled down St Mary Street like tumbleweed. In a doorway of the Walkabout bar, six Santas, four angels and an Elvis Presley huddled together to shelter from the cold.
From inside his Mercedes van, Mike Loveless watched as a man stumbled towards him, his white shirt soaked in blood, dripping from his smashed up nose.

A few metres away another young man, his shirt sleeves also stained blood red, slumped against a parked car and punched uselessly at the keyboard of his mobile phone.

All around others staggered; dazed and confused, some crying and bloodied, like survivors in the aftermath of a disaster. But there had been no bomb, no train crash or motorway pile up. This was the fallout from the last Saturday night before Christmas when hundreds of young men and women, their flimsy tops no barrier to the freezing temperatures, swarmed from bar to club to bar in search of pleasure.

Parked on a strip of Cardiff city centre known as "animal farm", Mr Loveless, a paramedic with 18 years experience, had the unenviable task of picking up the pieces.

In a pilot scheme running in south Wales, Mr Loveless spends his 10pm to 4am shift at the heart of the Christmas revelry answering 999 calls to leave the main fleet of ambulances free to answer serious incidents elsewhere.

He assesses the patients at the scene, carries out treatment and, if necessary, sends them to hospital in a non-emergency back-up ambulance.

As part of the Christmas crackdown on anti-social behaviour, Mr Loveless works with police officers who roam the streets of the city centre. They call on his medical skills when needed, and in turn go to his aid if the crowd becomes hostile.

"I am linked into the police radio for security," said Mr Loveless. "There are a lot more people carrying weapons these days. A lot feeling they have nothing to lose, all drink and drugs fuelled.

"I've had my arm broken and I've been given a black eye in this job, so I am in constant touch with the officers."

The night is still in its infancy when the radio crackles to life with a 999 call to the Old Borough pub, where a young woman has fallen head first down some steps. A group of young women, fuelled by the festive offer of any three bottles for £5, chants: "Get your kit off for the girls."

It takes half an hour to check the young woman over, lay her on a spinal board and lift her up the stairs and into a waiting ambulance to be ferried to hospital.

Moments later a call for assistance at Edwards bar comes in from the police - "male assault victim hyperventilating".

At the scene, two girls dressed as Christmas tree angels weep and hover over a young man, lying flat on his back on a bench, his face a mess of blood. As the casualty is put into the back-up ambulance for treatment, a teenage boy runs across the street screaming and sobbing to the paramedic: "Pentwyn, pentwyn, pentwyn, I need to get to Pentwyn, please I only got a £1, please."

"Listen mate, I'm not a taxi service okay. Go away or I'll call the police," Mr Loveless responds. "You have to be a bit assertive with them sometimes," he says. "Because otherwise it is like the lunatics running the asylum."

Throughout the night the rapid response van races up and down the street and its offshoots, where every second building is a late night bar, dealing with everything from intoxicated, weeping girls who have fallen off their high-heeled shoes to testosterone-fuelled men with bloody faces, suspected heart attacks and broken legs, and female victims of assault, like Sophie.

Her Christmas celebrations came to an end when a man in The Yard bar punched her in the face, splitting her cheek and plumping her eye out in a black, blue and red mess.

"I've never in my life had a mark on my face, oh my God, look at me, my mum is going to kill me," weeps the 20-year-old, before being ferried away to the University College hospital, Wales.

As night becomes early morning the response team flies from one call to another.

As Mr Loveless treats his patients, around him more police pour into the street, blue sirens flash the length of the road, a fire engine adds its wail to the mayhem and the ambulance control sends a message over the radio to all crews: "A lot of fighting going on in the city centre, it's very dangerous, be careful."

"Merry Christmas to you all," shouts a reveller as the response van pulls up to a ruck outside the Chip Shop.

A well dressed businessman, out with his wife, slips and spills curry sauce over the T-shirt of another man. "He just went for him.

"He went ballistic, and headbutted him," said the businessman's wife.

Then there is the 20-year-old subject of three 999 calls; one over a broken leg which turns out to be a grazed knee, another for an assault and the third when she collapses shivering and drunk in the street.

"I've had enough of this," said the paramedic, sending her to hospital.

Heading back to police HQ at 4am - after answering 21 calls and treating nearly double the number of patients - he adds: "Roll on New Year's Eve."


I'm working Christmas Eve, Christmas Day and Boxing Day 18:00-01:00 on overtime and 07:00-19:00 on New Years Eve and New Years Day. Nothing to do with the extra money at all...

Yesterday continued to be busy - out of five further calls, four of those had to be 'blued' into hospital and put straight into the resus room. This is not normal. There were two serious asthma attacks, a heart attack, and something else that I can't remember (it all became such a blur...)

Today however, the first job was given as an 'Abdominal pain', but as we spoke to the patient it turned out that he had called us for his toothache - the toothache that he had had for all of 10 minutes, and that the pain was getting better...

Second call was to a seven year old boy who had managed to pull a Sky set-top box on top of his head. A minor cut, which was treated at hospital.

The rest of the day continued in much the same way, although the hospital got very busy as it seems that everyone in Newham chose today to get sick/have a check-up/decide that their sore throat must get seen today... And it also seemed that it was some other crews turn to bring in loads of sick patients - the resus room was full for most of the day.

But ultimately, for myself, it was nice to have some jobs that I didn't have to stress about. This is what is so nice about this job, you never know what you are going to get from one job to another.

And thanks to everyone who either left a comment or emailed me privately about the last post - it's much appreciated

I've been doing a couple of interviews recently (oh the fame...), and one question people always seem to ask is "Why do you blog", which is a tougher question than you might imagine. I often answer that I use this blog as therapy - which isn't perhaps entirely true, but it sounds much better than "I use it to whine", but after our job today I think that there may be more truth to that answer.

We got sent to a job of a six month baby not breathing - while this often means that baby has a cold, it could also be one of the worse jobs you can get. We sped to the address and entered a house where the whole family was distraught. It was an Indian household, so there were a lot of people there, and most of them were crying. Once more, I heard the type of crying that can only mean that something awful has happened - entering the living room I instantly saw a baby laying dead on the settee, father crouched over it crying and the mother standing and wailing, shouting out that her baby was dead.

There is only one thing that you can do in a situation like this, which is to scoop up the baby and run to hospital as quickly as possible. So I reached down and picked up the baby, I was shocked to find that it was as stiff as a board and very purple - indicating that it had been dead for some time. It looked more like a doll that anything that had once been alive. We could have recognised the child as dead on the scene, but taking the child to hospital would mean that the parents would see that everything that could be done was being done, and more importantly they would be in a hospital with all the support that the hospital could provide.

I ran out to the ambulance with mother in tow, and told my crewmate to get us to hospital as quickly as possible - the father and grandmother followed behind us in another ambulance who had heard this call go out and had turned up to see if there was anything that they could do to help. On the way to hospital I did the CPR that I knew was ultimately pointless and spoke to the mother. She had last seen the child alive at 3am, and he had been fine then. It looked like it may have been a case of SIDS, and I did all that I could to prepare the mother for the worst.

We pulled up at hospital and handed the baby into the care of the hospital, I spoke a little more with the mother and grandmother, but there is nothing that you can say to people who have had such a tragedy. Our station officer met us at the hospital and asked us if we were alright, then he booked us off the road so that we could go back to station and have a cup of tea and 'decompress'. If we needed more support I think it would have been there, but I just wanted to get away from the hospital.

I'm not often affected by jobs, and this isn't the first dead baby that I've had to deal with - but it is the first dead baby I've had since joining the ambulance service and it is very different than dealing with them in hospital. going into someone's house to take away a dead child is very different to having the child and parents turn up at hospital, which is your safe territory.

At the hospital all the other crews were asking if I was alright, and to be honest I wasn't really alright - I was upset that while I was doing CPR on the baby it's legs were seesawing into the air, and it looked too much like a doll. There was a point after the job where I thought I was going to start crying, but a moment outside the resus room and I was back to functioning as I normally do. I'm not weak, and when in the midst of something I can deal with anything - it was only after the doctors and nurses at the hospital had taken over that I started to feel anything.

We returned to station, where the therapy of talking about anal surgery with another crew, and a cup of tea soon had me feeling better. It used to be that you would return to work straight after a job like this, but then I think they realised that if we got our normal inappropriate call (belly-ache for two weeks sort of thing) we might say something to the patient that we might later regret.

Well an hour on station later, and I feel fully prepared to deal with that sort of thing again. But I think that I'll be haunted by the image of that child lying dead on my trolley.

Just some back from my favourite job of the last four 12 hour shifts...

Patient is 6 months pregnant and she is feeling the baby move. Given to us as "Abdominal pain, pregnant - Category 'A'".

Had to take her out of our area to the maternity unit she is booked under.

Panicking neighbours were telling her it was early labour (Quote I've had three babies)

At least the patient herself was fairly pleasant...

If this format is funny, it's because I'm posting on the move, pocket PC and Smartphone...

Yesterday was the attack of the friendly old women. All of our patients were 85+, and all were really pleasant, normally healthy women who had experienced 'wobbly episodes'. This led to it being a rather pleasant shift.

My crewmate had the first half of the shift off - so, while I was single, I was used to take broken ambulances to the places where they could be fixed, taking fixed ambulances back to their respective station, and dealing with various office related chores. One of the benefits (or drawbacks) of being on a satellite station, is that you rarely see anyone from management. However when they spot you at the main station, they can hit you with all the paperwork that they have been saving up for you...

At the moment everyone is either being congratulated, or warned depending on the amount of sick they have taken. Unfortunately they don't discriminate between 'normal' and 'industrial' sickness, so I fall into the 'warning' category. Not a major problem, it just means that they will keep an eye on my sick, and we will work out how it can be improved. My personal contribution will be trying not to swallow anymore HIV+ vomit during the course of my work, or having epileptics sprain my thumb while I hold them down.

As mentioned, I'm not the only one - but it has been noticed that they are doing this just before Christmas, when (for some reason), the number of people going sick increases...

Of course if they want sickness to improve, they need to stop sending us to people who are ill.

Three of our jobs today had the potential to be upsetting, and while they were all sad, only one seriously upset me, and did so in a way I consider rather out of character for myself.

The first job of the day was to an 86 year old female in a nursing home with a 'blocked nose', we raced around there because...well...it was a Category 'A' call and those are the top priority 'get there in eight minutes to please the government target' calls.
Just as we pulled up outside Control let us know that the patient was upgraded to a 'suspended' (no pulse, no breathing), and sure enough we ran into the home to be greeting by a Fast Response Unit who was doing C.P.R. I jumped down and did a round of chest compressions which cracked her ribs (a recognised side effect of effective C.P.R) and then noticed that on the cardiac monitoring machine her heart rhythm had changed. She had a pulse!
...people don't normally get a pulse back from cardiac arrests of her particular type. We rushed her to the hospital, where a full cardiac arrest team was assembled. Her pulse was lost, and then returned. Unfortunately her prognosis was poor, but she stayed alive long enough for her daughter to reach the hospital. She died with her daughter there, which is a small victory, but one that we are getting more used to.

The second potentially upsetting job was to a one year old boy who had pulled some boiling milk on top of him. We turned up to find about 20 police officers on scene, and the HEMS helicopter circling above. The same FRU responder was there and the child had around 10% partial thickness burns to parts of the neck and chest. While nasty, this wasn't immediately life-threatening, but the HEMS doctor who turned up decided that it would be best to take the patient to the Paediatric Burns Unit at Chelsea and Westminster Hospital by helicopter. As the helicopter could get the child there in under 20 minutes it seemed like the right plan of action. My job during this call was to, (1) hold onto the other two toddlers in the house, (2) mix up some paracetamol for the child, and (3) to drive child and doctor to the helicopter which was around 300 yards away. The job was interesting because she was the type of parent who thought it was a good idea to wedge a settee into the hallway to stop her children from falling down the stairs...

The final job was a lot simpler - we were called to an 18-22 year old female who was 'unresponsive' in a bus. The bus had reached the end of it's route and the driver couldn't wake up the patient. (Possibly interesting aside - Bus drivers cannot touch any of their customers to wake them up). We turned up and soon managed to wake up the very sleepy girl. She remained drowsy but agreed to let us take her to a place where she lived, but after talking to her a bit, we soon realised that she was instead homeless. This, coupled with the way she would fall asleep as soon as we stopped talking to her, made us think that it would not be safe to leave her on the street, so we decided that we would instead take her to hospital. When we reached the hospital she refused to go in, and instead pulled out a 'crack' pipe and started to light up. We told her that she couldn't do that... So she jumped up, pushed my crewmate and ran off. As there was nothing physically wrong with her we couldn't chase after her, so instead returned to our station to fill in the necessary paperwork.

So why was it that this last job was the most upsetting, not only for myself but also for my crewmate? Well it wasn't because she was pretty (she wasn't, and she had a voice like Ken Campbell), and it wasn't because she was ill, nor was it because my crewmate got shoved.

With our first job, the woman was at the end of her life, and until she died, had enjoyed fairly good health - she didn't die a painful, protracted death, and she died with her daughter next to her. With the scalded child, he would forget the pain, and will receive excellent care from the hospital he went to, he would return home to his loving (if ever so slightly dense) mother.

With this girl, it was as if she were lost - at some point in her life her potential future had unravelled. Instead of getting an education, holding down a job, finding someone special and living a long and happy life, she is homeless, a drug addict and her future is probably painful and short. What is so depressing is that no-one was able to turn around this descent, and this is perhaps why I despair at society - that so many people are prevented from reaching their full potential. I understand that she has made her own choices, but how much power did she have to make those choices. I wanted to help her, but there was no way I could do this.

And it's that which annoyed and upset me.