I hate the beginning of the year. The long nights and even longer night shifts have a terrible effect on my body, depression sets in and a huge blanket of apathy stops me doing anything interesting - I return to the familiar comforts of food, sleep and occasional time-wasting computer games.

When I was an A&E nurse this effect was magnified by working all shift in an airless, windowless box. I would come into work in the dark, then miss what little seasonal sunlight there was only to return home again in the dark.

It hasn't been too bad this year, working out in the fresh air keeps me happier than I would otherwise be. It still effects me, causing a lack of enthusiasm but thankfully without the depression. It also hasn't helped that I've had a period of time off work - my month off sick with my knee could have been used to do some interesting things, but with the season and without work I became a bit of a barnacle.

This may explain why posting here has been a bit intermittent.

Thankfully, with the end of February and the beginning of March, the seasonal mood swing I have tends to lift and I throw myself more into life.

Tomorrow and Sunday I shall be going to BarcampLondon2 which should be really interesting - I would imagine that I will be posting interesting bits throughout the weekend on my Mental Kipple blog (another thing that has suffered of late). Next week I'm on a rostered week off, so I shall try to delve into the archives of my mind for interesting stories. If all goes to plan then there should be something a little bit special for the end of next week...

'Sauber' - Be a dear and stop writing spam comments on my blog. I'm a bloody-minded individual and delete them all, even the ones in the archive.

There's a good chap/lass.

Sauber is one of those people who goes around blogs, leaves comments which include a link in an attempt to improve his client's Google search rankings. It's frankly anti-social and I don't want it here.

When dealing with children in a basic ambulance job there are two types of parents - the calm sensible ones, and the flappers. Calm sensible parents are preferred, they keep the child calm, can give you a full and complete history and are a pleasure to have in the back of the ambulance. Flappers are another matter.

Our call was to a nine year old girl with a nosebleed, they lived less than two minutes from their local hospital and the presence of a car in their driveway had me rolling my eyes. The front door was opened by the patient's mother, she was literally running backwards and forwards with tears streaming from her eyes. She could hardly talk because she was so upset and her breathing was just a shade short of becoming full blown hyperventilation.

Obviously I had a moment where I though that the child was more seriously ill than a simple nosebleed.

Then our patient walked around the corner, she had a bit of kitchen towel held up to her nose, but there wasn't any active bleeding. There was one or two drops of blood on her blouse and otherwise she looked fine.

I finally got the mother to calm down enough to explain what had happened. Well, I say calmed down, what she actually did was thrust a piece of paper into my hands. The child had ITP, an often mild clotting disorder. Examining the child it seemed that the nosebleed had already stopped and there was a large jelly-like clot in her nose. The best thing to do is to leave well enough alone and give the wound plenty of time to clot - if you start fiddling around with it then the chances are good that the bleeding will start again.

There wasn't enough blood loss to fill an eggcup.

But still the mother cried, ran up and down and generally did her best to inadvertently scare the child. While the child seemed quite sensible (she'd done the right thing in clamping the kitchen towel to her nose) she was obviously frightened by the mother.

So I turned on my 'everyone keep calm' demeanour. I tried to calm the mother down, I told her how it wasn't serious, how the bleeding had stopped and how the blood loss was tiny. I showed both of them the vital signs that I took and explained how they were all fine and if it were anything serious then the pulse would be higher, the blood pressure would be lower and the breathing more rapid. But the mother didn't listen.

Instead of going to the local hospital (with a perfectly fine paediatric department) the mother demanded that they go to the Royal London where the child was under the haematologists. I explained that the Royal London didn't have any paediatric beds (because we'd just come from a transfer from there to another hospital) and that the local hospital would be able to cope just fine. But the mother flapped and fretted and so I agreed that we would drive past the local hospital and down the road a few miles so she could go to the Royal London.

So we set off for the hospital, the bleeding remained stopped and the mother seemed to calm down a bit. But then every few minutes she would dart forward and scream 'It's red!' and pluck the kitchen towel from the child's nose causing the patient to cry.

Later in the day I could contrast it with a 10 month old baby who had two febrile fits in the space of two days, the parent s were sensible, calm and a pleasure to deal with. The baby was fine by the time we got there and the parents were more than happy to go to the local hospital for a check-up. The calmness of parents tends to keep the child calm - and a calm child makes for a happy ambulance person.

Some jobs are just *hard*, not because the patient is heavy or even particularly ill but just because of the circumstances.

We were called to a care home, one of the good ones in the area which deals with people with learning difficulties, ('learning difficulties' is one of those politically correct terms that seemingly came from nowhere as a way to describe people who we used to call 'mentally handicapped'). The patient was a 50 year old man with a nasty case of pneumonia, the GP had been out to see him and had decided that hospital treatment would be in the patient's best interest. We were called to transport the patient to hospital.

Our problem was that the patient point blank refused to go to hospital. We tried persuading him, the staff tried persuading him, I tried reasoning with him and the staff even tried bribing him. I may have even thought about threatening him. He would sit there, coughing occasionally, and refusing to go.

What we have to determine in a case like this is if he has the 'capacity' to refuse treatment. I often tell patients that I'm not allowed to kidnap anyone and this is true. If you were to take a fatal overdose and refuse to go to hospital knowing full well what the overdose would do to your body then I couldn't force you to attend hospital*

However, this relies on the patient having the capacity to understand what a lack of treatment would do, in this patient's case I wasn't too sure. He'd been in and out of hospital for much of his life, he knew what would happen should he go there - but did he have enough understanding that without treatment there was a reasonable chance that the pneumonia could kill him?

If the patient doesn't have capacity then we can force a removal to hospital, normally with police assistance - this is something that we don't like to do as it isn't very nice on the patient, nor on their relatives. So we do everything we can to avoid this. It's not very good to have half a dozen coppers frog marching a sick person out to an ambulance.

Well, in situations like this there is/should be an officer around to come and advise us on what to do. It also means that we have someone who is paid more than me taking responsibility for the patient, so should that patient die I know I've done everything I can and it's the officers 'fault'. So I trotted out to the ambulance to radio Control to find us an officer.

I was waiting for them to come back to me when my crewmate, wheeling the patient on our carry chair, came trundling out of the house.

I was astounded, it had looked like the patient had no intention of travelling and yet my crewmate had managed to get him out of the house. In awe I asked him how he'd done it.

He told me that the carers had told the patient that they wanted to change his clothes, he did have a bit of a problem with drool being coughed down his jumper. They had stood him up, changed his top, put a coat on him and then sat him straight back down into our carry chair. Good thinking on their part and on the part of my crewmate. As he was wheeled out he realised what we were doing, he wasn't hugely happy but seemed resigned to going to hospital.

It's not nice to take someone to hospital against their will, but he really needed to go. Some people might think that it's bullying to do this, but without the mental capacity to understand what might happen to him, we sometimes have to be cruel to be kind.

*A simple version and there are tricks around this, some of which I've mentioned before.

To be honest, today I'm kind of ashamed to be English.

So overnight and this morning it snowed, the snow lay and as I write this we have about two inches of it all on the streets.

(Rather amusingly, as I don't watch the weather reports I only found out it was going to snow because of my Twitter cloud).

I'd planned to visit my mum, so I had a careful drive to her house - my car felt as if it had power steering and as I opened the front door I was greeted by my brother.

I may have mentioned before how my brother is a teacher, he'd gone to school and had been sent home. Apparently half the teachers hadn't turned up to work and a similar number of children were absent. A cleaner had slipped over in the hall (and then a trampoline had fell on her) breaking her leg. The headmaster then decided to send everyone home.

Cue much phoning of parents and writing of letters. Now the streets of Dagenham are more dangerous than normal, not because of of the snow, but because there are gangs of teenage thugs roaming the place.

So everything shuts down - snow is headline news (although as I'm writing this the BBC is showing pictures of puppies in the snow. No dumbing down there...) Why is it I can remember winters like this, but without all the fuss that this current fall is making.

Ernest Shackleton nailed planks from his ship to his feet to trek across hundreds of miles of frozen tundra, but a bit of snow and everything grinds to a halt. That is why today I'm ashamed to be English.

I *am* however looking to racing around icy streets in a big, heavy yellow van tomorrow (although I'm not looking forward to getting up at 5am to do it).

A quick congratulations to Merys who is just celebrating her second blogaversary. She's a close friend of mine and all round good egg. We got to know each other when she was deciding whether to become a doctor or a paramedic.

It's interesting - she has also entered the Love To Lead competition to try and win a laptop, and yet the two leading entries come from blogs that seem to have been set up purely for the purposes of entering the competition (although I think that one is about to be disqualified). It's a shame when people try to 'game' a competition - perhaps something for further thought on my Mental Kipple blog when I get home.

I'm 'third manning' at the moment, which is a way of easing me back into work. I'm a third person on an ambulance, which means I get to see how other people work.

We were called to a man who had been pushed over following an arguement over payment at a shop. The man (the customer) was sitting on the floor wailing and shouting as our patients who feel aggrieved often do.

My mate attempted to get a history from the patient, but he refused to talk to us. He would talk to his friend, but not to the ambulance crew who were trying to help him. He was being generally obstructive.

We gathered, from other people, that he had a painful leg - he didn't tell us this himself, he just ranted about how he wanted the person who had pushed him over arrested.

So, without being able to get a verbal history my mate decided that he would physically examine him - so he got out his scissors and cut the trousers off of the patient so that he could examine the injured leg. The patient still refused to talk to us, he was too busy trying to get the other man 'nicked'.

I mean - he'd been pushed over, he was hardly going to hurt himself in anything but a most minor way...

Except that his femur - the strongest bone in the body had snapped.

We have no idea how this could happen in a middleaged man with no other illnesses and (after the x-ray) no sign of pathological bone disease. It's the sort of job that you pick the person up off the floor, dust them off and they refuse to go to hospital.

So we got him into the back of the ambulance to discover that the traction splint that we would normally use was missing a small, but vitally important, bit.

So I got the job of hanging on his leg providing traction while my mate gave him some excellent painkillers and *his* crewmate drove us into hospital.

The hospital was impressed as well.

It's a good job my mate decided to be 'evil' and cut his trouser legs off. The patient didn't have an accident history to suggest a broken bone, the patient themself didn't suggest a broken bone and we could have quite happily taken to lifting him off the floor.

There is a reason why we don't cut the clothes off everyone who falls over, it costs them money, it's very cold at the moment and it's frankly undignified. But now I'm wondering if I need to start stripping everyone I come across...

I’m back to work later this afternoon – three shifts as a ‘third man’, it’s part of LAS policy that those of us daft enough to injure ourselves for long periods of time should be eased back into work.  I’m just looking forward to a lovely Newham Friday Saturday night…

I can finally stop moping around being bored and get some new material.

Laura had a nasty job earlier and she’s written it up on her blog as an incredibly moving post.

Update: Date changed because I had no idea what day I was writing this - the perils of shiftwork.