The rota that I'm working currently gives me one week off, twice every ten weeks, and while this is nice, unfortunately it means that I don't have any stories of exciting derring-do to thrill and entertain you with. My muse has therefore taken the opportunity to bugger off on holiday to Barbados for the rest of the week.

So my options are limited, do I traipse around London and find out about local history or interesting little spots like Diamond Geezer? Shall I comment on the 'Blogosphere', and computing in general like Tom Coates (although without the gayness)? How about posting some pictures on Flickr? Perhaps I'll write about Agenda for Change, if only so I can try to understand it myself.

Or shall I hibernate, play some video games and fly around Paragon City or Norrath?

So the choice is yours - if you want me to write about something, leave a comment telling me what it is, and I'll do my best to fulfill your wishes.

How long until the MPAA/RIAA/BPI/BFI try suing Google for helping people find DRM breaking software, or for indexing sites that provide copyrighted material?

Can anyone put me in touch with the people who think that Mal-ware is a good idea, specifically the people who created "Windows AdTools", then can you recommend a way that I can crash their computers for a couple of hours.

Either that, or provide me with a plane ticket and a baseball bat with a nail through it...

...because there is nothing I enjoy doing more than spending some of my valuable time off getting my computer working again after these bastards have left their crap all over my hard disk.

Part of our job involves using a radio to talk to Control, so part of our training is in the use of the radio. The training is about three hours long, and you spend it pretending to talk on a radio passing jobs back and forth (this is before the computer terminals were introduced).

One of the things we are taught is the Phonetic alphabet, which I am sure you have all seen in film and TV. Normally it sounds something like "Foxtrot Alpha Sierra Tango Charlie Alpha Romeo", and is designed to make the spelling out of words over an unreliable radio transmission clearer, and less likely to have errors.

One other thing that you should be aware of, is that our radio has an open broadcast - this means that everyone in the sector can hear you talking on it. You can recognise your friend's voices, and this radio chatter gives you a general idea at what they are doing. Of course, this means that should you make a mistake - everyone knows about it.

Why was it, when spelling out a name I suddenly forgot the phonetic for 'M' (Mike), and instead, in a moment of panic, decided that the new phonetic for 'M' would be...

...Mango?

It's not as if I have mangoes on the mind - I can't remember the last time I ate one, but for some reason it was the first thing that came into my mind.

I bless the radio operator for not bursting into laughter and calling me a twit.

Work was fairly light today, I had one blue call, which was an eight year old who was having an asthma attack. When we got on scene, the child was having real trouble breathing, his lips had a worryingly purple tinge and he was using the whole of his chest to suck air into his lungs. I don't think the mother realised quite how serious her child's condition was.

We gave him a dose of a Salbutamol nebulizer (a medicine for opening the airways of the lungs, making it easier for the child to breath), and 'blued' him into hospital. I carried him into the resuscitation room to be met by a couple of doctors and nurses. By now the child was looking a lot better, and the consultant didn't look too impressed with my bluing the child in. The consultant didn't say anything, but I sensed a definite 'vibe', that he thought we were overreacting. However, once I explained how the child looked when we first saw him, the consultant was more understanding of my decision. The child stayed in the resuscitation room for some time, so they can't have been that unconcerned.

I have a rule at work - if I'm considering bluing in a patient, then I should just blue them in and have done with it. It's more embarrassing to turn up with a dead patient after driving slowly, than to have a live patient turn up quickly. No-one ever lost their job for bluing in a patient.

Sometimes you just know that a patient is seriously ill, even if everything else says otherwise. It's good to listen to your intuition.

I suppose that it can be hard to understand why the ambulance crew has blued a patient in if they look quite healthy when we roll them in through the door. Sometimes it's because the patient has improved, sometimes it's because the patient has a medical history that explains symptoms that would be otherwise frightening and that the patient hasn't told us about them.

And of course, sometimes, just sometimes, patients fake serious illness.

The server problems that have plagued the Bloggies have been resolved, so now would be a good time to go there and vote for your favourite sites. Feel free to vote for whomever you like (at least in the categories that I'm not mentioned in...). There are some great sites mentioned, and in a lot of the sections I was torn which way to vote.

All I can say about the people in the 'Tagline' category, is that you shouldn't vote for Scaryduck, if only because he regularly makes me soil myself with laughter - and I don't think that increasing my laundry workload should be rewarded.

Oh, and can I just say that Jane Perrone is a very nice person, she was the first person to interview me.

Joey made me very welcome in Canada last year - and was also one of the reasons why I got into this blogging lark in the first place.

And my final 'for consideration' should go to Real E Fun, who is just a bloody excellent writer, and shows me up for the hack that I am.

Don't ask me who to vote for in the 'Best British or Irish Weblog'. I don't know myself.

Mum, get Brother to show you how to vote...

For those that are interested, I've joined the team at Heardsaid. It's a blog that contains little posts that are like one-two punches. Things that we have heard that are probably true, never proven, but always interesting.

...They could literally be about anything or anyone but the really compelling and dangerous aspect is that corroboration isn't necessary. We'll present this stuff just as we heard it and it's up to the reader to decide whether it's true or not. The only basic rule is that we can't just make things up ourselves and that generally there isn't a structure. That's what encyclopedias are for -- its chatty and conversational -- like a personal weblog about answering questions which haven't been asked yet.

This reminds me, I need to write more for Lingual Nerve (the other writers are much better than me).

I also need to work out how to get paid for all this writing...

Last night I worked out of a different station to normal, although it was still in the same complex of stations, with a team leader assessing my clinical skills. It was an interesting night, and although I was going to nothing except the most serious 'Category A' calls - I still ended up getting called to a drunk.

I had two 'suspended' patients, one of which had been dead some time, and had been found by his relatives deceased in bed. There was nothing we could do for the patient, so the other crew on scene were left to arrange the police to deal with the death.

The second suspended was rather more interesting, in the 'Chinese Curse' fashion.

The call was given as a 90 year old female with difficulty in breathing, and on reaching the scene we were directed into a room with around 15-20 people who were wailing and praying over a very sick old lady.

At first, there was no way I could reach the patient, so I ordered the people out of the room. Some left, although they were quick to return, and I quickly looked at the woman - she was breathing, but her breathing was very poorly. I prepared our equipment to give her oxygen but as I did this, I looked up and saw that she had stopped breathing. A quick pulse check showed that her heart had stopped as well. At this point a lot more of the family came back into the very small room and started to, well, get in the way.

We started CPR, and a second crew turned up. The family were very unhappy that we were attempting to resuscitate their elderly relative, and while I could fully understand this, for resuscitation, is not a pleasant thing for anyone to go through, there was little we could do. If we hadn't attempted to resuscitate her, then we could lose our jobs and, perhaps more importantly, rob this woman of any chance of survival.

So we continued to resuscitate her, and prepared to remove her to hospital - at which point the family became really upset, and adamant that we should leave her alone. It got so bad at one point that my crewmate called for police backup.

There were a lot of angry looks directed to us, and various mumblings that we didn't understand their culture and religion. I can understand this, but still, our hands are tied. If someone suspends in front of you, and they don't have a 'Do Not Resuscitate' order, then we have to attempt a full resuscitation. To do anything else would be to allow someone to die, and therefore a dereliction of our duty of care.

We decided to meet the relatives halfway, in that we would follow our resuscitation protocol, which allows us to cease resuscitation if there is no response after 30 minutes of CPR and drug therapy. This way, the relatives wouldn't have us take the patient to hospital for a (most likely) meaningless attempt at treatment. They seemed somewhat happier that we were doing this, and calmed down a lot.

We treated the patient for 30 minutes and there was no recovery, she was recognised as deceased, and we left the police to deal with the paperwork that follows after someone dies. I think that we handled the situation as sensitively as possible. There is always a worry that what we consider best for a patient, might not be what the family consider in that patient's best interests - but in some circumstances our hands are tied by procedure and protocol.

While I think we did the best we could for everyone concerned, I wouldn't be surprised if a letter of complaint found it's way to the LAS.

But as we weren't nasty to the family, and followed our protocol - I should think we will be alright.

Two posts today...

First off, thanks to everyone that nominated me for the Bloggies, I'm nominated for two categories (sort of), the first being Best Tagline (Trying to kill as few people as possible, less a tagline - more a statement of intent). The other is being the subject of a blog article (one of the Guardian articles). More details than that I cannot give you, as apart from a few hours around 1am, the site has been down as people have hit it's bandwidth limit pretty hard.

It's up to you if you want to go and vote for me, but go and have a look at the other blogs mentioned - there is a lot of gold out there.

Every so often, things start to go wrong around me - nothing particularly bad, just little things. The problem is that it tends to come in little clumps, normally when things are going so well. Recently I've had problems with an external hard drive I bought, problems with the post office, a broken mobile phone, ambulances that fall apart as soon as I sit in them and a camera that has suddenly decided to only start using it's flash when it wants too.

All these are not insurmountable problems, and eventually this period of technological meltdown will end.

But last night my laptop (centre of my life at the moment) decided to throw a wobbly. Everytime I boot it up I get a "TCP/IP Transport Network not loaded" error message, which has broken my web access. I have tried everything that I can think of, but there is, as far as I can see it, no easy way to replace what are probably corrupted services in Windows XP.

It'd help if I had something other than the dreaded "Recovery Disk", which will wipe the hard drive of around 60Gb of data, and leave me having to set up my system exactly how I like it. I'm hoping I can find a way around it without having to do this drastic action - but just in case I'm making a copy of my hard disk so that nothing gets lost.

I'm also working a funny shift pattern this week - which means that in 24 hours I'm back at work on a 7am Wednesday start after a Monday (finish at 7am Tuesday) nightshift.

*Shudder*

Oh well, at least I'm still breathing, which is more than I can say about some of my patients...

Oh, and the next post contains a hint about my 'secret plan'.

Update: Thanks to this page, my "TCP/IP Transport Network not loaded" problems are solved. My happiness is unbounded. In other words, I can go play City of Heroes

One of the perks of this job is the need to cover football games. Well...it's a perk if you enjoy seeing your local team play, personally I can't stand football - but overtime is overtime, and it does make a nice change to the usual jobs I go to. So this Sunday I got to see West Ham play against Derby.

The L.A.S. provide 'Major Incident' cover for these games, we don't look at sprained ankles or minor injuries (for that is the job of the St Johns ambulance). We also don't look after the players who get hacked down and are unable to walk, only to watch them turning somersaults a scant five minutes later when their team scores a goal (that is a job for the private medical firms).

So, unless a stand collapses, there is a major fire, a bomb goes off or someone drops dead in front of us, there is very little we have to do. At the West Ham ground (my local football club), there are four 'road crew' present, along with at least one major incident support vehicle, one radio operator and an officer. The road crew sit down near the pitch, while the officer and radio operator sit in a V.I.P. box overlooking the whole ground.

Today I was given the role of "safety officer", which doesn't mean I've been promoted - it just means that in the event of a major incident, I'm supposed to watch out for the safety of the ambulance crews present, liaise with the Police and Fire Service about any hazards that might be a problem, and to make sure that any crews that attend the incident aren't getting too stressed. I also have to talk to the person in overall control at the incident about any issues within this sphere that may occur.

We were warned that there was an increased chance of violence at this match because some hooligan 'supporters' are appearing before the magistrate tomorrow - and that some of their 'crew' might want to cause some trouble. Luckily for us, that wasn't to happen despite a 2-1 loss.

It was really cold down there in the stands, I had my undershirt, shirt, body armour, fleece and Hi-visibility all weather jacket on - but I was still freezing. Anyone listening carefully as I walked around trying to keep warm would have heard a clink-clink-clink-clink sound as my frozen balls knocked together.

As I've mentioned before, I'm not a huge fan of football (overpaid idiots, getting paid more in a week than I get paid in a year, booting around a plastic ball) - so I spent most of the match listening to The Magnetic Fields on my smart-phone, while stamping around trying to get some sensation back in my toes

As a quick aside, who needs an iPod Shuffle? My smart-phone can do the same thing and more - it can even make phone calls...

Half time came and went so we joined the St Johns ambulance for a cup of tea and a sandwich, rather than watch a bunch of scantily clad young women prance about. Then we were back in the cold - where I tried to stay awake while West Ham, perhaps predictably lost...

With the exception of someone having a crafty cigarette and setting off a fire alarm, it all went rather smoothly. I did find it funny that the people in the stadium knew what the "Inspector Sands" announcement meant, and did nothing but laugh quietly at it.

At the end of the match we have to stay around until we are 'stood down', essentially when the last few supporters are leaving - so we sat in the ambulance, with the heater going, wrapped in our own blankets (and remember - we know what those blankets have been wrapped around, yet we still used them - that is how cold it was).

We then started making our way back to station...

...only to come across a policeman who had tried to stop a car - only to have them speed up (possibly accidentally) and hit him. He wasn't especially badly hurt, but we took all precautions as we transported him to hospital. He'll need a few x-rays, but I suspect that he will be fine.

Now I'm sitting in my flat, waiting for tomorrow's night shift, at the end of which, I shall know how my secret plan is to unfold...