Neenaw has written recently of 'banana man', in that post she mentioned someone dribbling on my arm...

There is a person on my patch who takes great pleasure in calling out an ambulance - I suspect that he likes the attention that he gets from us. The other night we were sent to him on four separate occasions.

For the first call he'd already left the scene, which was perhaps unsurprising as the call was over an hour old.

The second call was made from outside a pub - we rolled up and he wandered over to us to have a chat. The complaint was one of his regular reasons for calling us - 'feeling suicidal'. He never appears suicidal with me, laughing and joking, telling me how he is a trained scientist and therefore is a genius.

I suspect that he doesn't actually have a mental illness, although he is an alcoholic with liver failure.

It was this call that had him dribbling and spitting over my arm. Not good, as I understand that he has hepatitis.

While talking to him another one of our regulars staggered over and started shouting at him for wasting the ambulance service time, which made me laugh as he's used up more than an average number of ambulances himself.

Our 'scientist' decided not to go to hospital and instead head back into the pub - so we drove off into the night.

Two hours later we were back at his house, this time saying that he was bleeding from his anus. We arrived and, once more, he decided not to go to hospital.

I'm fully aware that one of these days an unlucky crew will go to him, he'll refuse to go to hospital, and then he will die - dropping the last crew to see him in the brown sticky, smelly stuff.

It's like a game of Russian roulette.

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Our final call to him came down the MDT as this.

You will notice that the 'Determinant' - the thing that is used to triage the call says that he does have a weapon.

A nuclear weapon.

(I know that calltakers have to put down what the person calling says - although I'd like to know if the calltaker was serious, or having a joke).

Needless to say, I cancelled the police who would have attended due to weapons being used - told Control to look out for the mushroom cloud in the East and trotted around there again.

After a bit of an argument he finally agreed to go to the hospital - with him now in the A&E waiting room we know that he is...

a) Safe, and

b) Not going to call us for the next few hours, thereby letting us deal with actual genuine calls.

As we dropped him off at the hospital his 'friend', who had berated him earlier for his misuse of ambulance resources was pissing up the wall of the A&E waiting area - having called an ambulance himself.

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The thing is - he has been known to be violent in the past. While he has been nothing but nice to me (except of course the dribbling on me) he has been nasty to nurses and other ambulance crews. I'm happy to go to him without wasting the police's time, but there are some crews who - more wisely - ask for a police escort.

I've written about him before.

Currently I think that there is a team looking at him to try and reduce his calls to the LAS and his attendances at hospital - it's a process that has worked in the past, so I'm keeping my fingers crossed.