If there is one thing that will rub me up the wrong way on the job, it's 'gawpers' - more so if they insist on providing not so helpful advice.

A case in point - yesterday I attended a call to a young lady who had suffered an epileptic fit in her hairdressers. Now epileptic fits are not pleasant things to have happen to you, and it's embarrassing at the best of times. Often you can vomit or become incontinent. You can injure yourself if you fall over onto something hard and when you do stop fitting your behaviour is often bizarre and aggressive.

All in all, what you don't want is twenty people standing around the door of the shop staring at you and pointing and talking about the patient.

Nor do you want members of this crowd kissing their teeth and commenting that the ambulance staff who are getting their equipment from the motor should "hurry up".

When a certain ambulance person tells you that you should leave the area as it isn't a public circus, you really shouldn't get arsey with them.

It's just a damn shame I had to look after a patient rather than have a blazing row with some jumped up girl who thinks it amusing to mock the defenceless patient.


Breathe...and relax...breathe...and relax...

It's why, when in a public place, I always try to get the patient in the back of the ambulance as quickly as possible, you have just got to love our tinted windows for patient privacy.

(Once I did have a teenager push his face up against one of our windows to try and see inside. A quick bang on said window with an oxygen cylinder soon stopped him and gave him a sore nose into the bargain).

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I had a look at the changes to 'Da Book' suggested by the copy editor - all of them help the posts work better as a book rather than as a series of blogposts over time. Things seem to be happening really rather quickly at the moment.