First off...

...Bah Humbug.

(It's not just for Christmas).

I've just finished with a job that makes me question this whole 'love' idea.

I'm sent to an alcoholic who has just had an epileptic fit and I arrive to find his fiancè looking very worried.

She tells me, "I've known him for ten months and I've only seen him fit once, so I'm afraid I got scared and called for an ambulance".

I reassure her that this isn't a problem, and that she has done the right thing.

I look after the patient, it's an easy job and I spend some time waiting for the ambulance to arrive (I was 'single', so I was asked to work on the RRU, the alternative was to work out of Waterloo station).

I look around the room they are staying in. It's not what you would call 'homely', it's the typical house of a young alcoholic (he's the same age as me). Cans of cheap cider are laying around the place, there is no furniture apart for a settee and a T.V, empty cigarette packets litter the floor and the pictures haven't been mounted on the walls.

There is an axe leaning against the fireplace.

His fiancè is young and not obviously unattractive, she doesn't seem particularly stupid and she doesn't look like a fellow alcoholic. So I'm confused as to why she would want to marry an alcoholic? I'm afraid it just befuddles me as to how you can 'love' someone who loves their next drink more than you.

In any partnership you will come second to an open bottle of cider.

I just don't understand.



Maybe I'm just emotionally stunted?

Someone (who I can’t mention on pain of death) pointed out an Amazon page to me…

Where Da Book is listed

Which means that I better finish writing it…

It’s definitely a weird feeling to see it up on a website I buy most of my books from.  I’m currently polishing the ‘final’ first draft before sending it off to the publishers so they can edit it into something approaching English.  I’m having a bit of a crisis of confidence at the moment.  Reading through my old posts I’m constantly worried that my writing skills are not good enough to be published.

One thing that leaps out when you look at a collected bunch of posts is how I seem to spend a lot of time trying to get a cup of tea, or worrying about sleep.

At one point we seriously considered subtitling the book “One man’s quest for a cup of tea”.

It’ll be finished before the end of the week, so I’ll see what my publishers have to say.  Until then I’m afraid I’m going to be neglecting this blog and email.  Maybe I’ll post something from work via my mobile phone, but unless I come across a job that I simply must write about, the next post might take until Wednesday to write.

So I shall leave you to ponder an important life lesson about ‘ass-hair’.

A very interesting post from Mind Hacks about why people buy French or German wine.

This week the round up of medical blog posts “Grand Rounds” is up at Science and Politics.

As Neil Gaiman just wrote…

Writing away on about three different deadlines right now, so the blogging is probably going to suffer for a week or so. (Traditionally I either follow a post like that by disappearing completely or by posting twice as much.)

I never thought I’d share anything with him, but the first draft of ‘da book’ needs to be in by the end of the month, so blogging may be a bit light for the next two weeks or so.  I’ve got some stuff to write about last nights ORG meeting, some in private emails, some of which may end up in this blog.  There also may be some scribbling over a little project I’m doing – this may however remain private.

If I get something really interesting in the next two night-shifts I’ll let you know, but I may be a little to busy to turn belly-aches into interesting posts.

The Amazon adbox (the only ad I’ll ever have) has been turned into a “what I’m reading now” box.  Do with it as thou wilt.

After much deep consideration and thought trial and error, I’ve managed to get the Talkr link for individual posts working.  This will let you hear my posts without having to subscribe to the Talkr RSS feed.

Last night was a bit strange, which for a change had nothing to do with the patients I was seeing.

Newham hospital was packed to the gills with patients, there were no beds available in the hospital, so a lot of my workmates ended up transferring patients from Newham to other hospitals around the area.  At one point it got so bad that for two hours Newham ‘diverted’, or closed to non-‘blue light’ ambulance jobs.  Hospitals don’t like doing this as they tend to be fined for restricting their services, but when the situation is dangerous it’s actually in the best interests of the patients.

But my crewmate and I had to be that little bit different.

We had managed to return to station for three minutes when the phone went.  Control wanted us to transfer a patient from a hospital out of our area to another hospital on the other side of London.  We were told that there we no ambulances available in the originating hospitals sector.

The patient was a young lady who may have been in premature labour at 30 weeks pregnancy.  The nearest SCBU (Specialist Care Baby Unit) with an empty bed was in Hammersmith.  Hammersmith is on the other side of London.  I suppose we should have counted ourselves lucky that it wasn’t in Brighton.

So I drove through our sector, into another sector to pick up the patient and the midwife.  We then drove 30 miles through the centre of London to get her to Hammersmith hospital.  I don’t drive through London very often – I don’t need to, London Underground is cheaper and easier than trying to find a parking space.  Thankfully all our ambulances now have GPS navigation systems installed – so it’s a (simple) case of following the arrows on the little navigation screen and avoiding the cars that insist on trying to crash into you.  I have a strange feeling of pride that I managed to find the hospital without getting lost or crashing.  I then cruised around the hospital looking for the maternity entrance, and managed to find it by sheer luck and good fortune.

The hospital itself was completely different to the hospitals in our area – it was clean, it had comfy chairs, and the doctor who met the patient at the hospital showed us the staff kitchen so we could get a cup of tea.

The only thing the same as the hospitals ‘back home’, was the angry glare from the midwife as we entered the unit.

On our way back to Newham we managed to get a job.

“Aha!”, we thought, “This might be an interesting job”.

But no – it was exactly the same sort of patient/job that we get in Newham.  An elderly Bangladeshi gentleman with all over body ache and a heavy head.

Still – he was a very pleasant man so we didn’t mind.

This patient went to St Mary’s hospital by request, and I’ll admit that on my first attempt at getting him to the hospital I drove past the obviously well-hidden entrance ramp.  So I had to enter the one-way system, adding an extra mile on our journey.  The picture in this post is of St Mary’s ‘welcome mat’.  You don’t get welcome mats at Newham.  At Newham you have to force open the ambulance bay doors…

Then we managed to get back to Newham, where we had an hour to relax on station before the morning crew turned up and sent us home.

This CoComment thing looks very, very interesting and I’d love to get to play with it.  Unfortunately you need to have an invitation code to be invited into the Beta.

Anyone able to help with this?

Update: Thanks to Euan Semple of The Obvious, I now have an invitation. Once I've played around with it for a couple of days I'll let you know all about it.

A while ago I read my posts and published them as podcasts.  It ended up taking too much time and was impossible to do while blogging from work, so I had to stop.

However – if you cast your eyes over to the sidebar you will spot a new icon .  This clever little thingy converts my RSS feed into an audio RSS feed.  Copy and paste that link into your podcaster software and you will get a pretty good computer generated reading of my posts.

If I were clever I’d know how to add a “Listen to this article” link at the bottom of each of my posts – but after spending some time wrestling with the Blogware templates it’s all a bit beyond me…

For anyone who is interested I’ll be at the second Open Rights meeting, although to get to it has meant that I’ve had to spend some of my annual leave to get a night off work.

If you are going, come over and say Hi.

I know on Thursday I told you about having a rapid wager with my crewmate about which way a drunk would fall, but I don’t want to give you the wrong idea.

I think betting is silly.

I have no idea how to work out any odds other than ‘X to 1’ (where the larger ‘X’ gets the more unlikely something is going to happen).  ‘Odds of 11/7’, ‘each way’, ‘accumulators’ and ‘handicap’ make no sense to me at all.  Since childhood the betting shop has always seemed to me to be a seedy place where hard drinking, and hard smoking, men flush their money down the toilet.  Not somewhere I would ever visit.  In fact I’d rather visit a sex-shop, which as at least one of my readers will know, is a tricky proposition.

Occasionally I do find myself, due to the duties of my job, frequenting these dens of vice.  And to be honest most of them aren’t that bad.  The most common reason why I am sent to these places is because someone has passed out in the toilets due to drugs, or less commonly, drink.  For some reason betting shop toilets seem to be really popular places to take drugs.

Don’t ask me why.

These jobs are fairly rare, so I was surprised to find myself called to betting shops on two separate jobs in one day.  Even more surprising was that neither of these jobs were junkie related.

The first job was to a fifty year old male who had collapsed, and when we arrived the FRU driver was looking a bit concerned.  The patient was as white as a sheet and not talking, we were all worried that he was going to die while in the shop, so we quickly loaded him into our chair and removed him to the ambulance.

While trying to do this, every other user of the betting shop continued around us without batting an eyelid.  Normally we’d get a bit of an audience, but not so in this case.  At one point a man ‘tutted’ me because I was standing between him and some vitally important bit of paper on the wall.

I’ll leave it to you, dear reader, to guess my reply to that.

As soon as the patient was in the ambulance he started to come around.  All of our investigations showed nothing unusual, so we concluded that it was just a ‘simple’ faint, if a slightly prolonged one.  Once he had fully recovered he was a fairly nice man to talk to, and we took him to hospital for a few more tests.

The second job to a betting shop was for a sixty year old male who was having a critically low blood sugar.  He was a diabetic, and when we arrived was rooted to his stool watching the horses racing on the TV screens.  His wife was starting to get frantic at his refusal to talk.

We checked his blood sugar (it was very low at 2.2 mmols), and this explained his strange behaviour.

We tried to persuade him to drink a can of coke but he refused, so we made the decision to give him an injection of Glucagon.  This drug, when injected into a muscle is often good enough to reverse a low blood sugar for a short period of time.  The plan was to get his blood sugar high enough that he would come out of his confusion for long enough that we could get some sugar in him.

That was the plan at least.

Instead, we just gave him enough strength to start fighting us, his wife and the nice betting shop lady who threatened to ban him if he didn't do ‘what the nice ambulance people told him to do’.

In an effort to get him into the ambulance, we ended up wrestling with him in the street.  It’s a bit strange to be physically restraining a pensioner while trying to (a) not hurt him, and (b) not look like a bully, even though he is a good couple of inches taller than me.

Then a police car drove past us.

They did a U-turn in the middle of the road and pulled up in front of our ambulance.

A couple of police officers got out and helped us persuade the patient to get into the ambulance where we could finally get the patient to drink the can of coke we gave him.  Sometimes it just needs a couple of big men in black and white uniforms to get a patient to do what you want.

This is one of many reasons why we like the police.

What didn’t help was the wife who would alternately berate her husband for poorly controlling his diabetes, and then spend time telling us that she was a devout Christian.

Thankfully the coke did the trick and the patient made a full recovery – we left him and his wife in the nearby cafe getting something more substantial than a can of coke and a Mars bar.

Two ‘good jobs’, and not a trace of drink or drugs on them.

Makes a nice change.

Some of you may remember that I trained to be a teacher (of small to medium sized children). Rather thankfully I've managed to block out much of the trauma from those days. My poor memory does have it's positive sides.
However, I've just done a job in a primary school, and all those memories came flooding back.
To be honest I think it was the smell that did it. Smell is strongly tied to memory, which is why certain smells can transport you back in time, say to helping your mum bake a cake, or to painting a shed with your father.
In this case it was the smell of the floor polish coupled with the scent of the powder paints in the air that flung me back to my days of trying to control 33 mini disaster machines (or as they are known to the general public..children).
I'm sure that new parents must have the same experience when they first visit their child's school.
The job itself was quite an easy one, one of the teachers was having a panic attack, which is fair enough really - I know that if I were still trying to teach, I'd be in a constant state of panic attack.


I have never been so happy to have changed careers.

The regular round up of medical blogs, ‘Grand Rounds’ are up at Barbados Butterfly.

“He’ll end up in the bush,” I say.

“Nope – the road,” replies my crewmate.

“Bush”.

“Road”.

The man we were watching dropped to the floor – in the road. 

---

It was the last call of the night – a police CCTV camera had seen a man sitting in the middle of the road in what can only be described as a ‘dangerous’ part of town.

We arrived to find our patient rather drunk and sitting in the road under a CCTV camera.  Circling him was a hungry pack of feral children who scattered when they saw us arrive.

We had a pleasant little chat with him – he had a scrape to his face when he had fallen over, and no desire to get out of the road.

We spent twenty minutes trying to persuade him to get out of the road.  We tried being nice, we tried reverse psychology and we even tried explaining that the police would soon be here and they would make him move on.  He refused to move, and he refused to go to hospital – he was a very stationary object.

We got back into ambulance, where it was warm, to await the police.  We’d already parked in a ‘fend off’ position, so that our patient wouldn’t get hit by a passing car.

“Control, have we got an ETA for the police please?”

Control replied, “I can only tell you what they have told me – there are no policemen in the big policeman storage box, as they are all out dealing with other things”.

Great.

Right, I thought, time to try a little trick I learned while reading Mind Hacks.  Certain gestures and objects have ‘hard-coded’ responses in your brain.  So if you walk up to someone who is sitting in the road, and give them your hand (as if you were about to shake their hand), they will often take it, and from there it is fairly easy to get someone standing.

Success!  Our patient was now standing (well…swaying) and indicated that he wanted to go home.  His home was about 400 yards away in one of the tower of flats that surrounded us.

He took two steps and started to fall – he grabbed at my crewmate’s jacket, spun himself around her and by some miracle remained upright.

“I’m fine!,” he said, “I don’t want you helping me walk home”.  He pulled his arms out of our grasp and started to stagger home.

We got into the ambulance and slowly followed behind him.

A message from the police (via our Control) appeared on our display terminal.  “Are you alright?  Does the man have any warning signs?”

Warning signs?

“Control,” I was back on the radio, “I’ve got this message about ‘warning signs’.  Well I don’t think he has any signal flares, or any of those reflective red triangles you put behind your car when it breaks down”.  Yes, I know…I was being silly.

While trying not to laugh Control replied, “I wondered what the police meant by that as well”.

What I think had happened was that the CCTV operator had seen what looked like my crewmate being attacked by the patient when it was just his stumbling around.

We kept following the patient.

He stared to swagger.

He started to sway.

He swaggered some more.

We quickly laid bets on him falling into some bushes on onto the road.

I chose the bushes.

I lost.

We got out of the ambulance and picked him up again.  This time we decided that ‘technically’ breaking the law and frog-marching him home would be in the patient’s best interest.  So we grabbed an arm each and in a jolly fashion walked him home.

With the three of us all with linked arms making our way down a deserted street, it was inevitable that I’d start whistling “We’re off the see the wizard”.

The patient got home safely, although I’d guess that the family member who answered the doorbell wasn’t too pleased with him.