Have been spat on, vomited on and shat on
Have stood in ‘remains’
Have tried to find purchase while walking backward down narrow stairs
Have defended me from drunks and druggies
Have been run over by a 22-stone trolley
Have been stared at by a daughter when I was telling her her mother had died
For Pixeldiva who denies she has a shoe fetish.
I went to Occupational Health today – it seems that the last time they checked my blood (because of being on PEP) my liver enzymes were a bit elevated. Most significantly my gamma-GT (gamma-glutamyl transpeptidase) was at 164 (it should be between 0 and 55). PEP is well known as having effects on the liver, so this isn’t completely unexpected.
More blood was taken today to check that the enzymes have returned to normal. The nurse was very concerned that I was alright in having my blood drawn, and that I wouldn’t faint. She was asking me this while I’m sitting opposite her in full uniform …
The nurse was also a bit surprised that I’d had aural hallucinations and looked at me as if she thought I was turning schizophrenic – I assured her that the ‘voices’ were now leaving me alone and that it wasn’t a problem. She’d never heard of this symptom before, so at least I entertained someone today.
Nobby is working tonight from our main station. He is always a good laugh and always seems to have a joke whenever he works. Tonight I met him outside the hospital and he told me about a deaf old woman he had just brought in.
It was raining as he started to wheel her out her house so he made the comment ‘It’s raining, you picked a fine time to be ill’.
‘Eh?’ was the reply.
‘The rain … it mucks up my hair’.
‘Eh?’
‘MY HAIR!’
With this she took a long hard look at Nobby’s very short, and very receding hair and asked him, ‘Is it because of cancer?’
It is now 3 a.m. and already every other patient we have picked up has been drinking – from the 38-year-old male having a panic attack, who didn’t want to talk to us, to the 50-year-old female who slipped on some steps coming out from the pub and cut her head. This has so far ended with our last call being one of our smelly ‘frequent flyers’, who thankfully decided not to hang around and wait for us to turn up.
Then there was the police car that managed to accidentally force another car into someone’s garden – one of those jobs where every passing car slows down to stare. Thankfully, there were no injuries, apart from the house-owner’s disturbed sleep. (At least I assume it was the owner – he was dressed in no shoes and a dressing gown.)
With a bit of luck people are now wrapped up nice and snug in bed – away from the rain – and the only calls we will get will be the 5 a.m. ‘I’m in labour’ call that will result in a baby around 11 a.m. (long after I’m in bed).
No sooner do I hope for a quiet hour or two than the activation phone goes; it’s sending us 200 yards up the road to a ‘Collapsed Male’. We are met by two police officers who tell us that the patient was walking along the street, saw the policemen and then collapsed.
We get to the patient and my crewmate can’t smell any alcohol on him, but he is coughing and spluttering like an Oscar winner. He complains of a headache, coughing, leg pain, back pain and an inability to walk. Other than that he is refusing to talk to us. Examination is normal and the patient is obviously play-acting.
He then does one of the things that I really hate (given the prevalence of tuberculosis in Newham); he coughs all over us and the vehicle without putting his hand over his mouth. Then he starts to spit on the floor of the ambulance, again something I take a dim view of – but I’m driving so I leave it to my crewmate to sort out.
Forty seconds later and we pull up outside the hospital, and our patient decides to roll around the floor. By now our patience is wearing thin, so we haul him up and throw him in a wheelchair.
In the hospital he refuses to speak to the nurses, says he cannot stand and doesn’t acknowledge any requests. We leave him there and within 30 seconds are back on station.
While at the hospital I indulged in a little bit of teaching. The nurse who was assessing our patient was trying to check his pupil response (by shining a light in each eye and making sure that it reacts to light) but the eyes don’t appear to be reacting. I then suggest turning off the ceiling light that the patient is lying on his back staring at.
I still have patients who insist on coughing without putting their hand over their mouth. I’ve given up asking them to stop – instead I just give them oxygen, via a nice tightly fitting oxygen mask. I got a lot of people coming to this post searching for ‘Hand over mouth’. I swear I don’t know why.
One of the bizarre things about the Ambulance Service is that, in the eyes of the government, we are an ‘essential’ service but not an ‘emergency’ service. We are ‘essential’ because the emergency services (Police, Fire Brigade and Coastguard) are run by the Home Office but Ambulance Services across the country are run by NHS Trusts, and as such do not have access to the same resources as the true ‘emergency’ services. The distinction is often slight, but can sometimes have quite important considerations for our safety.
Last night was a case in point. We were called to a patient with abdominal pain; however, further information was given that the patient could be violent. There was something in this information that triggered my ‘danger-sense’, so I was happy to wait for police assistance to arrive before approaching the house.
Four police officers turned up – normally only two are sent to assist us – and they told us that their computer system, and their personal experience with the householder, showed him as a nasty piece of work. We followed the police to the patient and they told him that they were going to search him, and that they wanted to put him in handcuffs first. The patient had obviously been involved with the police before, as once he was handcuffed they checked to see if he had any new warrants out for his arrest …
Searching him they found a large stick, and a rather worrying-looking (5-inch) knife on his person.
All through this the ‘lady’ of the house was shouting abuse, mainly at the patient, but occasionally at the police officers present. One quick examination showed nothing life-threatening, so we offered a trip to hospital, which the patient accepted. However, as we left the house the woman shouted a few final obscenities at the patient and he then told us he couldn’t be bothered to go to hospital and stalked off into the night. (This was not a problem for either my crewmate or myself.)
Police computers had information that he was dangerous (a number of rather vicious assaults) but our computers are not allowed to have such data. A police dispatcher has told us that they have all sorts of information on addresses, from animal liberation protesters to Members of Parliament. Again, our computers don’t have any information of that sort unless we enter it manually after an ambulance crew has been threatened assaulted.
Needless