I'm off working on nightshifts for the next few nights, and so will be spending large chunks of my time either asleep, working towards trying to be asleep, or desperately attempting to be awake while dealing with drunken teenagers.

So, for the next three days I'm opening up this blog for you dear reader. Comment authentication is off and anonymous comments are now allowed. This is the equivalent of letting down the castle gates while marauding barbarians look for decent women in medieval skirts.

Three days to entertain me and the other readers of this site.

Leave interesting stuff in the comments. Jokes, pictures, videos, short stories, links to interesting sites, links to your own sites. It's a free-for all for the next three days.

Show me amazing things, or work that you are proud of. Drop in links to whatever music you find interesting or forums that you call home.

Teach me something I don't know, or just plain show off your own particular talent. Tell me what is heading the news in your part of the word or leave me a video message.

30,000 people or so read this blog and each of you are unique in your own way - show me how much of a snowflake you are.

And a very grateful thank you to the person who sent me a gift from my Amazon Wishlist - it's very much appreciated and will see plenty of use, I'm a big fan. And this is the only way I can say thank you as you didn't give me your name.

In my experience there are three types of suicide calls that we go to.

By far the largest group are those that don't really intend to die. They normally present as having had an argument with either a family member or their boy/girl/transgender-friend. They then either take a handful of tablets or make some minor cuts to their wrist. I don't believe that they wish to die for, as soon as they perform this act of self harm, they call for an ambulance. More often than not they don't call for an ambulance themselves but instead phone round their family and friends and let them know what they have done. These friends then call us and rush around to the patient's house in order to give their support

When we arrive they sometimes put up a pretence of not wanting to go to hospital, but will come without a fight as it were. Surrounded by the people who care for them they sit chatting in the back of the ambulance.

Often paracetamol (acetaminophen) is the drug of choice and occasionally someone will take too much of it thinking that it is a 'safe' drug to overdose on - a mistaken belief that has killed more than one person, especially when mixed with alcohol.

A much rarer suicide call is the person who has succeeded in killing themselves, seldom this is due to a drug overdose. We will get sent to someone who has hung themselves, or someone who lives alone and has taken a mixture of every drug that they can find. Often these people will have a collection of anti-depressents that they take all at once.

These patients will normally have a long history of mental illness and they go somewhere private and kill themselves - it is only when someone hasn't seen them for a few days that we are called.

While I've never been to one myself, there are people who kill themselves in public places, often fathers who kill themselves to be found by their children - something that I've never understood.

Then there is the final group, those who truly wish to kill themselves but have been 'unlucky' enough to be discovered. These are the tough cases as they don't want to be saved. We find ourselves trying to get them to go to hospital, but they refuse and, as the law stands, I can't frogmarch them into my ambulance. So the police are often involved in persuading them, and on more than one occasion I've had to rely on the Mental Health Act in order to have them removed to hospital against their will.

Sometimes they do come quietly, and this can be heartbreaking to see - one memorable job of this type was a teenager with a long history of mental health problems. They were taking a whole bunch of tranquillisers and anti-depressants, their arms were just a mass of scar tissue from repeated self harm and they were incredibly unkempt. But the worst thing about this call was the utter hopelessness that radiated from them, they spoke with no emotion and answered any question put to them curtly. In my opinion it was unlikely that this teenager was ever going to become 'normal', or be able to live any life without constant supervision. They were accompanied by their adolescent mental health worker and she was very caring, which is sadly a rarity.

Which is a long way around of wondering which of these three camps this particular gentleman came from?

I love my crewmate.

Not romantically mind you, that would be very wrong, but in a brotherly way.

You see, she's had a few days off work and I've had to work with other people. Now, these other people are fine people to be working with, but as I've never worked with them before we don't have the 'telepathy' that my regular crewmate and I share.

Let's imagine that we have a patient who is actually sick (I know, I know it hardly ever happens, but please bear with me) a simple glance from either one of us can let the other know what we are thinking with the patient being none the wiser.

It's nice not to notice that the nice ambulance people who are trying to treat you also think that you might end up shuffling off the mortal coil somewhat sooner than later.

The back of an ambulance is fairly cramped and so you work out fairly quickly how to work with the other person without bumping into them while still sharing out the jobs that need to be done. With a strange crewmate you find yourselves doing awkward shuffling dances in the back of the ambulance as one of you goes to put away the carry chair while the other tries to check a blood pressure.

With mixed sex crews there is also the potential of sexual harassment, thankfully my crewmate has managed to keep her womanly desires under control and away from groping my bum.

The current joke is that I'm looking for a divorce - like a married couple we finish each other's sentences, we whistle at the same tunes on the radio, we think alike and, like a married couple, I've stopped flirting with her.

Why, it's only a matter of time before I feel comfortable farting in the cab.

And of course, when we can, on nightshifts* we get to sleep together - me farting and drooling on one sofa while she snores and scratches herself on the other, slightly smaller, sofa.

Of course she does try to get me in trouble, like the time we were going to a little girl who'd apparently swallowed a magnet.

"You get bonus points if you can work a pun in there while you are talking to the mother", she suggested.

"Like what?", I asked.

"I don't know, something like 'I'm really attracted to your daughter'"

"Oh, so 'pun' is a new word meaning 'paedophile' and you want me getting arrested for telling a mother that I'm attracted to her three year old?"

She did manage to stop laughing by the time we reached the job.

So there you have it, part of the reason why I don't change ambulance station or go for my Paramedic qualification is that I just like working with her too much. A good crewmate makes all the difference to this job, and I'm glad I get to work with her.

*And by 'nightshift' I really mean any shift where we are left alone for longer than ten minutes - gotta grab those naps when you can.

It's been a long two or so weeks - lots of shifts with some nasty changes (getting up at 12am for some shifts then less than 48 hours later having to get up at 5am, changing shifts 'backwards' is awful). Add in hardly doing a 'decent' job for a month or two and coping with the management led changes that are causing morale to plummet and it's easy to see why I'm incredibly grateful to be off work for a few days.

Before starting Friday, Saturday, Sunday night-shifts.

Rather than bore you with lots of posts about how bad it is getting I thought I'd keep my moans all short and put them together in one post.

As an example of the sorts of calls that I've been running on blue lights to, with a FRU already in attendance, include a blocked nose and someone with an earache. These then get categorised as 'Cat A' rapid responses - surely this is proof that the computer system which triages these calls is not fit for purpose. Giving everything a high priority is not triage, it's arse-covering.

I'm going to start testing people's eyes soon as part of my assessment - stand them on their doorstep and ask them if they can read the writing on the side of the ambulance, you know, the bit that says 'Emergency Ambulance'...

The blocked nose and earache calls weren't even the normal 'demographic', young wimpish men, they were calls from people who should know better.

Due to 'Call connect' jobs are being sent down to us half-formed. Nothing but an address with no indication of what is wrong with a patient. I refuse to drive on blue lights to these jobs until they give us more information - I'm not going to turn up somewhere without any idea how dangerous it is. Imagine being sent to someone who has been stabbed by a mad family member, knocking on the door and being greeted by someone with a bloodstained knife.

This dangerous practice is due, once more, to the governmental target needing to be met rather than any actual clinical need.

If this job was based on clinical need I'd not be blue-lighting it to blocked noses, yet trundling down the road to elderly patients who have been on the floor all night with a broken hip.

Active Area Cover (AAC) continues to be a farce, as if a computer can predict where the next call comes from when there is a population density as high as in London. Only the other day I returned to station after being out all shift, behind me was another ambulance. We hadn't even opened the front door to the station when the phone started ringing to tell us both we had to turn around and start driving around.

I was told to go to a point 0.7 miles away from the station.

To say that I was fuming that I wouldn't even be able to get a cup of tea would be putting it mildly. So instead I found myself sitting in a cramped cab in the rain only to have to drive back past my station on the very next call.

What irritates me even more is knowing that the people who order us out to roam around are sitting in a nice comfortable office drinking tea and eating biscuits while clapping themselves on the back for a 'job well done'. And they get paid more than me.

Our stock of equipment has been of it's usual high quality, in the last two weeks I have been out on an ambulance with...

• No scoop stretcher
• No drug pack
• No reagent sticks for measuring blood sugars
• No blood pressure cuff
• No working ECG leads

And

• No oxygen masks

Good job I hardly ever go to anyone who is actually 'sick'.

When I first joined this job, staff morale wasn't too bad, it has now plummeted. This can be the best job in the world, but the changes that are brought in for no reason other than to make some governmental minister happy are destroying the job. To them a successful job is getting two resources to the earache within eight minutes, while ignoring the hypothermic broken hip patient. to them a success is 'doing something', even though there is no evidence that it makes things work any better - after all no-one was ever re-elected by doing nothing to a service even though it works well - you have to 'stamp your mark' don't you know.

It also doesn't matter if you get to a job and can't give the patient oxygen, as that doesn't impact the all important eight minute target.

Expect to see more of this sort of thing and be under no illusions, as far as the government is concerned this is a 'successful' job, because the FRU got there in under eight minutes - it's one of the many reasons why I came off the FRU.

Nope - I'm not dead, neither have I run out of things to write about. It's just that I'm in that nasty bit of my rota where I spend what little time I'm not working trying to get some sleep. It has also been a mentally exhausting couple of days and so writing has taken a bit of a backburner when compared to just getting through the day.

I've a few days off from Monday - so I should be more active then.

Most of the time hoax calls are rather simple things. Often someone, mostly a child, will call the ambulance service from a phone box. We dutifully whizz around there with our blue lights and sirens in an effort to meet the government target save a life, only to find that there is no-one there.

In this latest call we were sent around to a house where it was said that a young woman had phoned for an ambulance themselves and, after giving a medical history of some detail, said that she was finding it so hard to breathe that she was unable to open the door.

We arrived to find the house in question looking un-lived in - there are subtle clues that even the densest ambulance man can point to as being a sign of no-one living there. In this case it was over a week load of junk mail in the house foyer.

We knocked on the door and there was no answer. Now, if there is someone laid out on the floor then I'm happy to attempt to kick in a door - however in this case, with signs of neglect and a slightly strange call, I decided that I'd get the police (something that we are supposed to do for all forced entries anyway).

The police arrived quickly and set about gaining access, the neighbours had come out to see what the fuss was about and they told us that the owner of the house had recently died. But we couldn't leave the scene without being sure.

The police managed to get the two front doors open as as soon as we entered it was obvious that the house was indeed empty.

On the way out, while passing the gate I felt a tug, heard a 'Pop!' and felt a tearing sensation - my (not very well made) uniform came apart at the seams. Thankfully it was only one of the leg pockets, but it was still annoying.

After a bit of a laugh with the police officers, and naturally my crewmate, we returned to the ambulance and informed Control that the call was a hoax. I then said that I would need to go to the hospital for 'essential repairs due to a wardrobe malfunction'.

You see, there is a bit of a tradition in the NHS - in that you aren't a proper NHS worker until your uniform, or a bit of kit that you use, has been mended using medical supplies.

Being slightly clumsy I passed that milestone in my career quite some time ago. There is a reason why on some of our ambulances bits of equipment are secured with medical tape...

So we headed back to the hospital where I asked the lovely nurses if I could have a loop of suturing material, and then sat outside in the ambulance sewing up my pocket. I used to suture people up, but it's a fair bit trickier to do the same to a pair of trousers that you are wearing without the aid of the forceps that you need to easily handle the needle.

So - a hoax call not only wasted ambulance time, but also the time of the police and ended up with me off the road while I fixed my kit. At least when the police broke into the house they did so without causing any damage so could secure the house again after we left.

Here is hoping that should the hoaxer ever need an ambulance we are all off dealing with slightly more deserving people.

The thing about twelve hour shifts, especially when you do a lot of them, is that they have a nasty habit of turning into thirteen hour shifts. Or like last night a thirteen and a half hour shift.

Sadly the job that pulled three crews into an unwanted hour and half of overtime was a genuine job. And a sad one at that.

Now, after sleep, I have an hour and a half to get ready and eat before heading back to do it all again.

And that is why this is a very short blogpost.