It's a small pleasure we take in our patients sometimes, take one lady. She's in her eighties and originally from India, during the day she felt dizzy and fell to the floor. By the time that we'd arrived the next door neighbour had picked her up and sat her in the kitchen.
She greeted us politely and we all started to have a little chat, the thing that brought warmth to the cold hard nugget of coal that was my heart was that when she laughed she giggled like a schoolgirl. A laugh of that 'age' means a life well lived.
On the other hand I find that, in the words of a certain Mr John Lydon, 'anger is an energy'.
Another old woman, with us called by one of the 'carers' who visit he four times a day in order to clean her and her house.
The first thing that the carer did was complain about how long the ambulance had taken (half an hour, it wasn't a priority call), she told me that she had been there for an hour and a half.
...and for that hour and a half the patient had been left swimming in a bed full of piss.
The room stank, it stank of ammonia and it stank of flesh slowly being burned in ammonia.
No attempt had been made to clean her, nor change her clothes. We were instead 'ordered' by the carer to take the patient to the hospital.
My crewmate interrupted my discussion with the 'carer' because she could see the direction that it was suddenly taking...
(Methinks it's good for my career to work with people like this, while making crap 'carers' break down in tears is good for my sanity it isn't that helpful for the patient).
So we cleaned the patient and put her into a new dress, which took all of three minutes, and took her to hospital for her very minor injury.
Then it was time to turn all that anger into making sure that our patient was referred to the proper social services department. Which made me feel much better.
Oh yes.
Although I may have pushed a little too heavily on the paper in some parts.
