There were two police officers standing over the crying woman.  From 50 yards you could tell she was an alcoholic, blood matted her hair and she held her head in her hands.

We walked her onto the ambulance, it was warmer than the night air, and we had more comfy seats than the wall she was sitting on.

The policewoman joined us to get the woman’s initial statement – as the woman was drunk, another statement would have to be taken after she had sobered up.

The woman told us how she had been drinking all day in the park with her partner and his sister – then her partner’s sister had kicked and beaten her before stealing her handbag.

She continued to tell us how her partner had continually bullied her and how she lived in fear of him.  Her partner’s name was known to both the police and myself and it wasn’t known to us for him being a paragon of virtue.

The police officer was friendly and supportive – she called on the specialist team for domestic violence and started the process of getting her referred.

I took her to the hospital, while her wounds weren’t serious she would need some sort of social services input before she could be discharged – her home wouldn’t be a safe place to go.

“This time”, she told me, “this time, I’ll press charges and get out from him”.

When she sobered up she’d probably go back to him, but we have to offer her all the chances we could – just in case, this time, she were right.

Sometimes, life is like a bad soap.

Happiness is...
Driving over a crowded Tower bridge on blue lights and sirens, sometimes on the wrong side of the road.

Despair is...
Doing all that to get to a drunk who then tries to assault you nd ends up crushing your hand against a door handle.


More later after I finish running around some shops, when I'll have access to something other than my mobile phone.

This picture made me choke on my tea – thanks Ewan.  Click on the picture for more great work from the costumers who made this replica.

 

There has been a bit of bad news, in that my new crewmate won’t be returning to work until much later in the year.  I’m thinking of putting some plans in motion to get me a temporary crewmate.  Obviously I’ll let you know here how it all works out.

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I did three jobs last night and all of them are ‘blogworthy’, here is the first of them.

It was actually the second job of the night – we were sent out of our area for a ‘Pedestrian Vs Car’.  Often these are ‘nothing’ jobs, the person isn’t badly injured simply because there are very few roads where a car can get up the sort of speed to cause serious injury.  Then I had a look on our mapping terminal and which road it was.

“Bugger”, I said to my crewmate, “could be a nasty one…”.

We got there quickly and found an FRU already on scene along with some police, one of the officers was holding the patient’s neck as still as possible.  The patient was writhing around the floor in a mixture of fear and agony.  The FRU paramedic looked rather relieved to see us.

As I jumped out of the ambulance he came over and told me that it was a hit and run, that she’d been thrown some distance and that she had an open fracture of her arm.

An ‘open fracture’ is where a bone has been broken and is sticking out of the skin.  There is always a worry about infection in these sorts of injuries, we also worry about nerve and blood vessel damage – it is a serious injury.

My first concern however was to protect her from any other injuries – specifically any neck or back injuries, and then to get her off the cold dark road and into the warm and well lit ambulance.  Then we would ‘scoop and run’ to the hospital which was less than three minutes down the road.

First things first – I told my crewmate to get our scoop stretcher and trolley bed off the back of the ambulance, then I grabbed a cervical collar and, taking control of the patient’s head, placed it around her neck.  It is here that I’m glad of my hospital experience, as she was wearing a necklace that I took off before putting on the collar – you can’t x-ray a neck that has a necklace on it, and once the collar is on then any necklace is that much harder to remove.

While I was doing this the paramedic was putting a temporary dressing on the patient’s fracture, so while I was holding the patient’s head I started to talk to her.  She didn’t remember anything about the accident, and she kept repeating herself.  While this can be normal after a traumatic event, it always makes me consider that she may have received a brain injury as a result of either hitting the car, or hitting the floor.

I was certain that we weren’t going to ‘stay and play’ at all.

We strapped her to our scoop, lifted her onto the trolley and then put the trolley in the back of the ambulance.  We could have put needles into her, filled her with fluid, given her pain relief – but with the closeness of the hospital I thought that the best thing for her would be out of my ambulance as quickly as possible.

In her confused state the patient kept wanting to poke at her broken arm, so the journey to hospital was mainly taken up by my holding her (working) hand while standing over her so I could talk to her in a vain effort to try and keep her calm.

Soon we were relaxing at the hospital having handed the patient over to the resus team.  Speaking to the FRU paramedic, he had been returning to his station after an equipment failure when someone had jumped out at him and shouted that the patient had been hit by a car.  As he put it, “four months on the FRU and the most interesting job I get is the one I get waved down for when I have no kit in the motor”.

My crewmate asked me later if I missed A&E nursing.  While generally I don’t (because, like this job 80% of it is ‘crap’, but it’s crap that is hard work), I do miss a ‘nice’ trauma sometimes – because my first thought is to get the patient into hospital I don’t often get the chance to use my trauma nursing skills.

But then again – I do now get to drive the wrong way down the road.

After two weeks off work, I am returning to work tonight on my favourite shift, 18:00–01:00.  I love this shift because it fits in best with my own internal body clock in addition you can get a fair number of ‘interesting’ assaults, drunks and bizarre occurrences.  Of course by saying this, I’ll end up doing nothing interesting at all.

With a bit of luck (and, yes, I do have my fingers crossed here) it will be the first shift with my new crewmate.  As with any new work partner it might take a little time to settle in with them, but it’s something that I’m looking forward to.

I’d like to also apologise for not posting much in an ambulance vein for the last couple of days – a bit of depression (some of it alcohol induced) coupled with an accidental deletion of my ‘potential blogging stories’ file has left me empty of inspiration.

 

And no, this apology isn’t because someone left a comment saying they weren’t coming back to this blog because they were bored with the non-ambulance stuff, when you read this blog you have to put up with the random breaks in transmission that shift-work and lack of inspiration causes.  Included in that is that I’d sometimes like to write about stuff that isn’t ambulance related.

Besides, if they are gone, they’ll never read this…

“…are no longer coded as an automatic category A. Neither are maternataxis with supposed “imminent delivery”…”

NeeNaw has just made my day.  Of course I’ll still be going to Maternataxis, I just won’t be forced to drive like Sterling Moss to get there.

The LAS are (as far as I know) the only ambulance service in the UK who still go to routine maternity calls.  Maybe…just maybe one day that will change.

I am a bad, bad person for not blogging more over the last few days.  My only excuse would be that I was preparing for my talk.  And then after my talk I was recovering.

You see – after the presentation I got accosted by a stalker who forced me to drink several pints of obviously poisoned alcohol.  Alcohol has a bit of a bad effect on me and yesterday I just couldn’t face turning my computer on.  Because of this I was only able to wave at Dave Green – I hope he understands that the lure of ‘stalker’+’beer’ is one I simply cannot resist.

Concerning the last post…

The plan was to post that picture from the event, using the Wifi at the Apple store – then at one point during the talk where I ramble on about how to prove your blog is your own I could direct everyone with a laptop to have a look at the picture.

Unfortunately something went wrong so the post and picture were somehow both delayed by 24 hours.

You can download the Powerpoint presentation here, if you are so interested – I’d post my notes but they only really make sense to me (and then only just).

Like the other times I’ve talked in front of a lot of people, I think I started out a bit rough but gradually got better as the talk progressed.  I need a bit more practice talking to large groups of people in a non-“get out of the way, I have a patient to get to” fashion.

The other speakers were excellent, Annie Mole giving an interesting presentation about why you should blog, and exploding some of the myths around blogging.  Inkycircus talked about some of the issues of running an effective groupblog.  Unfortunately Tom Coates was ill, which was a bit of a disappointment for me, as I’d love to see one of his talks.

And thanks to Londonist for letting me blather on – you can read their account of the event online.

This post is designed to show the people at this talk that I am who I say I am.

Cute Overload

Yes I am working on my presentation.

Honest.

Well, not really – it’s a metaphor.

I’ve managed to complete the fresh install of everything on my laptop, the only problem was a couple of hours wondering why I couldn’t migrate my email settings into Outlook 2003.  I finally tracked the problem down to having installed Outlook 2002.

Meh.

However, as promised my mum and brother have disappeared off on holiday and I find myself both house and video sitting.

“Video sitting?”, I hear you ask, “What’s that?”.

My mum’s house has six televisions and video recorders – all needed to record the vast amount of TV that they watch.  Some programmes get taped to keep forever, my mum is football mad and she loves detective series.  My brother (and to be fair, myself as well) both like Sci-Fi.  Add in the daily dose of ‘Neighbours’ and ‘Doctors’ and I’m finding myself running around swapping video tapes and cable channels like some demented Pokemon collector – “Gotta tape them all”.

So I am alone in the house with only the stray cat that adopted my mum for company.  This is why I feel like I’m in prison.

Still it gives me plenty of time to write stuff – just stuff that you may not see for some time.