Normally if I get sent to someone who isn't 'sick' I'll start grinding my teeth and begin composing angry blogposts in my head. However, sometimes it's great to go to someone who isn't acutely ill.
We were on the edge of our patch following our last job and were dismayed to find that the current job was going to send us far, far out of our area. We assumed that it wasn't going to be an easy job either as it was sent to us as 'Mentally ill man, walking down middle of the road'. The last job I remember like this the man was 6'2" tall, naked and covered in his own faeces...
But the police were the ones who called us, so we guessed that the scene would be safe.
Our patient turned out to be in his fifties and suffering from dementia. A check showed that he hadn't suffered any physical harm. The police had already determined where he came from - he'd escaped from his care home two days ago. He'd also crossed the river so in order to return him home we'd have to head into the dreaded South London.
To be honest, I don't know why the police didn't return him themselves - I suppose that there was a fear that they would miss some tricky medical condition. Or maybe it was just that they share our dislike of crossing the Thames.
It's their own fault then that they didn't get to meet the care staff, nor have the satisfaction of being thanked and seeing the patient returned home safely.
It actually seemed like a nice home, the carers seemed decent people and
I commented on the security bars over the windows of the home to one of the staff, suggesting that it should have made it harder for our patient to escape.
"Oh", she said, "that's not to keep the residents in, it's to stop the locals from smashing the windows and stealing the residents property".
Please note, all disparaging remarks about being South of the River, and of the inhabitants of South London being the sort of people who eat their own children have been made purely for comedic effect.
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.
"19 year old male, chest pain", that's a blue light, sirens, whizzing through the streets sort of call. Not because he's nineteen, but because it's a chest pain. Remember, chest pains are one of the things that we need to get to in eight minutes or the government will slap us on the wrist.
Nineteen year olds don't often have heart attacks, not unless they have been hitting the cocaine rather hard. Where they do have heart problems it sadly tends to be of the sort that causes the heart to stop suddenly.
So we arrived and the young man was very pleasant. He certainly didn't look like he was having a heart attack, he was upright, he wasn't sweaty, he wasn't dizzy and he wasn't having any trouble with his breathing.
"I've had this pain for half an hour, and I've seen those posters, the one with the belt around the chest, so I thought I'd call you".
So we popped him into the ambulance and did all the tests that we normally do including an ECG and a full history.
He'd been working out at the gym the day previously, the pain got worse if he took a deep breath in and the ECG was more normal than my own.
I told him that we couldn't be sure, that the only way to be certain would be with blood tests, but the patient seemed happy that he wasn't having a heart attack.
"I suppose you think I'm silly", he said.
"No mate, I'd rather come out to someone who is thinking they are having a heart attack than to come out to someone lying dead on the floor because they ignored their heart attack".
Sometime I moan about people calling the ambulance for inappropriate reasons, the verrucas, the runny noses, the period pains - but I never moan about people calling me out for chest pains.
Chest pains are 'boring' jobs for us, you need to do a lot of things and run over the same questions and there is seldom any change in the circumstances of the patient.
But I don't go to work to be entertained. I go to work to get paid help people, and that is why you should call for an ambulance if you get chest pain.
She sits there, quietly she tells me about what has happened. She describes one of the worst things one human being can do to another. She's reliving it for me.
I shouldn't be here.
I should be waiting outside, waiting for the police to arrive to make sure that the scene was safe.
But as I sat outside with the message on my screen saying 'police have no units to send' all I could think of was her, alone in the house. Or with the person who did this to her.
So we went in.
As she tells me what happened my crewmate is in the room next door playing with her child, her child who seems thankfully ignorant of what has happened.
When I've been to a job like this before the police have always been there first, today I'm there first. I'm the first authority face that she sees.
So she unburdens herself onto me, there is nothing I can say to make things better, all I can do is offer her someone to listen to and a promise that the police will arrive soon.
I've spoken before on the 'Connecting for Health' IT project, its something that frankly gives me the willies; a huge database of all your medical details that has shockingly bad security measures.
(I've spoken to people working on the system, and trust me, it's horrendously insecure).
They are having a consultation process on the use of your medical information, which you can take part in on-line.
The health and well-being of the population can be improved by activities such as medical research, disease surveillance, screening, needs assessment and preventative activities.
NHS CFH is keen to obtain the views of the general public, patients and other interested parties on how patient information held by the NHS should be used for additional purposes such as research.
I suggest that everyone in the UK has a look at it.
From the Open Rights Group mailing list I'm part of, someone has made the following point.
Note that the survey more than once claims that patients have no legal right to control information they have given the NHS about themselves once it has been anonymised.
As a matter of law this is nonsense.
Information given in confidence may not be used or disclosed except for the purpose for which it was supplied unless the supplier consents, and this is not changed by removing the supplier's name. So I hope responders will challenge this (and perhaps also the blithe claim that
anonymisation only fails in the case of people with very rare diseases, which greatly understates the risk that an aggregation of conditions,
dates and places will identify someone just as plainly as a name and address).
This is just exactly the sort of function creep that I mentioned in the previous post, please go and have your own say about your data being used in this fashion.
Oh, and you folks do me proud. If anyone else wants to join up (I do recommend it, I'm a proud supporter, and you can see the sorts of bright people we have involved) you can find out more here. These folks do good work that you can help support for less than the price of two pints of lager.
A paramedic who tackled a wheelchair-bound gunman has been hailed a hero. Garry Perkins was honoured for his bravery by a crown court judge after he and a colleague came face-to-face with the armed man during a routine call-out.
But when they arrived at the house the two paramedics found Ian Wilson, who has no legs, sitting in his wheelchair asking for morphine.
But while Mr Perkins called the man’s GP, he noticed a gun on a radiator.
He said: “We both saw it and looked at each other, then the man produced a gun from down the side of his wheelchair and pointed it at John, smiling.
Myself? I would have either thrown him the drugs and told him to take them all at once - then call out the armed police, or just run.
That the man was in a wheelchair is neither here nor there, you can shoot from a wheelchair as numerous paralympic medal-winners have shown. I've also known wheelchair users who have run quite successful drug dealing businesses.
I particularly like one of the comments left on the site that says,
I have had the dubious 'pleasure' of having met Mr Wilson as a result of my job, and although on the face of it, it is hard to believe that a man with no legs, and confined to his wheelchair could be a threat to anyone,believe me he is a very threatening, aggressive and thoroughly odious little man. Good work from the Paramedics.
Just a snapshot of the sorts of things we can walk into.
Sometimes you are grateful for the drunk that has been getting progressively more intoxicated through the duration of your shift. As you drive past him on the way to the hospital you wave at each other for nearly twelve hours.
Then, as a final job of the shift for both you and the police, he tries to get up, falls over and gets a massive bump on the head.
He's not aggressive and his timing is perfect, both you and the police get off shift on time for a change.
Also - sometimes short little random thoughts let you have time in your real life to get some real life concerns sorted out, although doing it for more than a week would be tiresome.
Our Control was asking for an ambulance for a stabbing on our patch while we were on our way, under blue lights, to a twenty six year old with indigestion. So it goes.
Welcome to Random Acts Of Reality, a Blog based in London, England, written by an E.M.T working for the London Ambulance Service. Also, number one search result for "Womble porn". All names have be changed to protect the guilty. This Blog was previously known as "Why I Hate Humanity" but the antipsychotic medication seems to have kicked in.
All opinions on this website are mine alone, and may not reflect those of the L.A.S or other ambulance crews
