Second job of the night is a two day old baby that coughed up 'something white'. It's an easy job where the parent carries a healthy baby into the ambulance, I drive it 800 yards and the local hospital provides reassurance.

Forgiveness is also due because the birth was difficult and the baby was born two weeks early. Although there is some negative marking for thinking that baby '...needed suctioning for amniotic fluid still in the lungs'.

I'd just like to say that my (female) crewmate finds babies cute.


I don't.

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Sent from a mobile phone, probably from the cab of an ambulance.
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For those that are interested, I'll be in Second Life from around 2pm on the Radio 1 island. The BBC are apparently simulcasting their music festival

So the first job turned out to not be an elderly person with common medical ailment, but instead a young man who had hit a car. Then while limping home had caused three people to call an ambulance.

Add in another call in the same general area and you had a potential for chaos - however our Control staff are pretty good so everything was sorted out.

The patient had reached his home and then started hyperventilating, with all the symptoms that this brings. Luckily he wasn't seriously hurt and once he had calmed down it made for a fairly easy job and a pleasant trip to the hospital.

If you are wondering when I have time to make these entries - I'm driving tonight so I can post these while my crewmate books the patients in.

I'm looking after the patients tomorrow which fills me with some dread...

...More of which later.

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Sent from a mobile phone, probably from the cab of an ambulance.
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I was wrong about our first job. We are yet to go out as the crew who had our ambulance before us had to deal with someone who had nearly cut his arm off with a falling window.

We let them go and cleaned the motor ourself.

There was a reasonable amount of blood on the floor.

I 'm sure I've told you before that I don't get the sexy' jobs...

We also needed to get fuel and head down to another station to do some paperwork. I am now eagerly/anxiously* awaiting our first job.


*delete as applicable.

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Sent from a mobile phone, probably from the cab of an ambulance.
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Thanks to Heather, who let me know about this.

There is a copy of the Emergency Workers (Obstruction) Bill posted on the internet.

Looks interesting – the proof that will be needed for a successful prosecution will be so high only those people who really make an effort to obstruct us will fall foul of it.

I would have thought that existing legislation would have been enough though.

Feel free to discuss in the comments.

After working for two weeks straight I have had a chance to spend two enjoyable days hiding from the world while sitting on my backside reading,watching TV and of course – playing World of Warcraft.

Now I return to work for a Friday, Saturday, Sunday nightshifts.

Deep. Joy.

 

The standard breakdown for a weekend nightshift is as follows.

19:00 – Clock on at the station.

19:01 – First call, normally to someone elderly, probably chest pain

20:00 – Man with ‘man-flu’

21:00 – First assault of the night, outside a pub.

22:00 – ‘Unconscious’ male in street – normally a homeless guy.

23:00 – Another assault.  Fueled by alcohol.

00:00 – ‘Unconscious’ – drunk in street.

01:00 – Child with a high temperature – everyone in the house is awake.

02:00 – Young man with bellyache / young woman with dizziness. (We are now the only ambulance running from West Ham)

03:00 – Nightclubs kick out.  An assault who doesn’t want to go to hospital.

03:30 – Drunk in the street or a drunk who has injured themselves.

04:30 – Get back to station.

04:31 – Maternataxi.

06:00 – Another Maternataxi.

06:30 – Return to station – start watching the clock for sign-off at 07:00.

06:57 – Get a job for a little old lady, miles out of my area with cardiac chest pain.

06:57:01 – Start swearing.

07:25 – After a ‘scoop and run’ return to station to sign off – all ready to repeat the night in just 11 hours and 35 minutes.

Tell you what – I’ll do one of my ‘updated throughout the night’ things.  I can’t guarantee that this is how things will unroll (and this in part is the pleasure of this job), so we can see how far away from my prediction things fall…

I have just felt a surge of rage.

Some *%^$! just told us to F-off just because we dared approach his crossing point on blue lights and sirens and expected him to wait the second it would take us to pass.

Somehow (don't ask how) I managed to avoid jumping out and punching him in his gobby mouth.


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

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Sent from a mobile phone, probably from the cab of an ambulance.
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This is the Tate and Lyle sugar factory, cunningly enough it lives on Factory road pretty much smack bang in the middle of my ‘patch’.  When I was on the FRU and ordered to, “go and drive around – see if you can find someone injured”, I would often drive past it.  As you may know I’m a bit of a geek and factories full of pipes, chimneys belching strange smelling smoke and arcane bits of machinery interest me greatly.  However, until today I’d never actually been inside this behemoth of a factory.

The call was pretty simple – the hydraulics of a fork lift truck had burst, and the fluid had splashed into his eyes.  Luckily he had been wearing safety goggles, so had been spared the full brunt of the spray.  The companies first aider/fireman had already washed his eyes out with plenty of saline, so there was little for us to do except take him to hospital to make sure that nothing had scratched the front of his eye.

But that wasn’t the fun bit…

To show us where the patient was a security guard met us at the main gate – then he jumped into a Vauxhall Astra and drove like a man possessed through the factory grounds towards the patient.

I was driving.

I got to chase him.  I got to chase him the length of the factory.

More importantly I got to chase him through narrow turnings and under footbridges full of pipes.  Smoke was billowing out from vents, while I dodged between lorries and powered up ramps.

In my head the theme music to The Sweeny was playing.

I just may have giggled like a nine year old girl.

While my crewmate attended to the patient I had time to whip out my phone and take a picture of the factory floor.  The place is huge and this is just a small part of the process that goes towards getting a spoonful of sugar in your morning cup of tea.

Yet another thing that I love about my work – I get to go into some strange places.

That, and I get to chase cars.

(No, this blog is not about to turn into www.picturesofrandomwarehouses.com.  But I would like to go back there with my proper camera and get some nice pictures of rusty walkways and the like)

I had two new experiences yesterday – I’ll tell you about the job I had that left me unhappy that I couldn’t help more.

We arrived at the same time as the police to find an Indian woman crying on her bed.  We had been sent round to the house because she was supposedly threatening to jump from a window and there were signs of a disturbance all around the bedroom.  The woman herself wasn’t seriously physically harmed although she had a few scratches to one of her wrists, an obvious sign of attempted self harm.

She was laying face down on the bed sobbing uncontrollably, her husband told us that he had ‘done something wrong’ and that she had gotten upset over it.

She was obviously in no fit state to remain at home but it took a long twenty minutes to persuade her to make a move down to the ambulance where we could have a private chat with her.

Her story was simple, yet one I haven’t come across before.

Her marriage had been ‘arranged’, she had met the man who was to be her husband just four months before they married.  The pair of them lived in a house with her husbands mother and sister.  The husband was apparently seeing other women on the side and his mother had told our patient that this was ‘normal’ in England.  Our patient told me, between sobs, that her mother in law and sister in law both bullied her.

Her only family was out in India, and today, when she had told her father about her troubles he had started crying.  This is what had sent her into such a distressed state.  She was distressed because she had made her family unhappy.

My only choice was to offer her a trip to hospital so that they could clean and dress her minor wounds.  The police officer however could offer more, she took my patient’s mobile phone number and promised that she would pass that number on to the groups that deal with situations like this.  All I could do was get her out of the house for a couple of hours so that she could collect herself and start thinking about what she could do next.  As I often feel in such cases I wished that there was more I could do for her.

I would imagine that due to the ethnic make-up of East London there are quite a few arranged marriages, I’m always suspicious about the marriages where a forty year old man is married to a twenty six year old female.  While I’m not completely against the idea of arranged marriages, there does need to be specialist support for those people who are quite obviously powerless in the relationship.

Arranged marriages should not be about power over a woman being given to a man.

I’m hoping that the woman that we left in the A&E department will be able to get the support she needs, and I hope that the short period of time I knew her will be a turning point for her.

Because of my incoming bandwidth woes lots of folks are donating money via the ‘Donate’ button that is down the bottom of the sidebar to your right.  First off I’d like to thank all of those people, it’s much appreciated and will make the financial hit I’m about to take that much easier.

Some people have asked why I don’t move the donation button a bit further up the screen and make it more obvious.  Maybe it’s time to break out those good old *blink* tags…

The thing is…I don’t like asking for money, it has never been an intention of mine to make money from this blog.  The whole ‘money’ thing is perhaps a little embarrassing. 

(Although if I could charge £1 a year to each reader, I’d make more than I do driving around picking up drunks…)

So the donation button will stay small and hidden away – and if you want to send me some money I’ll be grateful for it, but I won’t be asking for it.

This site was down for a while last night, I did try to let people know that I was working on the problem with a slightly altered title graphic...



It's quite simple really, every month I use about 15-20Gb of bandwidth (which is a silly amount as all the graphics are hosted off-site, so that's 15-20Gb of text).

When I signed up with the hosting company (MyOstrich) the bandwidth limit was something like 1Gb.

Unfortunately for the last three years or so I appear to have 'dropped through the cracks', so I haven't been charged yearly renewals, nor have they noticed the huge jump in my bandwidth through becoming an *cough* internet superstar *cough*.

So yesterday they realised. And shut me down.

Cue a frantic email halfway across the world, where I pleaded for help. I'd just like to thank the extemely helpful Tim at MyOstrich for sorting out my problem very quickly. I'm in his debt...

...quite literally because I'm now at the point where they work out how much money I owe them. I suspect that Mr Barclaycard is going to take a bit of a hit at some point in the near future.

I've been offered free hosting by the lovely Friday Project, but that would mean...

a) Setting up a Typepad/Moveable Type/Other Third party software.

b) Migrating everything across from my Blogware blog.

c) Trying to get the URL to redirect (which will be tricky as I don't 'own' it).

The thing is that I really like Blogware as they are a superbly friendly and helpful company with an excellent bit of software - so it looks like I'll be adding another big number to outgoing expenses this month, what with my £500 bill for new spectacles.

Good job I'm paid such a huge amount of money...

Can someone please explain Livejournal Syndication (which is something that has apparently happened to this site).

Why is it that Livejournal users can't just visit the original site, instead of having a copy in their own little island of the internet?

More importantly, is this something I should be happy with, or should I be upset?

How can I easily read comments that people leave on this syndication?

Seriously - I spend nearly no time in 'Livejournal-space' and have no understanding of the why and wherefores of it.

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).

---

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.

For the past few days I have been…

a) Working (With absolutely no jobs of any interest what-so-ever)

b) Sleeping (And for some reason my body wants to sleep for thirteen hours each day)

c) Studying (For possible ‘promotion’, but there are so many obstacles in the way I’m not too hopeful)

Consequentially I’ve had little time to blog, and little to blog about apart from some big subjects that need a proper look at rather than a half hour stream of consciousness type.

---

However there is some good news – I have my new crewmate!  I no longer turn up to work wondering where I’m going to be sent to work, nor wondering who I am going to be working with.  Today was my first shift with them and I had a whale of a time.

Job One was to a patient who refused to talk to us except to demand that we took them past one A&E to one further out of our area.  I wasn’t even told why I was called.  He rated an 11 out of 10 on the annoyance scale.

Then we chased around a number of garages trying to get our ambulance fixed – I believe that it is the oldest motor in the fleet.  It frequently breaks.

Job Two was to a woman who had been punched in the face by her partner, who had then stolen her shoes.  The police looked after her.

Job Three was a lovely job – a woman with mental health problem had thrown petrol over a community policeman, she had then locked herself in her flat where she threatened to set light to herself.  We were sent to stand around and look pretty in the sun while the police pulled her out and arrested her and the fire service unrolled and re-rolled some hoses.  To be fair it was a well controlled situation which entertained the locals and annoyed the patients social workers who thought that it was ‘a circus’.

Still, at least she didn’t set herself alight…

Job Four was to a lovely little old lady who was found confused and wandering down the main street.  Luckily for all involved we discovered her identity, and so she just had to wait in A&E for a little while for her relatives to come and pick her up.  She was lovely, smartly dressed, pleasant to talk to and completely batty.

One of those little old ladies you just want to hug.

 

I may revisit one of these stories later – it depends on how much time I have over the next few days.  I live in hope.

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On ‘da book’ front, I have the copy-edited version to have a look at, which will no doubt take a couple of days.  It’s a bit tricky having two jobs (and an addiction to World of Warcraft) to deal with at once.