A strange thing happened tonight.

For the first time ever, I was 'recognised'.

The job itself was simple enough, genuine illness which had become worse.  I walked into the house had a quick assessment of the situation, and then said my usual bit which goes something like...

"OK, I'm the fast car, so I turn up to make sure everyone is still breathing.  There will be an ambulance along in a bit to actually take you to hospital".

I wasn't expecting one of the relatives to then say.

"You also blog about it as well - I recognise your face".

Sudden panic, followed by an admission that I was indeed that particular ambulance person.

It's strange, I suppose I've always thought that this might happen one day, although given the amount of alcoholics I see, and the way that they don't tend to read blogs, I thought that it might take longer than it has.

It's not as if I altered my treatment in any way, and if anything it made the treatment easier, as he knew that I wasn't some fly-by-night cowboy.

I hope…

The rest of the night was fairly uneventful, I had the same 'frequent flyer' in the same phone box at about the same time as I did last night and the first job of this shift was about four doors away from the first job of my previous shift.

My last job was a maternataxi, who’d been sent home from the maternity department just fifteen minutes earlier and told to wait six hours before coming again.  The patient had gotten an ambulance the first time, so this meant that she had used two ambulances in one night.  This is a failure on someones part, either the patient, or the maternity department.

One more nightshift, then three days off.  And during those days off is the glory of the Eurovision song contest.

But first…sleep.

 

So the MPAA have closed down some TV tracker sites while the BBC are going ahead with legal download trials.  I’m not going to comment on how the MPAA seems to have taken a ‘global cop’ role, and seems to have to power to shut down websites at will.  I’m not going to comment on how the owners of those site are completely unable to mount a court defence because the MPAA can throw millions of pounds at the case until the defence goes bankrupt.

I’m not going to comment on how the companies can broadcast something and then want it all ‘returned’ back in their control.

I’m not going to comment on how, when aliens land after tracking our radio/TV signals, the first people they are going to meet are the lawyers who will want to sue them for all the copyrighted material they’ll have recorded.

Now there is an idea for a short story…

I’m not going to comment on how I think that once the oil has gone, the next big wars will be fought by America bombing places that don’t have strong copyright controls.

I’m not going to comment on how transmission of programmes are delayed around the world, and are dependant on local stations buying that programme.

And I’m not going to comment on how it seems that these days, laws concerning copyright seem to be more important that laws protecting people.

What I will comment on is…

Where am I going to be able to download the last couple of episodes of “Lost”?!?!

This night-shift is overtime for me, I'm doing this overtime to make up for the pay that I was docked because I couldn't work my shift, on account of being stuck in Houston.

It started to look like it might be an interesting night, my first job was to a 24 year old male who had been attacked by a group of people outside his home with some sort of weapon. He had been properly beaten up, swollen eye, multiple cuts, grazes and swellings. He also probably had a broken rib or two. Luckily for him there didn't seem to be any serious injury, but he'll probably be sore for the next week or so.

From there, I got bounced to another job which meant I was following the police down to road to a stabbing.

The patient was an alcoholic who had apparently been set upon by a gang of youths. It looked like they had tried to stab him with a kebab knife, which had snapped. So they took another kebab knife and made a mess of his left hand, he had multiple cuts down to the bone, and also some serious tendon damage. They had then stamped on his head and chest, breaking a few ribs.

Once more the patient was very lucky that the wounds they had weren't life threatening. He was whisked off to hospital, and I had to run back to base in order to remove the blood that I'd dropped my service phone in. I later learned that the patient would be going to another hospital in order to get the tendons in his hand repaired.

The night then got back to normal, with my next patient being a mother who had possibly overdosed, we persuaded her to attend hospital, and the crew that took her in to hospital had another, more serious, overdose later that night (I told you that you get a jump of suicides this time of year)

Then I was sent a call in Ilford to an elderly gentleman, who had flow in from India two days before, and was having an asthma attack made worse by a chest infection. He got a bit better with some of the medication I gave him, and he was taken off to hospital where they will probably give him some antibiotics.

Then I got even further from my area into Seven Kings to the train station for a "male vomiting blood". Well he wasn't - he was vomiting up some red wine, red wine that he had drunk to excess in the city earlier in the evening.

At this point I was quite happy to be wandering around the Ilford area, it's a nice change of scenery - so obviously the next job I got was a maternataxi back in the middle of my own area. The patient's contractions were two minutes apart, and were lasting a minute, so I was quite happy when the ambulance turned up - although to be fair, I was thinking that if I did have to deliver in the dingy corridor we found ourselves in, at least it'd make a good blog entry...

I had a short time on station - just long enough to close my eyes before being sent to one of our "frequent flyers" who claims to have fits, but only when he is drunk (which is pretty often). I've never seen evidence of him fitting, but maybe I'm just lucky. He is one of those patients who you don't have to touch, as all he wants is a 'big white taxi' ride into hospital.

Back to station long enough to have a dream about trying to smuggle drugs into Russia by hiding them in my mouth - then out again to a 27 year old female with chest pain. She didn't have any symptoms that pointed to anything serious, so it's up to the hospital to work out what is wrong with her - I'd suspect she'll find her way home later today with a diagnosis of "muscular-skeletal pain".

I have an hour to go until the end of the shift, so I'll post this, and if I get anything interesting I'll let you know after I get home.

One of my commenters asked if it was true that the Full moon affected people so much that the local hospital had to hire extra night staff every month.  There have been scientific studies to disprove this, and I have never worked in a hospital that hired extra staff on the basis of the phases of the moon.

But it did get me thinking about the effects that the weather has upon people, because in my experience this does have an appreciable effect.

When I was teaching children, we would dread days when it was windy, because we knew that the children would be more active, and more prone to be disobedient, another of my commenters said exactly the same thing, so I know it wasn’t a local phenomenon.

It works for adults too – I’m much busier on windy days, and while this is just my impression, I always seem to think that there are also many more assaults.

If the weather is grey and overcast, we tend to go to more old folk who are sitting indoors, or more commonly, falling over indoors.  Sometimes you get the impression that they just want someone to talk to – or to not be alone.  There also seem to be more suicide attempts as well – and it is fairly well known that suicide rates go up in springtime.  So on those rainy spring days you end up seeing a lot of Paracetamol overdoses.

Spring and Autumn rains (and in England, Summer rains) bring with them car vs car collisions, as an infrequent rain lifts off the layer of rubber and pollution left on the road by passing cars and the roads become a skid pan.  Fallen leaves on the road don’t help, and neither do the effects of the rapidly changing hours of daylight on a drivers bodyclock.

Ice on the streets means that we will be going to plenty of “Nan Down!” calls, little old ladies falling over.  When working in the hospitals I remember one icy day where I personally dealt with 23 elderly people with broken wrists caused by falling on the ice.

When the weather is sunny, there can also be chaos on the streets – this Sunday had really nice, sunny weather, the kind of weather you only seem to remember from your childhood.  East London has a lot of narrow residential streets, with cars parked nose to tail on both sides of the road.  If these streets are ‘quiet’ then children tend to forget that cars do occasionally travel down them (thankfully not often at any speed).

So this Sunday there were more than the usual number of children being hit by cars, I went to one where a six year old had run out between two parked cars and been struck.  He had a minor head wound, and complained of neck pain, so I put a hard collar on him and when the ambulance crew turned up we did a full restraint.  He was an excellent patient – normally I can’t stand kids, but he was exceptionally brave, and when I explained about the collar, he was happy to have it on because he seen them in use on the television…

There was also a (well behaved) crowd of about 30 people standing around, and when the police turned up they got people out the way by saying “I know it’s a cliche but, please move along there is nothing to see…”

It’s a good job I don’t get performance anxiety.

The hot weather also brings out the people who start drinking at lunchtime, and continue throughout the day, tie this in with a lot of sporting fixtures, and we find ourselves going to a lot of fights in a lot of pubs.

——–

Oh, and for the people who got stuck heading Westbound on the A13 yesterday at around 15:00 – it was because there had been an accident and HEMS was blocking the road.  While I didn’t stop and look (I was too busy trying not to get hit by the people who did want to see what was happening) I did get the impression that it might have been a pedestrian trying to cross this six lane major road who then got hit.

I’m a scientist at heart, I believe in emperical evidence, research based medicine and the eradication of silly superstitions.

Unfortunately sometimes this job can throw weird things at you.

An example of this happened to me the other day.

Out of eleven jobs I went to three in the same street, lets call it ‘Gray close’.  All the jobs were to diferent houses and all were for diferent illnesses.  The area is not in an especially deprived part of Newham, so there is no real reason why I should have to go there more than usual – and to be honest, I can’t remember the last time I was there.

I was wondering what the chances of this happening were – so bear with me for a bit, and if my maths is a bit screwy then feel free to correct me.

There are roughly 92,382 households in Newham (I worked this out by dividing the population of Newham by the size of the average household 2.64), and while I cover more of an area than Newham, this number will do for the purposes of this example.

All numbers come from the Fire Service.

Gray close has 34 households.

92,382 divided by 34 is 2,717.  So the chances of a specific call being in Gray Close is 1 in 2,717.

I did 11 calls that day, and three of them were in the same close, which has the odds of something like 1 in 20,057,135,813.

At least I think that is right – it has been years since I looked at statistics and probability and to be honest I didn’t understand it then.  But while the maths might be wrong, the effect is still stunning.

An additional thought is that this isn’t that unusual – At least once a week I’ll find myself going to the same street, or streets that are neighbouring each other on the same day for multiple, unconnected calls..

It is this that makes me think that there might just be certain concentrations of some form of ‘bad vibe’ that hit certain areas causing illness, assaults and other ‘emergencies’.  I’m sure there is some clever (and very expensive) clustering software that could work out if this sort of thing was a real effect or just my all too human mind playing pattern recognition tricks with me.

Or am I just going mad?

If I ever come across a person who writes Malware – I promise that I will break their legs.  It’ll be worth it, and if I’m ever called to someone who writes this stuff I’ll make sure that their injury gets worse before they reach the hospital.

If I come across the person responsible for the “aurora.transponder” malware, I’ll start with the legs, but they will end up in little bits (I think it’ll be justifiable homicide).  Actually I think I’ll flay the fuckers alive.

I’ve spent all night using MS Antispyware, Spybot S&D and Ad-aware, all to no avail – I’ve even been manually removing registry keys and the like.  It is similar to when my car gets stolen, it’s frustrating because I’m being attacked and yet I have no-one I can punch over this.

A couple of people have suggested that I get an Apple Mac to combat this problem, unfortunately I don’t have the funds for it, but I do have a plan…

Over on the right you will find a little button.

You can click this button to send me money.  Yep, it’s begging time.

I get around 9,000 to 10,000 visitors a day, so if they all were to donate just 50p ($1) then, not only would I have enough for a nice shiny Mac, but I’d have a load left over to give to a charity.

And of course, you wouldn’t have to put up with my moaning about Malware.

Your choice…

UPDATE: The reason why the Paypal thing goes to 'Brian' is because that is the name that comes first on my birth certificate. Tom is my middle name, and I use that as my nom-de-plume because when I started this blog I wanted that little bit of a separation between this site and my real-life work, partly for patient confidentiality reasons. So don't worry, there isn't some scam going on here, and I have mentioned it before.

Secondly, I'll never charge folk to access this site, all donations are voluntary - you won't get any extra content except a 'thank you' email from me. The reason why some sites are asking for donations are because these things do cost money to run (to be fair, it's not much if you pick the right hosting solutions), and some people would like to at least break even on providing content. At the moment it costs me about £25 a month to run this site (including the hosting for the upcoming podcasts), and I get so much out of this site, and the great people who read it, that it is well worth the money.

Just a quick request.

If there are any police from KF reading this, can one of them drop me a quick email please. You may know what it is about.

Cheers

Everyone else, just ignore this post

Thirteen jobs, half of which were either drunk or long term alcoholics

The other half (with the exception of two people) were either wimps, obnoxious or a complete waste of time.

The only people driving around Newham were the sort of people who got their driving license free in a cereal box.

I’m having real trouble (read: finding it impossible) booking a hotel and flight to Copenhagen in June.

My laptop has both a virus and spyware on it (even though I never open email attachments, use a firewall).  Neither of which are being fixed with the usual tools, and so will require some real work when I have the time.

The FRU car I’m driving at the moment only seems to pick up African pirate radio stations, and doesn’t have a CD player.

…and then…while driving on blue lights and sirens, I had a young man walk calmly out in front of me – knowing I would stop.  He also gave me that whole, “you are a piece of shit I have found on my shoe” look  that certain sections of the Newham population seem to perfected towards anyone in a uniform.

Don’t ask me how I managed to stop myself from gunning the engine and aiming for the arrogant bastard.  There may have been some rather unprofessional shouting at him though.

It’s been a while since I felt that all-over white-hot rage.

So, not a good day really.

Same again tomorrow

Today is one of those days where I really need to be careful, otherwise the disjunction between what the public expects of us, and what we actually do will get me in trouble.

At the moment my body is feeling ready to give up, a troublesome changeover from night to day work doesn't help, neither does the sore throat or the feeling that my soul is still in Seattle waiting for a flight back to my body in London.

This means that the chances of me having a "sense of humour" failure are greater than normal.

I noticed it yesterday with my last job - I was called to a "60 year old male, collapsed in park". Now there are of course many reasons why someone collapses in the park, and while I keep an open mind the chances are very high that it is alcohol related.

So I got there, and there was a concerned member of the public fussing over a drunk alcoholic. All power to him, he had spotted someone in distress, and was trying to help out as best he could, and I'd much rather have people like that compared to the calls we get of "Man laying in street, poss. dead. Caller cannot stay on scene", which always seems to be a drunk.

The care I gave was the same as the care I would normally give, but I wasn't as "warm" as I normally am. I was polite, but there was something deep down in me that really couldn't be bothered with dealing with yet another alcoholic.

The ambulance turned up about a minute later, and took care of the patient - but I was aware that the bystander was probably not happy with my apparent lack of empathy.

This is that disjunction that I mentioned - the public expects us to be constantly caring people, dealing with what they see as a serious emergency - while to us it is a regular alcoholic, with very little newly wrong with them. And while we often hide our apathy behind our professionalism, it can sometimes slip.

It's that sort of job that will earn you a complaint from someone for being "not caring enough".

The fact that I feel rough (through no fault of my own) might just mean that the mask of caring might slip - and while I have no problem with people who are actually ill - if I get the usual rubbish, I'll have to be very, very careful.

I might have to do a proper post on this when I'm feeling a bit better, as it's quite an important thing about our work.

Do you have a work based blog? One that talks about what you do at work?

Would you like it listed on a website? A website that I link to?

If you answer yes, then let me know in the comments box - I'm collecting them.

Just because I own workblogs.net and jobblogs.net, and I want to do something cool with them...

UPDATE: Don't bother, some clever bugger has beaten me to it.