I got posted to Newham, which is a 10-minute drive from where I live; unfortunately, I’d never driven there and my navigation was awful. When I told my new workmates where I lived they thought, ‘Good someone who knows the area’ (and just after that they probably thought, ‘If he lives there I wonder if he’ll steal my car?’). This was before the days of satellite tracking where you just have to follow the dulcet tones of the computer (sometimes in Danish if some bright spark has reprogrammed the computer); in those days you had a mapbook and were expected to get on with it.
Gradually, you get to know the streets, where the regulars live, the pubs that are ‘trouble’ and where the 6-feet-6-inch width restrictions are. You then have to counter every threat the ‘natives’ throw at you.
For example, I might be driving a big white (or bright yellow) van, covered with flashing lights and ‘ambulance’ written on the side, occasionally – if I feel like pushing out the boat – I’ll even have the sirens going. You might expect people to get out of the way; instead, pedestrians will be drawn to run out in front of you, like particularly dim-witted moths to aflame. People in cars will suddenly develop selective blindness, and idiots with Drum ’n ’Bass pounding out from stereos worth more than their car will argue that I should make way for them.
Drivers will pull out from side streets in front of you, and as for the bizarre ideas some people have as to the best way to clear a path for us (jump on the brakes, swerve in front of us, sit there and panic), well, it’s a good job we often don’t have far to travel.
However, there are benefits to driving an ambulance: driving on the wrong side of the road (at a top speed of 20 m.p.h. mind you) still makes me happy, driving over kerbs is often a giggle, and let’s face it, who wouldn’t like to treat red lights as a ‘Give Way’?
Despite popular belief, we don’t actually go that fast – we can’t, we never know when some young mother is going to push her baby buggy out in front of us. At best I think we have a maximum speed of 40 m.p.h., not only for our safety and the safety of other people, but purely because the worn-out ambulances that we drive have an acceleration that would embarrass a milk float, and a top speed of … oh … about 42 m.p.h.
I once got on a motorway and ‘opened her up’, we got up to 70 m.p.h. (downhill naturally) before the front of the ambulance started lifting up and the steering became a trifle ‘unresponsive’. Luckily I managed to stop screaming in sheer terror for long enough to regain control.
Most of our accidents (as a firm) come from reversing, I’ve – cough – occasionally reversed into pillars and lampposts; one person I worked with managed to reverse into a low-flying balcony. I have on at least two occasions got stuck in a width restriction (I swear, one day I’ll get our 7-foot-2 ambulance through a 6-foot-6 restriction – I just need to get up to a decent speed before tackling it). Thankfully, our ambulances are so old and battered that small amounts of damage just add to the character of the vehicle.
Of course all that has changed with the new yellow Mercedes Sprinters. Or at least it would if they haven’t all started getting faults around the 5 000 mile mark. Our station had three of the new ambulances, now we have none. They are all either being patched up, or shipped back to Germany to have major repairs done. Current reports are that the fibreglass back is splitting from the metal chassis – possibly because of the number of speed-bumps we have to contend with.
Speed-bumps – a good idea in theory, but in practice they slow us down by a hell of a lot, wreck the ambulances, and in 5 years’ time I intend to go on permanent sick leave because my kidneys have been shaken out through my mouth. My plan to get local councillors thinking a little more sensibly about speed-bumps would be to strap them down on a spinal board and drive them through the streets – I think they would be begging for mercy after 5 minutes.
Parking is a nightmare in Newham as well. We often have a line of traffic parked on either side of the road, making side streets effectively single track routes. When we get a call for a ‘chest pain’ (you know, the sort of thing that could be a heart attack), then we have no choice but to park in the middle of the road, blocking any other traffic. At no point do we engage in the ‘how much traffic can I stop’ game. We don’t like confrontation at all, we like a nice quiet life, so we are not trying to wind people up on purpose.
Unfortunately some people don’t see it like that and will sit there honking their horn at us to get a hurry on. To be fair, I tend to spend a maximum of 10 minutes on scene, and if you honk your horn at me, I’ll then change my working speed to ‘go slow’ (assuming that this won’t affect the patient’s condition).
I think it’s incredibly rude to think that your journey is more important than that of an emergency ambulance.
Don’t you?
I’m off to work now to drive around those selfsame streets … wish me luck, and if you see me in your rear view mirror, please get out of the way by pulling over and stopping on the left of the road.
Some unusual jobs today, the first call was to a concrete company (which will remain nameless – no doubt they have better lawyers than I). We were told to meet with the Police and Fire Service at an RVP (meeting point). It turns out that some animal liberation types have taken offence to this company (rumour being they are supplying concrete to a new animal testing laboratory) and have sent some deactivated incendiary devices to various branches in order to scare them. Today, in three of the offices across London, some ‘suspicious packages’ had turned up and we were being sent to cover the defusing of one of these devices. Two ambulances, one Duty Officer, three fire engines and countless police were there, standing around the now evacuated offices.
Our Duty Officer started allocating ‘Major Incident’ roles to everyone. I don’t think he was best pleased when I asked him why, when major incidents are designed to deal with multiple casualties, we needed to play that game when the only person in any danger in the now deserted office was the bomb disposal officer.
He sent me to arrange the parking of the emergency vehicles. We were soon stood down, however, when it was discovered that the ‘device’ was actually a packet of envelopes.
The next call was to two brothers who had fought over possession of a bong, with one brother trying to sell it to a third brother. Both we and the police were sent; when we got there both brothers had calmed down and there were no serious injuries. One policeman was confused about what a bong was used for, until I explained that it was ‘drug paraphernalia’. One of the brothers told the policeman that he was selling it because he didn’t use it – he much preferred smoking his cannabis in a spliff.
Luckily for him the policeman ignored this massive blunder (and me collapsing in tears of laughter at this idiot essentially confessing his drug habits).
Our next interesting job was to a man in Docklands who had a head injury caused by trying to avoid an attacking seagull. It turns out that there is a seagull living there who likes to dive-bomb people passing by. This man had ducked the avian attack, then tripped and fell flat on his face, knocking himself out. He had only minor facial injuries, but the loss of consciousness will mean a short stay in hospital being watched. My old crewmate suggested that he sell his story to the newspapers.
The rest of our jobs were rather boring after this early excitement.
One of the things that will constantly amaze me is that some people will drop dead at the drop of a hat (so to speak), while others will survive injuries that would kill us mere mortals.
Today was a case in point: we got called to a 39-year-old female who’d been hit on the head by a brick that had fallen seven floors. We turned up at the location