The Complete Blood, Sweat and Tea

Until now I always thought of ‘donor’ as a ‘nice’ word – heart donors and the like – I never really thought it would happen to include this circumstance.

During the consultation they told me that I’d need blood tests every fortnight for the next month and a half, and that my first HIV/hepatitis status check would be in 3 months, with an additional one in 6 months. Should they both be negative then I would be in the clear.

They also told me of the side-effects of the antiretrovirals that I am taking, and seemed surprised that all I was experiencing was similar to a mild hangover.

That was yesterday – today was spent vomiting/sleeping to avoid nausea/and experiencing the joys of explosive diarrhoea.

My station officer called up and asked me how I was. When I told him, he basically told me to take it easy and go back to work when I felt better.

However, there was some good news when the Occupational Health nurse contacted me, and told me that the donor’s viral load was low, that there were no resistances to the PEP drugs I’m taking and that in 2002 he was free of hepatitis. That has eased my mind somewhat.

Some people have commented that I’m taking it rather well. There are a number of reasons for this, not least that the chances of me becoming HIV-positive are less than 1 in 5 000. The other thing is that I can’t do anything now to change those odds, apart from continue to take the PEP.

The other side-effect of the meds I’m taking are that I’m having a certain ‘vagueness’: my mind isn’t operating on all four cylinders, so if this seems disjointed, I’ve got an excuse …

Even today I’m not sure that the PEP drugs didn’t permanently ‘disjoint my mind’.

Pavlov’s Dog

Well, the PEP is still going down, unfortunately I’ve developed a Pavlovian response to the hours of 8 o’clock. Every 12 hours I need to take the pills – I start to get nauseous just thinking about it, the familiar copper taste hits my mouth and I just want to lie down.

I also seem to have lost any control over my circadian rhythms, I’m sleeping for 14–16 hours straight and I’m drowsy for the rest – doesn’t matter whether it is day or night.

At the moment the rather wonderful ‘Scissor Sisters’ album is chilling me out nicely, particularly ‘Return to Oz’ (which has a bit that puts me in mind of The Kinks’ ‘Lola’).

I am, however, losing the motivation for cooking food, not least because of the large amount of washing up accruing in my sink. It makes me feel like a student again.

Also, my PC is screaming out for a complete overhaul – I just can’t be bothered.

Mothering Sunday

Well, Saturday was the last day I worked but Greenfairy (another blogger) mentioned something that I wanted to write about – but forgot, for some bizarre reason …

The first call of Saturday was to a ‘?Suspended’.

(#litres_trial_promo)

So we hack along the road, knowing full well that because it is the first job of the day the patient is definitely going to be dead.

We arrive at the house and the FRU is there before us – I grab my kit and bound up the stairs past the daughter who called us and into the bedroom. Where a very dead lady was lying on the bed while the Rapid Responder was completing his paperwork.

One look is all you need to tell if someone has been dead for some time – and this lady had that look. It turned out that the daughter last saw her mother alive an hour ago, but that she was feeling a little unwell and took to bed. The daughter had checked on her half an hour later and found her not breathing. She then waited 20 minutes to call us as she was in such a ‘tizzy’. A quick look told us that even if we had been there when it had happened it was unlikely we could do much: various clues led us to think that a stomach ulcer had ruptured and she had bled out into her stomach.

All around the house were flowers and cards – the next day being Mothering Sunday.

No sooner than we had informed the daughter that her mother had died than the doorbell went and my crewmate went down to see who it was. It was only a bleedin’ flower delivery man, delivering flowers to the (now) dearly departed. My crewmate told the delivery guy that now, perhaps, wasn’t the best time to bring flowers but took them in anyway, hiding them in the kitchen.

Perfect!

Then we had to wait an hour for the police to turn up, which is normal procedure for any death in the home and is nothing to worry about. I then helped the police turn her body (to look for anything strange) and put my hand in a puddle of urine

(#litres_trial_promo) – something that wouldn’t bother me, IF I was wearing any gloves.

Oh well.

The Other Guy

I’m feeling a little better, the side-effects of the PEP seem to have subsided somewhat, although the flatulence is reaching epic proportions, which, coupled with the diarrhoea, makes every bowel motion an adventure

I have my second date with Occupational Health on Friday, for a blood test to make sure that the PEP isn’t battering my liver/kidneys/pancreas and that my white cell count hasn’t lowered. Work have said they’ll do everything they can to supply a vehicle to get me down to south-east London.

I’ve been thinking a bit about the ‘donor’; I wonder how he feels – he’s lying in bed after having a rather frightening collapse in the street, with a broken jaw and the reason for the collapse unknown. Then a couple of days later the medical team ask him to consent to some more blood tests because he may have infected the EMT who helped him out.

If it were me I’d be absolutely mortified.

When I talk to Occupational Health I’ll ask them if they can get a message back to him, letting him know that I’m fine and that I don’t blame him for anything. I know his name and address, but I don’t think it’d be right to turn up on his doorstep to talk to him.

I hope he is alright and that the collapse was something simple – I suspect a ‘TIA’ (transient ischaemic attack), which can be a precursor to a stroke, but with the right medications hopefully the threat of that can be controlled.

I never got to see him again, so he never found out the results of my blood tests. I kind of hope that he gets to read this, so he knows that I’m fine.

Twelve Hours to Go

In 12 hours I will have stopped PEP. Those seven pills are the last ones that I am going to take.

I am extremely happy about this.

It has been a month since my stomach didn’t feel as if I were waiting to vomit, a month since my thought processes have seemed even remotely like mine. A month since I last worked – good grief, am I bored! A month of wondering if my life is about to change for the worst. A month of my mates looking sideways at me when I had to take the pills in front of them (but still friends enough to laugh and joke with me about it). A month of having to get out of bed to eat breakfast, because the pills need food in my stomach. A month without shaving (why bother, I’m not allowed to have sex!). A month of feeling just the tiniest bit isolated. A month of people who I have never met, from places around the globe I have never seen, wishing me well. A month of always feeling grateful to those people, for this is the kindness of strangers – in itself a random act of reality.

All over now.

In two months I get to go for my HIV test, which should be fun and giggles.

But for now – I’m happy.

I really think that if it wasn’t for my blogging and the support of my friends around the globe I’d have gone mad from boredom. My next book should be Blogging as a Mental Health Exercise.

Proper Day

My first ‘proper’ day back at work, working with my new crewmate on a proper ambulance.

The first job was a 66-year-old male who had been fixing tiles on his shed roof and had fallen off the ladder, probably around 10 feet. He was shut behind his front door and all I could hear through his letterbox was ‘I’ve broken my leg’.

The police are much better than me at getting into locked premises (the last time I tried I fell on my arse in front of a crowd of 20 people) so we waited for them to arrive and use their specialised equipment (screwdriver/size 12 boot) to force open the door.

Gaining access to our customer it was pretty obvious that he had fractured his femur (thighbone) as it had a new bendy section just above the knee. The pulse was good in his foot and he didn’t complain of pain anywhere else in his body. This brave man had crawled, with this fracture, from his garden through his kitchen to the living room where he kept his phone. All throughout our treatment he didn’t complain once. We splinted his leg and ‘collared and boarded’ him from the house (a fall of 10 feet can easily break your neck, and the pain from his leg could easily distract him from a neck injury). We could have set traction on his leg, but we were only 5 minutes from the hospital; so we ‘blued’ him into Newham General Hospital, where he was ‘attacked’ by the local trauma team.

The next job we got was a dinner lady at a local primary school who had dropped a knife on her foot. There was a tiny cut to the foot, and after cleaning, dressing and checking her tetanus status we left her at work. What depressed us was that there were no scraps of food left we could have.