The second night-shift of a batch is always the hardest, your body clock doesn't know whether it is coming or going and you really aren't emotionally equipped to deal with people who want to give you a hard time.

This might explain why the desire to run over the patient who decided to run out in front of the ambulance and 'collapse' was really rather strong.

It might explain why, after a twelve hour shift, when you call up with 15 minutes to go because 'I've had a cold all week', you may get a less than friendly EMT.

And it might explain why, given our recent diabetic death, we 'Blue' in a 47 year old with a blood sugar of 24mmols, one kidney and a respiration rate of 42.

One bizarrely enjoyable job was an alcoholic Indian who had fell, while drunk, between two cars - his wife was on-scene telling him off, while he lay in the pouring rain, splashing around in a puddle. In March he had broken his hip, and now it looked like he had possibly dislocated it. But he was so intoxicated he was waving it around like it was just troubling him a bit, rather than writihing in the excruciating pain that you would expect. When we managed to scoop him up and get him in the back of the ambulance his hip looked 'wrong' - unsure whether it was due to his operation, and given the amount of alcohol he had on-board, we treated like a fracture and took him into hospital.
All throughout transport the patient, his wife and myself had an enjoyable chat - mainly about his drinking and how he is 'daft'. An enjoyable job despite scrabbling around in the cold, wet, cramped conditions that he found himself in.
The hospital x-rayed it and said 'something is wrong - but we don't know what' - an admirably vague diagnosis.

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