Since I am feeling (and to be more honest looking) fat I’ve decided to take up cycling again.  I’m sure that I gave a great amount of joy to anyone who saw this particular tubby man puffing and panting against the wind while cycling along at 1mph.  Still, if I want to stop from looking 6 months pregnant I need to start some exercise.  This is due, in part, to a job I did yesterday.

We were sent to a strange call.  It was given as “Elderly woman laying on the green as you enter Kellett road.  Woman may have got up”.

Rushing to the green we found it empty.  So we decamped from the ambulance, grabbed our bags and went for a little wander to see if the patient was hiding in a dip in the ground.  Across the green, near some houses, some people started waving at us, so we trotted over.

The patient was a very elderly woman.  She was wearing a nightdress, a threadworn cardigan and nothing on her legs.  She was also barefoot – I was surprised that the thin skin on her feet hadn’t been torn apart by the pavement.

The temperature, not taking into account the strong windchill factor, was around 1 degree Celsius.

She was – unsurprisingly – a bit blue and she felt like a block of ice.

We just had our medical equipment with us, we didn’t have a blanket, so I took off my fleece and wrapped it around her before running back to the ambulance to bring it closer to the patient.

Twenty-four hours later and my ankles are still in pain.  I was shocked by how out of breath I was after jogging about 150 yards.

I brought the ambulance closer and we bundled the patient into the back, turned the heating on full and wrapped her in our blankets.  The patient was one of those little old ladies that you would want to give a good cuddle to if she were your Gran.  We had a short and uneventful trip to the hospital where she was soon receiving the attention of the nursing staff.

My crewmate filled in a ‘vulnerable adult’ form, which means that the Social Services will get involved so that the patient will (hopefully) get any long-term care that she needs.

I managed to get my fleece back.

It now smells of granny wee.

It’s in the washing machine as I type this.