Birmingham University medical school has banned full face veils in clinical areas. It just interests me how such things spread, not that I wish to turn this blog into 'veil-watch'. As an update to the post about headscarfs being made part of a school uniform, it appears that this was misreported (although the cynic in me considers that they have decided to quickly change the policy after the media attention). Check the comments of that post for more details.

(Via Warren Ellis)

Oh yes, the Wordpress question doesn't mean that I'm moving this site to Wordpress - I'm a Huge fan of Blogware and my hosting company. I'm just interested in starting up another blog for non-ambulance stuff.

There are days when you wake up in a foul mood, I'm sure that everyone can relate to this. For no good reason you just want to growl at everything. Us ambulance people get those days as well.

The trick is to try and hide your general grumpiness with the world, given some of our calls this can be a bit tricky.

It is particulary difficult when your first job is to transfer a maternity patient from one hospital to the other and the midwives in the sending department treat you rudely. I wouldn't treat a taxi driver the way we were treated that day.

We were called over with a dismissive wave of the hand. The handover of the patient consisted of a doctor referal letter being thrown at us and the midwife who accompanied us hardly spoke a word to me or the patient.

Add in a rude relative and the job was a bundle of joy.

It wasn't helped by the midwife spending forty minutes at the receiving hospital photocopying the patient notes.

I very nearly said something I would have regretted.

Still, it all became better after I had a full fry-up breakfast.

It's not good to want to do painful things to other healthcare professionals, but us ambulance folk are only human too.

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Sent from a mobile phone, probably from the cab of an ambulance.
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It seems that the discussion on the wearing of a veil can go the other way. A UK school has made the hijab part of the school uniform, even though 10% of the children there are not of the Islamic faith.

Countdown until the tabloids catch wind of this, 3...2...1...

(Thanks to It's Your Time You're Wasting, Not Mine)

My crewmate (permanent crewmate mind you) called me ‘Tom’ yesterday.  She has never called me this before.

She normally calls me ‘Harry’, because she is rather obviously mad and thinks that I look like ‘Harry Potter’.

I call her Moomin, partly because she wants to live in Finland and partly because she is short and looks like one of them.

We don’t have nicknames for our regular patients, except perhaps for, ‘Oh it’s that bloody man again!’

Now for a request…

Has anyone any experience in hosting for Wordpress?  I’m looking for somewhere, preferably in the UK who will host a Wordpress blog.  It doesn’t have to be the world’s cheapest (although that would be good), but somewhere which has a pretty good record of treating it’s customers right.

Thanks in advance.

I don’t often do reviews, mainly because I don’t read them and am therefore uncertain about the format.  But this was too good an opportunity to miss.  Also I may have sold any reputation I have down the river and have agreed to do a bit of PR for the company promoting it – no money has changed hands.

‘Saved’ – Sunday at 9pm on the Hallmark channel.

Although this will perhaps be old news for any readers from the Americas, there is a new ‘Paramedic Drama’ TV show called ‘Saved’.  It’s on the Hallmark channel in the UK and last night I saw the pilot for it.  I made a few notes…

Like all TV medical dramas it was full of the interesting (but rare) jobs that we go to – I believe that somewhere out in TV writer-land there is a list of things that *must* happen in a medical drama. 

You must have,

• A fat guy having a heart attack.
• A cardiac arrest (which is saved).
• A case of child abuse.
• A baby being delivered.
• A car crash.
• A dead child.
• A mad homeless person, and…
• A newbie.

‘Saved’ ticked all of those particular boxes, but didn’t feel cheap for it.  In an hour long show (especially a pilot) you need to make things as interesting as possible.  The plot is fairly typical, the ‘hero’ has personal and family problems with a complicated love life, another is separated from his wife and child.  Once more drama needs these tropes to make you feel for the characters.  No-one in a drama has a happy marriage, just like no-one in Eastenders has a life free of pain.

But before you think I am being harsh, I’d like to let you know that I really enjoyed it.

I understand that there are differences in the way that American ambulance staff differ from us in the UK, but there were some universal truths that I can’t ever remember seeing in a TV drama before.  For example, on their way to hospital after dealing with a trauma the attendant was chatting quite happily while doing a medical procedure – now, realistically the driver would have pulled over, but it was the dialogue that I quite liked, they were both calm (no ‘If I don’t make this he’s gonna die’ histrionics) the driver was congratulating his mate on not getting them beaten up moments earlier.

The dialogue was similar to the way we talk in real life (although not always in front of the patient), the way of talking that may seem cruel and uncaring, but it is that level of disconnection which gets us through the shift.

There was the same superstition about uttering the ‘Q word’ in relation to a shift, I imagine that their medical consultant threw that idea into the writing pot.  It’s funny that they have the same belief in America.  We also shudder if someone says that the shift will be ‘quiet’ – it’s a terrible curse.

At one point the ambulance was stolen – the reaction was pretty much what ours would be, a moment of ‘oh sh*t!’ followed by laughter as the police followed it down the road.

The attitude to the patients was also similar to a lot of what happens on the road, telling the heart attack that he wasn’t going to die, and that he was safe now is the sort of thing that we all say in order to relax our patients.  I’m also glad that I’m not the only one who mentions to patients that he doesn’t like doctors either…

It’s also nice to see someone who wears gloves less than I do – I’m not a big fan of wearing them, but, unlike the protagonist, I do wear them if I’m delivering a baby as it gets bloody mucky.

I liked the reaction to being told that a patient of theirs had died – a little sad, but not broken up about it – and then back on the road for the next call.

Can I just say though, sex in the back of an ambulance?  Ewww.  Reember, we know the sorts of people who we regularly pick up…

Finally, I can’t tell you how much I love the photo montages of the patient’s backgrounds that are shown as our heroes arrive on scene – they condense a lot of information into a short space of time and avoid the ‘Casualty’ trap where half the programme is set-up for the emergency.

(As an example, I saw Casualty this week, the first part of the programme showed a woman with two children next to a canal – I was guessing that one of them would drown.  I was wrong, one child smothered the other, but it had distracted me.  The ‘Saved’ approach is much better at compressing a patient history into a few seconds).

So I’ve got to say that I enjoyed the pilot and I’ll be watching again next week to see if they can keep the same standard of realistic bits mixed with the trauma cases we get once in a blue moon.

Oh yes, the American site for the programme has two blogs!

“Male, 40 years old – fitting”.

It was a park, it was midday.  I didn’t really need to see the update that said,

“Patient with two males, both appear drunk”.

I think that it is a law of the universe that your middle-aged, middle of the day, middle of the park fitter will be an alcoholic.  That or they are an epileptic alcoholic.

As we approached the scene my crewmate asked where I thought it would be.

“Well, the drunks tend to hide down by that end, it’s close to the off license”.

I was right.  Our patient looked familiar, but after a while they all look familiar.  I did recognise his two friends, one had been picked up two days ago, the other was another of our regular callers.

“He’s had another fit”, said the slightly more sober one, “He’s had three today”.

“Yeah”, said the other taking a swig from a big bottle of cheap cider, “He’s epileptic but he doesn’t take his tablets”.

Our patient had the same ground in grime that you get from sitting on a park bench drinking all day, then falling over and going to sleep in the bushes before heading home at some point in the early hours.  A simple job to load him up onto the stretcher, check him out and give him some oxygen and pop him into hospital.

My crewmate and I were inspecting him in the ambulance when I felt an urge to pass wind.

It was perfect timing, I could blame it on the semi-conscious patient.

My crewmate groaned, “I think he’s pooed himself”.

I told her the truth.

Honest.

By the time we reached the hospital the patient was a lot more awake, so we spoke to the handover nurse, put him on a trolley and went outside to clean up, finish off the paperwork and *ahem* air out the back of the ambulance.

I think it was thirty seconds before we saw him walking out the department.

Probably towards the nearest off-license.

Not that I want this site to turn into a 'veil issue' site, but this BBC news story has perfect timing. (Plus I have a day off which I have spent mostly sleeping and am too tired to write a big post).

A Muslim woman has been suspended by a school in West Yorkshire after she insisted on wearing a veil in lessons.

Bilingual support worker Aishah Azmi, 24, was asked to remove the veil after pupils found it hard to understand her during English language lessons.

I'm not the only one then. (Although it'll be interesting to see how the tribunal goes).

I think that there is something in the air, yesterday we went to two diabetics with critically low blood sugars. It's a job that we sometimes do, but isn't actually that common. The day before there were at least two others in our area, one of which was quite ill.

The first was rather simple. A woman found her husband collapsed in the living room, she called us and we quickly diagnosed and treated the low blood sugar. When we found him he was unconscious, sweating profusely and was rather ill looking. One injection and some glucose gel and an hour later the patient was playing with with his very cute doberman. We may have also been enjoying the friendly dog as well.

The second person was a young woman in the workplace. I felt sorry for her as she was surrounded by her work colleagues and it was impossible for us to move her to a more private area. She wasn't as low as our first patient although she was very sweaty and was acting as if she were drunk. Once more we managed to 'cure' her with some sugary drinks an a little time. She was mortified that she was ill in front of her colleagues. She had received some immediate help from her friends, one of whom was 'first aid at work' trained.

Neither patient wanted to go to hospital, and once their blood sugar was back to normal there wasn't much that the hospital would do. Traditionally these are the sorts of patients who refuse to attend hospital and are left behind by us ambulance crews.

Still it is nice to be able to help people in such a profound manner - it makes a nice change from people who aren't actually ill.

Click Here

I hope that it does make The Friday Project huge amounts of money, because everyone who works there is lovely* and they deserve good stuff happening to them.

Proof, perhaps, that a Creative Commons release will only sell more books?

*With the exception of Pond, who is wicked.**

**Wicked as in Evil, not in the 'street word for good' way.

I'm the new 'Health And Safety' representative for our station. I'm assuming that there is a reader out there who is knowledgeable of such things. If so, could you point me in the direction of training course that I could apply for?

I know I could Google for the info, but I'm too busy/lazy/stupid. Mainly busy. Honest.

I am currently so tired I'm not actually human at the moment - after a few litres of Coke I approach sub-human. This is not a huge disadvantage in this job.

Thankfully it was a pretty easy day today.

One call was to a teenage girl with abdominal pain, diarrhoea and vomiting. She described herself as an alcoholic. I let the nurses at the hospital know, perhaps she'll get referred to the social services, perhaps she is already known to them.

Then there was a homeless guy who was suicidal. The community mental health team wasn't interested in seeing him, so he went to A&E where the nurse in charge took good care of him.

Another call was to one of our 'regulars', a child who keeps collapsing. He's a nice enough lad, but so far investigations have shown nothing. It's believed that he collapses because of stress over bullying, various people are involved in his problem.

The final call of the day was to an ill person that we never reached. On the way to the call we came across a four year old child which had been sat on the crossbar of her father's bike. Somehow she'd got her foot caught between the wheel and the forks of the front wheel. There was some serious swelling and bruising to her foot and ankle, thankfully she wasn't otherwise hurt. It's possible, but unlikely, that she could have broken a bone in her foot.

The child was really grown-up, hardly crying at all. She did keep giving me a sullen stare though...

Darn kids can see right through me.

Everyday I meet a new kind of stupid.

A woman, thirty-five years old, mother of two children went to her GP. She had a swollen belly and pain which came and went in waves. She also hadn't had a menstrual period in over nine months. That morning, just after the pain had started, she had lost some fluid from her vagina. The pain was getting worse and the waves were getting closer together.

The GP did a (completely unnecessary) pregnancy test which - surprise, surprise, come back positive.

The GP was incredibly relieved when we arrived.

We had just managed to wheel her into the maternity department when the baby made an appearance. My crewmate helped the midwife deliver the baby while I was hiding in the ambulance. I'm quite happy for any baby (not of my own) to be born with me not watching, I suspect the woman was quite happy I wasn't there as well.

Here was a woman who was fully aware of what pregnancy is like, she wasn't even in denial - the whole thing came as a complete shock. Her husband looked completely shell-shocked as well.

The whole thing really beggars comment.

I hate mornings, there is something deeply depressing about crawling into work while it is still dark knowing that for the next twelve hours you'll be run ragged.

The current topic of conversation in the messroom at the moment is the furor over Jack Straw's suggestion that Muslim women wearing full face veils only divide communities.

My patch has a huge number of Muslims, some days I'll only attend to Muslims. This isn't a problem for me as most of them are polite and don't get horribly drunk and try to hit me.

On more than one occasion I've turned around to discover that the patient I've been talking to has 'robed up', the woman has turned from a person into a black 'blob', it's always surprising to see such a total change.

I'm a big believer in freedom of expression, and I have no problem with people wearing whatever they want, but the burka and it's relatives can make my life difficult.

You see, I'm a bit hard of hearing, and if the person I'm talking to has a strong accent I tend to get more meaning from lip-reading rather than just listening to them. If the person has a full face covering then it's often tricky for me to hear what they are saying. Add in the fact that the back of an ambulance isn't the quietest place on earth and the problem becomes a lot worse.

I don't want to offend people, but it does annoy me to keep saying 'pardon?' because I can't understand what the person is saying. I'm trying to be as nice as possible here (considering I believe *all* religion to be foolish), but what is more important, the wearing of a veil or the ability for the ambulance man to understand you and your illness?

It's Ramadan at the moment, so loads of people are fasting and again this can lead to offense...

I went to a gentleman who had fainted, as he was South-East Asian I asked him if he had been fasting (as this is a common cause of collapsing at this time of year). He told me that he was a Hindu rather than a Muslim, and that he hated all Muslims due to the fighting that had occurred between the two faiths in the past.

I apologised, and the patient wasn't bothered by my assumption - but another person may have taken offense and complained. It can be a minefield out there, especially given some religious adherents near constant level of being offended.

Still it could be worse, we could be killing each other over which sect of a religion we belong to...

...again.
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Sent from a mobile phone, probably from the cab of an ambulance.
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