The Complete Blood, Sweat and Tea

However, during our resuscitation attempt it seemed that the entire extended family had arrived and there were well over 20 people in this little terraced house with much wailing and gnashing of teeth. It’s always hard to tell someone that their mother has died, but it has to be done, and if you can manage it well you can answer some of their questions and hopefully provide some healing for them.

The GP (general practitioner) was informed, as were the police (a formality in sudden deaths). The family had called a priest and he was there before the police arrived, while the GP was going to ‘phone the family’; what he expected to be able to do over the phone puzzled me.

We tidied up and went onto another job.

Two weeks later, Nobby was called to a chest pain. He turns up and finds himself in the middle of a wake, surrounded by 20 familiar-looking people.

Can you guess who the wake was for? Its a funny old world …

I worked with Nobby again for the first time in 2 years. He still remembered the job, and what happened after it. I told Nobby that he’d be included in this book but he wasn’t happy with his pseudonym and told me that he would prefer to be referred to as ‘George Clooney’. I refused.

I Do Like Some Drivers …

Although I often moan about the idiocy of other people’s driving when faced with a big white van with blue flashing lights on top, I am sometimes pleasantly surprised at the lengths some people will go to in order to get out of the way. For example, yesterday we had people nearly grounding their cars on roundabouts and roadside verges, squeezing into parking spots I wouldn’t be able to fit a Mini Cooper in and swearing at other drivers who wouldn’t move out of the way. I’ve had workmen stand in the middle of the road and stop traffic, lollipop ladies fence off crossings with their ‘lollipops’, and van drivers who I have clipped while squeezing past them wave me on and tell me, ‘don’t worry about a little damage’.

Yesterday we had all the above on one call (except hitting a van driver), it was like the Red Sea parting before us. It was a beautiful thing to behold; it left us in awe and wonder.

Shame we were going to 2-year-old with a cough.

This is a rare occurrence.

The Dangers of Prostitution

Occasionally you get a job that makes you laugh, normally because the person you are picking up is an idiot. We got called to a chip shop in one of the main roads in Newham – unfortunately there are about 20 chip shops on this road, but we managed to narrow it down by looking for the shiny white police car parked outside. The call had been given as an ‘assault’ which can mean anything from a slap on the face to a fatal stabbing.

In this instance it was a young lad, the spitting image of ‘Ali G’, who was complaining that he had been hit on the nose; needless to say there wasn’t a mark on him, and it turned out that he had been hit by his girlfriend. The police wanted to take statements, but he wasn’t interested and when I tried to assess him he told me that the ambulance wasn’t needed as ‘I’m St Johns innit, and a security guard’. This fella couldn’t scare a toddler, so I suspected he was telling a little bit of a lie. As he wasn’t hurt and ‘refused aid’ my crewmate and I retreated to a safe distance to do our paperwork …

In the course of the night we found ourselves at the local hospital (dropping off yet another ill person) when who should walk in with another crew from my station, but our earlier ‘Ali G’ lookalike. I asked him why he decided to call an ambulance when he’d already sent us packing and it turned out that another woman had hit him … the prostitute he’d hired after his girlfriend had slapped him. Turns out she had hit him and then robbed him of his jewellery. He couldn’t have put up much of a fight because he only had one scratch on him.

It’s pillocks like these we have to put up with … and call ‘sir’ …

However, it is also jobs like this that we can use to have a good laugh with our workmates. So people like him do serve some purpose.

My Night Shift

Much fun and games last night, working in the Poplar/Bow area. Not only did some German bloke graffiti on the back of one of the ambulances, but he also called the crew from a payphone and ran off, repeating it twice.

There are a lot of strange people out there …

MacMedic (an American ambulance blog) gave a rundown of what his shifts are like, so I thought I’d do the same, in honour of our brothers in foreign climes.

All these people called an ambulance last night by dialling ‘999’.

(a) Fractured wrist – young lad at the Boat Show.

(b) An alcoholic ‘frequent flyer’ who has just been released from prison … We thought we’d got rid of him for good.

(c) A 15-year-old with a runny nose.

(d) Very minor RTA.

(e) Domestic Assault, with no actual injury, but police already on scene.

(f) ‘Facial Injury’ which turned out to mean ‘Some bloke kicked my door.’

(g) Assault with a cut hand – actually a decent injury with tendon involvement (which means surgery and physiotherapy).

(h) Varicose Vein that had burst – plenty of blood everywhere.

(i) A 29-year-old with chest pain, hyperventilating, with very upset relatives.

(j) A suicidal overdose in a house filled with young men with short hair and tight T-shirts (ifyouknowwhatImean).

(k) RTA with a traffic light pole coming off the worse in a two-car collision.

(l) An 8-month pregnant female who had fallen earlier that day.

and …

(m) A fitting 9-year-old; only one parent spoke English, and they decided to stay at home and send the father who doesn’t speak English with us, because ‘The hospital has interpreters …’

Now, out of these thirteen jobs, only five actually went to hospital …

This counts as a ‘good shift’, reasonably interesting jobs, and no-one tried to hit me.

I Hate Psychiatric ‘Services’

Sorry folks, bit of a rant here … but I last slept 22 hours ago …

We got a call to a patient who was ‘Depressed – not moving’: normally with this type of call it’s some teenager having a strop, but this time it was a little different. Basically, the patient, who suffers from depression, was discharged from the local psychiatric unit 3 weeks ago and recently had her dose of antidepressants reduced. Yesterday, she was crying all night, and tonight she was just sitting staring into space, refusing to make eye contact and not talking at all.

One of the things that we as an ambulance crew cannot do is physically remove someone to hospital if they don’t want to go – that would be kidnapping and is frowned upon by the law. This young girl was not going anywhere despite my best attempts to persuade her – she just wasn’t communicating.

The solution would be simple: call the Community Psychiatric Nursing (CPN) team to come and assess her and, if needed, arrange her compulsory removal to the psychiatric unit (called a ‘Section’ under the Mental Health Act). The problem? It was 10 p.m. …

First off I phoned the psychiatric unit that she had received treatment under. After talking to two idiots who had trouble understanding plain English, I finally managed to get the number of the CPN team. Now, the London Ambulance Service (LAS) is quite smart: when we want to arrange an outside agency we go through our Control because all the telephone conversations are recorded … so if someone says they are going to attend they damn well better. I got onto Control, passed the details to them and waited for them to get back to us.

I’d just like to say that in all my years of medical experience I have never had a simple referral to a psychiatric service: they always seem to try shirking any form of work by ‘forgetting’ you or by being just plain obstructive. Maybe I’m just unlucky and get the idiots every time.

Needless to say we waited … and waited … and waited … from 22:20 until 23:00 we waited; then at 23:02 Control got back to us. Apparently the CPN team all goes home at 23:00 and hadn’t answered the phone until 23:00 on the dot. So they refused to visit the patient. The moral so far is if you are going to have a psychiatric breakdown in Newham don’t do it after 22:00.

So we switched to plan ‘B’, which is to arrange the out-of-hours social worker to come and visit, as they double as Psychiatric Liaison. Again we went through Control and waited … and waited … and waited … Finally we heard back that the social worker would ring the family and would like to talk to me. (Outside agencies try this trick, as they know the patient’s phone isn’t being recorded, and so can say whatever they want, with any disagreement being my word against theirs.) The social worker explained that she was very busy and so would prefer not to come to see the patient and have I tried the out-of-hours GP?

Back to Control I went and got them to try and contact the out-of-hours GP (a GP, for those not in the UK, is the patient’s family doctor). Can you guess what we then did? We waited … and waited … and waited … Finally, Control got back to us and informed us that the out-of-hours GP hadn’t arrived for work yet and that when they did, they would have to see two other patients first.

All through this time the family of the patient were very understanding and were happy when I explained that the GP would call at some point in the night. All I could do was advise them to remove anything that the patient could use to hurt herself, and keep an eye on her, calling us back if they felt the need.

Total amount of time an ambulance was tied up trying to get outside agencies to DO THEIR DAMN JOB – 2 hours and 19 minutes … and not the world’s most satisfactory outcome.