A little later on in the shift, after we'd dealt with the patient mentioned in the previous post, we were sent to one of the police stations on our patch. The person there, who had been arrested, was complaining of chest pain.

Patient's in their twenties rarely suffer from heart attacks, and one look at him as he dejectedly sat in the police cell was enough to tell us that it was really rather unlikely it was anything serious.

But we are professionals my crewmate and I, and treat everyone the same, arrested or not.

We tried to get a history from the patient but, like a fair few of our 'clients' he didn't speak a lick of English, so we asked the custody sergeant what was going on with the patient. The police doctor had seen him and was worried that he was having a heart attack - as I say, quite unlikely, but 'unlikely' isn't 'certainly' and the doctor was quite rightly covering his bases by asking for him to be seen at a hospital.

Talking to the sergeant it soon became apparent that this patient of ours had been arrested on suspicion of beating up our patient from earlier and it was only after some hours being incarcerated that the pain had developed.

It's not often that we get to treat both sides of a fight. Dealing with 'assaultee' and 'assaulter' is incredibly unusual, especially if they aren't being seen at the scene of the fight.

We also learned from the sergeant that the victim of the assault had been sent to ITU, but had woken up with apparently no life-threatening injuries. It would appear that a large part of his unconsciousness was due to the prodigious amount of alcohol that he'd drunk and wasn't in fact suffering from a brain injury.

Still, I feel justified in blue light transferring him to a neurological centre because he'd obviously done a good enough impression of being seriously injured enough to worry the A&E doctors enough to warrant a stay in ITU.

And after doing an ECG on my current patient it was highly unlikely that he was having a heart attack.

We took him to a different hospital.