Thanks folks you have successfully bullied my mum into going to the doctor.  She’s going to use Cheryl’s suggestion of blaming it all on me, and I’m currently educating her into not accepting ‘no’ for an answer from the doctor.

Gotta love the power of the internet…

Seriously – thanks.

Normal service is now resumed

Last night was a pretty strange one, in that I wasn’t massively busy – I only had eight jobs, but instead I spent most of my time standing around in patient’s houses waiting for an ambulance.

For various reasons, the manning of the ambulances last night was particularly poor – there was no night ambulances out of my station, and across the sector I heard the rumour that there was only ten ambulances running.

So the pattern for the night was that I would turn up to a patient, and then spend 30–45 minutes waiting for a crew to take the patient to hospital.  This isn’t a problem when dealing with a maternataxi ( patient’s first baby, pains started two hours ago, contraction pains of about 20 seconds every 15 minutes with membranes intact) who when I told them how long they would be waiting for an ambulance decided that driving themselves would be a better plan.

But with someone who is ill, those 50 minutes (I know, I timed it) seem to stretch.

In this case it was an elderly man with lung cancer who was having real difficulty in breathing.  his oxygen levels were 75% (they should be 95% or higher) and he was struggling to get oxygen to his brain.  Unfortunately there was nothing that I could do for him treatment wise apart from give him oxygen, and try to reassure him and his family.

It’s a bit hard to reassure a patient when the only word you understand is ‘bish’, which means ‘pain’, and he is using that word a lot.

Thankfully his family were on hand to translate, and they were incredibly patient and understanding about the long wait to get their father to hospital.  The oxygen that I was giving him seemed to help settle him a bit, but at one point he emptied my oxygen cylinder, so I had to nip back down to the car for a replacement.

So, not a busy night, just a bit of a hard one in places.