Because of various reasons of confidentiality, I'm not going into deep detail for this post. Sorry

She was 31 years old and I was kneeling next to her forcing air into her lungs because she had stopped breathing.

I was sent the call as a "31 year old suspended" and to be honest I didn't think that the call was going to be as given. I was working solo on the FRU at the time, and I sped to the address, reaching the place at the same time as the ambulance. It was an ambulance with two trainees working it - while one of the trainees and myself went to the patient the other trainee and their supervisor turned the vehicle around so that they could leave the scene quickly if needed.

I rang the entry bell to the block of flats - whoever answered the entryphone seemed to be a bit disorientated, but we soon gained entry.

"Probably a psychiatric patient", I said to the trainee as we stood in the lift.

"I hope so", replied the trainee, "I've not done a suspended before".

"Don't worry about it", I said, "Just remember that you just need to try and keep calm, I'm there to run it until your supervisor gets there".

The doors to the lift opened and we made our way to the flat. I walked in through the door and all hopes of the call not being a suspended were dashed.

The patient was lying flat on the floor a deep shade of blue - over her was a man I took to be her partner, he had one ear on the phone, listening to instruction from one of our calltakers. With his free hand he was pushing on the woman's chest in an effort of CPR. He wasn't doing a bad job of it either considering that tears were running down his face.

On the sofa was the daughter of the patient - she was around five or six years old. She was also crying. I realised that it was this little child who had opened the flat door for us.

The trainee and myself fell into our roles - I managed the patient's airway and breathing while the trainee connected the defibrilator. The patient had a pulse, but had suddenly stopped breathing. There was nothing in the patient's history to suggest what had caused this sudden stopping of breathing. The mother had overcome a serious illness a few years earlier - but that illness wouldn't account for what was happening today.

The job itself went pretty well - while the patient didn't start breathing again on her own, we did manage to 'pink her up' a lot. The transport to hospital went well and we handed the patient over to the hospital staff with a real hope that she would make a recovery.

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I went back to the hospital a while later.

The patient had suffered a sudden huge and unrecoverable bleed into the brain. She would never wake up.

For some reason this really upset me. I don't normally get upset at people dying, but for some reason this one really upset me.

I don't know if it is because she has left a small child behind - a small child who saw her mother die in front of her. I don't know if it was because the mother overcame a serious illness six years ago for the sake of her child. I don't know what will happen to the child, as the mother's current partner isn't the biological father.

I don't know if it was because the mother had overcome serious adversity and yet she was dead at such a young age.

I suspect that it was because, for once, we thought that in giving the patient the best chance possible, she may have survived. I'm guessing that we were all disappointed that the patient was going to die despite doing our best work.

Whatever the reason, I was at my most upset over a dead patient since the dead thirteen year old I attended.

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If there is a slight upside to the story - it's that because we kept her organs protected by breathing for her, those same organs were used to give a new lease of life for a number of other very sick patients. I only hope that this fact will gve some comfort to here family.

Yes - I'm a registered organ donor.

Just a random post (just ever so slightly into my last one)

Maternataxi!

10 minute contractions!

Treated as a large yellow taxi by the whole family!

Never said "Thank you", to their highly skilled medical crew!

Treated to a free pram, carry cot and carseat by my taxes!

(If they have a carseat then they must have a car).

Total distance travelled - 0.8 miles!

Unhappiness of this particular crew member for being used as a taxi driver - 7/10!

Six hours to the end of my shift and we have not had a single job that required an ambulance...

NHS funds well spent.

Nurse who killed two patients and put many more at serious risk.

For the short version of my thoughts (because I’m about to head out to work) – For a trainee nurse who took people to the brink of death…well…  Couldn’t we use him as a resuscitation training aid?  Cause a respiratory arrest in him and use it to teach resus skills to people.

For every day of his sentence.

He has betrayed the trust that nurses enjoy, and I hope that he rots in prison.

I’m working nights this week, so my writing time is limited by the routine of ‘Sleep – Eat – Work – Repeat’.  Couple that with a very difficult upcoming post to write and I would beg your short indulgence in the madness that strikes me when I’m constantly jetlagged.

I have two ideas.  One is more serious than the other.

I’ll leave you to decide which is the serious one.

 

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Idea One

The LAS should have business cards printed up which state something along the lines of “Due to your inability to control your drinking of alcohol you have wasted the time and resources of - an emergency ambulance and staff (including dispatchers and call takers), an A&E department along with nurses, doctors, radiographers and other NHS staff.  Please think on this”.  We could then leave these in the pockets of the drunk patients we pick up, so that they could reflect on their behaviour when sober.

We might have to get it printed up in a few languages though…

 

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Idea Two

Concerning maternataxis at 5:30am.  Can I beat one of them to death please?  Just as a warning to the others.

 

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Finally, before I go to bed, a quick “Hello” to Emma who I passed in a hospital ambulance bay last night.  Sorry I ran off but the nurse had something important to tell me.

Nighty-night all.

ZZZZzzzz….

We were called by the police to a child of a few months old. The father of the child had allegedly gotten into an argument with the child's mother. He had then shaken the baby in an attempt to silence its crying.

The police had already arrested the father and taken him away. The child seemed unhurt by the assault, however we took the child to the hospital for a check-up.

What strikes me (besides the obvious bastardness of shaking a baby) is that even if he becomes the best father in the world - should his child look at their medical notes the words that will leap out at them will be, 'Patient violently shaken by father'.

Imagine if you were to find something like that in your medical notes. How do you think that would make you feel?

Researchers state the bleedin' obvious.

"Goths more likely to self harm".

I wonder how much money they got to do this study. From the abstract (the only bit I can get hold of) they studied in the school and community setting. I'm thinking it would have been a bit quicker to ask the local ambulance crews - that is in between them dodging violent assaults.

As an aside, I was wondering why there was no traffic on the road today while driving into work. Apparently it's a bank holiday of some sort in the UK. Unfortunately I live my life like an alcoholic - 'one day at a time'.

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…