The Complete Blood, Sweat and Tea

These things also cost £105 000 each and if we get the slightest scratch on them they have to be taken off the road and repaired (unlike the ones we have at the moment where they are beaten up until they stop working). Since our insurance has a £5 000 excess it’ll mean a lot more money going to vehicle maintenance.

Should be fun, but I can’t see management ever letting me drive one … I estimate if I can squeeze through gaps by driving until I hear the crunch …

While I thought that parking to allow the tail lifts space would be a big problem, our biggest problem would turn out to be the regular breaking down of the lifts.

My (So-Called) Exciting Life

I had my hair cut today, which has become a weighty decision in my mind. It goes something like this …

(a) Do I get a crop or not? If I get a crop I’ll look like I’ve just been released from a concentration camp; if I don’t then I’ll look like a paedophile.

(b) Will my mum like it? If not then I’ll have to put up with 3 weeks’ worth of moaning about how terrible I look.

(c) Will this cut enhance my ability to attract members of the opposite sex? To be honest, no haircut has ever done this but I live in hope.

(d) If I go to my local hairdressers will I get the trainee … and if I do will it be possible to get a refund?

Anyway, I went in and got a ‘short-back-and-sides’ and rather unfortunately I’m deaf as a post when I’m not wearing my glasses (for those who have 20/20 vision, you don’t wear your glasses when getting a haircut). So when the whole place erupted in fits of laughter I didn’t know if it was because of a rapidly growing bald-spot.

(Still while I can’t see it, it doesn’t exist.)

The best I can say is that I’m not having to brush my hair out of my eyes with a pair of gloves covered in someone else’s vomit.

Which is nice …

Bloody Cat …

I’m sitting here single on station (you need two people to man an ambulance, and if you haven’t got anyone to work with you are ‘single’ and therefore unable to work. However, you need to stay on station in case they find someone else in London who is single. In that case you find yourself trekking across London to work in a place you’ve only seen on telly). I’m hungry and bored, partly because it’s night-time, and partly because there is no-one else on station.

However I have a plan …

To counter the boredom I have a DVD I can watch on the station’s new DVD player (bought out of staff funds, so no we haven’t been defrauding the NHS). The hunger problem will soon be solved by the microwave curry I have sitting in my car.

Let us now introduce a new member into the cast: when I said I was alone that was a bit of a lie, there is the station cat. Well at least I think it’s a cat as it is so threadbare it could be anything. This cat is so stupid it lies in front of your ambulance just when you need it the most, and refuses to move until you physically have to kick lift it gently out of the way. However, it is intelligent enough to realise that when someone is using the microwave there will be an opportunity to beg for food 5 minutes later (13 minutes if the food is frozen).

I nearly fell over the damn thing stepping away from the microwave, only to spend the next 10 minutes discussing with a mouth full of chicken korma why it wouldn’t like to jump up on my lap and make off with my dinner. It went a little something like this …

Miaow.

‘No you can’t have any.’

Miaow.

‘You wouldn’t like it.’

Miaow.

‘Go eat your own dinner.’

Miaow.

Gets up, plate in hand, to check that the cat does indeed have food/water/toy mouse.

Miaow.

‘Will you bugger off!’

Miaow.

At this point I put the plate (still with some of my food on it) on the floor, which the mangy beast sniffs and turns his nose up at. Said ‘cat’ then goes and hides under a table.

Horrible bloody creature.

It’s now dead; there is only one person on station who misses the bloody thing.

Why This Is a Good Job

My crewmate and I went to a man having a fit on Christmas day; he was a security guard and built like a brick out-house. This fit wasn’t your ‘normal’ epileptic fit, but instead the man was punchy and aggressive. To say it was a struggle to get him on the back of the ambulance is to say that Paris Hilton may have appeared in an Internet video download. Cutting a long story short, the patient is diabetic and his blood sugar has dropped to a dangerously low level. Luckily, we carry an injection to reverse this, and after wrestling with him in order to give him this drug he made a full recovery before we even reached the hospital. This is a nice job because we actually helped someone rather than just drove them to hospital.

Other benefits of the job include (but are not limited to …)

Working outside in the fresh air. I don’t know how office workers put up with air conditioning.

For much of the time you are your own boss – do not underestimate this.

Driving on the wrong side of the road with blue lights and sirens going; it’s not about the speed it’s about the power.

Being able to poke around people’s houses and feel superior even though you haven’t done the washing up in your own house for 2 days.

No matter how annoying the patient is, knowing that within 20 minutes it’ll be the hospital’s problem.

Meeting lots of lovely nurses, and knowing that I get paid more than them.

On the rare occasion, being able to help people who are scared or in pain.

Every time I have a bad day, or feel fed up at work I think back to this list and soon start to feel better – although I no longer get paid more than the nurses I meet.

Death and What Follows

There are some people, who despite being lovely people, you dread working with; one such person is Nobby (not his real name). He is what is known in the trade as a ‘trauma magnet’. He’s one of those people who will get the cardiac arrests, car crashes, shootings and stabbings; by contrast I am a ‘shit magnet’, meaning I only seem to pick up people who don’t need an ambulance. Other than having to do some real work for a change I really enjoy working with him.

I was working with him a little time ago and we got called to a suspended (basically this is someone whose heart isn’t beating and they have stopped breathing). It’s one of those jobs that require us to work hard trying to save the punter’s life. We got to the address and found relatives performing CPR on their granny. You might have seen it on TV as a ‘Cardiac Arrest’.

(Let me correct a few ideas you might have about resuscitation. First, it rarely works; ‘Casualty’ and ‘ER’ have led people to believe that you often save people: I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of people who have survived an arrest and most of them arrested while I was watching them in hospital. Second, it isn’t pretty: when someone arrests there is often vomit, faeces, urine and blood covering them and the area around them. Finally, people never suspend where you can reach them: if there is an awkward hole, or they can find some way to collapse under a wardrobe they will do so.)

This poor woman was covered in body fluids and was properly dead; there was no way we were going to save her. One of our protocols says that we can recognise someone as beyond hope and not even commence a resuscitation attempt. Unfortunately, we couldn’t do it this time as the relatives had been doing CPR (which is the right thing to do) and so we had to make an attempt.

Nobby and I got to work and tried to resuscitate the patient for 30 minutes. Our protocol goes on to say that if we are unsuccessful after attempting a resuscitation for ‘a specified time’ we can end it and recognise death, which is what we did.