There is a week of predicted high temperatures in the UK. The recent mostly high temperatures have resulted in us being exceptionally busy over the last few days - 5,200+ calls per day.
Please follow the advice given and try to keep cool.
The signs and symptoms of heat exhaustion are:
- Dizziness, weakness, fainting, nausea, and headache.
- Onset while working in a high heat/high humidity/poor ventilation environment and sweating heavily. Infants, the elderly, and the unacclimatized may experience onset at rest.
- Cold, clammy, skin; ashen pallor.
- Dry tongue; thirst.
- Vital signs within normal limits, although the pulse may be rapid and the diastolic blood pressure (that’s the bottom number; the pressure when the heart isn’t contracting) may be low.
- Normal or slightly elevated body temperature.
What to do about all this: Take off any excessive layers of clothing, particularly around the head and neck. Get out of the hot environment (say, into the back of a nice air-conditioned ambulance). Drink a liter or so of water (slowly, so nausea doesn’t develop). Loosen restrictive clothing, lie down with your feet up, and use a fan for cooling.
I suggest that you go and read the whole article from the excellent Making Light then spend a few hours going through the archives. Although good luck trying to find an ambulance that has working air conditioning - I spent a long hot day in an LDV ambulance with the windows wound down gradually going deaf from the sirens. In a contest between hearing loss and headstroke, I guess I picked hearing loss*. Air-con seldom works in the newer ambulances either, and by the time it gets fixed there is normally snow on the ground...
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*All of which makes me laugh at the people who cower when we go past on sirens, remember folks - I'm sitting under the bloody things all day and if the air-con doesn't work I'll have the window wound down working on my 'trucker's tan'.
