Some people have pointed out to me that the 'Contact Me' link just redirects back to the main site. There should be a quick fix in the next three hours or so, basically what happened was that I own the Domain Randomreality.org - at the moment it is used to store the 'Contact Me' page and the image that normally appears at the top of the page.

When I went to the PR conference two days ago I noticed that they had my blog's address as randomreality.org, not the actual working domain.

To be honest I forgot that I hosted my images and contact page on this domain so I quickly set up a domain redirect so that if you typed randomreality.org into your browser address bar you'd be directed automatically to here. Unfortunately this had the effect of breaking the links to the images and contact page.

I've (hopefully) quickfixed it back, but when I have more time I'l have to put in a more permanent fix. While I'm at it I my brush up on my design skills (*ahem*) and have a look under the hood to see what might be improved here.

But before then, I have a manuscript to edit - so all distraction are being turned off.

I came across this heartening story while browsing the BBC News site.

A mother from Bristol resuscitated her baby boy four times when he stopped breathing - with the help of a 999 operator on the phone.
Driving instructor Cordelia Nolan, 25, said she was "petrified" when her 10-week premature baby, Emrys, lost his colour and turned blue.
Ms Nolan started resuscitation straight away and a cousin dialled 999 and relayed the operator's instructions.

I'm glad that the baby is doing well. If the baby had stopped breathing then the mother did exactly the right thing.

-----

I can usually count on a few 'Baby not breathing' calls each week the number of calls that I've actually been to when a child hasn't been breathing can, thankfully, be counted on the fingers of one hand*.

Often the 'child not breathing' is actually a child having a febrile fit, by the time we get there the fit has normally stopped and the child is either asleep or crying. It's scary but incredibly common, when an infection is spreading through my area it seems that the only calls I go to are for febrile children. I sometimes joke to parents that the only children that I see are either fitting or vomiting.

During a febrile fit a child can get blue lips, if a child holds their breath they can get blue lips - blue lips tend, on their own, to be 'not terribly worrying' on the scale of things us ambulance types worry about.

Rather obviously a child who has blue lips is a scary prospect for a parent and so they, quite rightly, call for an ambulance. Sometimes they say that the child has stopped breathing, after all that's why lips go blue.

When we arrive the child has normally made a full recovery from it's breath holding, but as we are not doctors we recommend that the child comes in to hospital with us.

What is less common, but a bit funnier is when you have a drunk who has seen his friend 'die' and managed to 'save' him with a bit of CPR. Or as we like to call it 'waking him up by pushing on his chest'. A tip - if he's pink and trying to push you off he's probably not dead**.

*After an accident with a threshing machine.

**Except when you are doing really good CPR on a dead person and they open their eyes and look at you - it's only happened twice with me and it freaked me out both times - especially as neither of them survived.

I'm currently being hypnotised by this - it may just be the painkillers talking...

Fifty People, One Question: London from Crush + Lovely on Vimeo.

The last week was a week off from my 'day job', (is it still a day job if you work nights I wonder), what this let me do was catch up on all the things that I can't do when I'm working. What this really means is that my 'week off' was a week spent in meetings, plotting plans, doing writing work and other such things.

This week is also going to be a busy one, not only do I have forty-eight hours of ambulance work, I also have a PR conference where I am a panel guest. I also have the final changes to the sequel to Blood, Sweat and Tea to have in by the end of the week - with some luck I'll have some interesting news about both books in the near future.

Then I need to start planning out the narrative arcs for my third book, which will be fiction - something that I've never really done before.

I'll also hopefully have some good news about a gig that is quite unlike anything else that I've done before - I'll let you know what that is as soon as I can.

Finally I'm chasing yet another writing job that could be extremely interesting.

But tucked away at the end of everything else is a regular podcast and the possibility of another website.

Oh yes, and I should write some blogposts for this blog before I get carried away...

I think I need to employ an assistant.

All of this means that my time spent doing my 'day job', my ambulance work, will be one of the few moments that I'll have to relax - which is obviously a bit strange.

For those that want to take part, this Monday's question (to be answered in the comments) is, "Tell me about a teacher that made an impact on you". I ask this because I'm reading 'Moab is my washpot', the early autobiography of Stephen Fry where he talks about his teachers. Due to my shocking memory I can't remember any of my teachers, so I'd like to hear about yours.

I often talk about 'My Patch', the bit of London that I find it normal to work on. I can find myself all over London sometimes (which can be quite nice sometimes after all, who doesn't like being a tourist), but most of the time I find myself in the same geographical area.

What should hopefully be embedded below is a short film from Urban Earth, created by stitching together photographs taken every eight steps.

My 'patch' runs from 1:15 in the film up to around 3:35. It looks nicer than it does normally because they take the Greenway and part of the Hertford Union Canal, both rather pleasant walks. However it does give you a bit of an idea of the variation of ground that I cover.

Found On Diamond Geezer's Link hoard.

All I can hear is the sound of traffic passing beneath me but I know that will soon change.

I've parked the ambulance on the raised slipway where the accident has taken place. Two cars trying to take the same space space at the same time means that we have been called to help the driver of one of the cars.

I park the ambulance so that the drivers going past have no option but to slow down, lights making that familiar blue pattern in the night.

My crewmate is the one looking after the patients today and her quick assessment and a nod to me makes me realise that it's going to get noisy.

I call for the fire service, we need them to cut the roof off the car.

It's my job to sit on the back seat and hold the head of the driver so that he doesn't move it around thereby possibly aggravating any neck injury.

I have to hold it tight as he keeps wanting to turn around and tell me to make sure that his papers are retrieved from the boot of the car. And that we don't forget to collect the GPS holder on the windscreen.

It's quiet, just the traffic driving beneath me and the cars driving slowly past my ambulance.

Then the fire engines turn up and it gets noisy.

Hydraulic machinery is pulled from the back of the appliances, firefighters chock the car so that it is a stable platform to work on and they start to break all the windows - covers placed to avoid the glass going on me or the patient.

My arms are getting tired, it can take a long time to remove the roof of the car.

The cutters start snipping at the car, first the doors come off then the rear pillars. They wrap a big bit of plastic sheeting over me and the patient, its like being in a tent.

I can imagine what is going happening on the other side of the sheet even if I can't see it. The cutters snip away at the other pillars and the roof is peeled back. From my side I'm in an opaque white cocoon with weird bangs and shakes coming from outside. Not for the first time I'm glad I'm not claustrophobic, instead I concentrate on my arms - the burning sensation of holding the patient's head is starting to turn into a painful numbness.

I wish I was on the other side of the plastic with my crewmate, she's getting the trolley out of the ambulance and is preparing the back board and head blocks.

Because of the helmet I'm wearing all the noises are muffled, I've taken my glasses off to stop the helmet pressing on them so my vision is blurred - not that there is much to see, just the back of the driver's seat and the plastic sheet.

And my arms, that now feel like they are falling off.

Then the sheet is thrown back and I can raise my head into the air again. Lovely.

It is then a simple task to get the patient out and tucked up in the ambulance, the fire service have, once more, done their job with expert professionalism and have made our job much simpler. They slide him up the back board while I try to rub some life back into my arms.

We wave goodbye to the firefighters who are sweeping the debris off the street and then speed our patient through the night to the hospital.

Coming off nights, I'm writing this before I go to bed - the one good thing about nightshifts is that I get to drive home to go to bed while the normal people are trudging through the rain to get to work.

The draft manuscript for the sequel to Blood, Sweat and Tea has been emailed to my publisher. More news on this as it comes.

Monday's question for you is this -

If everyone has the ability to write a book - what is the first sentence of your book?

When I emailed in my draft manuscript I also posted a little note for the copy editor - I include it here the for comedic value of all the 'gotchas' that I am blissfully ignorant of.

Note for copy editors –
Just some notes to help guide you and alert you to some of the horrific liberties I take with the English language
The [[text like this]] is formatting instructions, not me having some sort of conniption. It’s text that should be rendered in a fashion that makes it obvious that it’s a later comment on the previous post.
I’m particularly poor at getting lying/laying right, sorry about that. Normally I write myself around using these words but I may have missed a few.
Also ‘was’ and ‘were’.
And ‘which’ and ‘that’. I wish I’d paid attention in school.
I like hyphens, en-dash or em-dash, I can’t seem to get enough of them – if possible I’d like them left in as they are part of my ‘voice’ even though I know that it’s not necessarily decent grammar.
I also like ellipsis… (Which I type as three full stops, Word may have changed them into the correct character – I have no idea).
Commas followed by propositions, but sometimes I can’t help myself.
I’ve probably missed a few chances to press my semi-colon button on the keyboard. I like semi-colons but I’m a bit daft about when to use them.
I try to avoid jargon, but sometimes I can’t help myself. If you want to change EMT to E.M.T. go ahead but ORCON isn’t an acronym and so should remain as it is.
Keep an eye out for ‘ and “ I’ve possibly mixed them up – sorry. I’m also a terror for missing or adding incorrect possessive apostrophes, blame my comprehensive school education.
I use newlines and double newlines for timing, I don’t know if layout is part of your purview but some of these double newlines are intended – please bear this in mind if you change some of them (and no doubt some of them are in there by mistake)
Thank you very much for putting yourself through the trauma of trying to beat this manuscript into shape, it’s very much appreciated.

I now have a week off work which means plenty of chance for me to get some of my other projects up and running, as well as a chance to do some administration on this site.

But first... sleep.

Halfway down the stairs his head rolled back and he stopped breathing.

-----

It was one of our usual types of daytime calls, a person who is housebound calls out their GP for a long running health problem, the GP arrives, assesses them and decides they need to go to hospital. The GP then phones for an ambulance and asks for one in a given time frame.

On some day shifts this can be the sort of jobs we go to all the time. We do so many as a service we have a 'Green Bus' that does mostly this type of call. It works for us because the staff on these ambulances aren't trained as much as EMTs and so their pay packets are smaller (quite a lot smaller I think).

We had been asked to get to this patient within an hour, the GP had told our Control that he had difficulty in breathing. This was our second 'Green' call of the day, something that doesn't require lights and sirens. The flat was only a little way from the hospital but as the patient was housebound and ambulance was needed.

The third floor flat was situated in a really awkward place, big gates stopped us parking the ambulance nearby - they have padlocks on them that we should have keys for, but I've never seen any such keys in existence - I suspect that the Fire Service has the keys though. Due to this we had to park the ambulance 200 yards away from the entry to the flats, not ideal at all.

We were let into the flat by the next door neighbour who does a bit of volunteer care for our patient, as soon as I entered the patient's flat I could taste cigarette smoke, it was so bad my crewmate (who is young and has baby pink lungs) stayed outside.

Our patient was sitting on the edge of his bed smoking a cigarette, he was obese, edging on the weight limit of our carry chair. I'll be honest and admit that my heart sank a little when I realised that I'd be carrying him down three flights of stairs.

It also struck me that this patient was really rather ill, I could hear their bubbly breathing from across the room, the signs of heart failure were obvious and it was plain to see that this patient needed hospital treatment sooner rather than later.

"I'm not going to hospital", he said between puffs on his cigarette.

Great.

So began the long process of persuading the patient that hospital was their best solution and that they shouldn't really wait for tomorrow when they would be 'ready' for hospital. It was only after I got the GP to phone the patient up again and essentially order them to go to hospital that the patient finally agreed to go.

I sensed that the patient was agoraphobic, he probably hadn't been outside of his house in years. During the discussion to get the patient attend hospital he smoked another two cigarettes.

After gathering all the things that our patient would need we wrapped him in a blanket an strapped him to our carry chair. It was going to be a heavy lift down those three flights of stairs.

The first flight went well, but halfway down the second the patient started to become agitated and complained that he was slipping out the chair - we stopped and checked that this wasn't the case and spent some time reassuring the patient.

Then halfway down the final flight of stairs his head tipped back and he looked me in the eyes. Then stopped breathing.

There is a moment, just a moment when your mind refuses to parse the fact that the person you are looking after has stopped breathing, you just aren't sure and can't quite believe that they have just died.

"He's suspended", I grunted at my crewmate. By now the effort of carrying this patient down the stairs had sapped me of much of my strength but the shock of what had just happened flooded my system with adrenaline as we flew down the final few steps.

I started CPR, unfortunately the only place that we could lay the patient flat was under a stairwell, it was incredibly cramped - my crewmate ran the 200 yards back to the ambulance to call for help and grab some more equipment, she had to do this again to get the trolley. The running backwards and forwards had turned her cheeks a rosy red.

Our patient had rapidly taken on the pale and waxy colour of the dead.

We worked on our patient, help came in the form of another ambulance and we moved the patient to the ambulance. Doing CPR under the stairs followed by running to the ambulance with the remnants of our equipment caused by back to seize up, at one point it was all I could do to sit on the floor of the ambulance and whimper.

Which gave me plenty of time to realise that the last thing that my patient had seen was my face, with an expression that showed my shock at having them suddenly die in front of me.

The other ambulance crew took him to the hospital, my crewmate travelling with them while I followed up behind n our ambulance. The hospital did their best but there was nothing that they could do.

I sat at the hospital filling out my paperwork while my crewmate restocked and cleaned the ambulance - it gave me plenty of time to sit and think about the job.

It seemed undeniable that our carrying the patient down the stairs had frightened them so much that his, already failing, heart had given out. We'd killed him.

We hadn't had any choice in the matter, there was no way that he could have walked down the stairs, so the chair was the only route. If we'd left him at home he wouldn't have survived the night. If we'd blue lighted to the call it wouldn't have made any difference. There was no possible treatment that the patient could have had at home. There was no treatment that we could have given that we didn't already give.

It was just that person's time to die, sadly not in their own bed but in our carry chair, halfway down the stairs.