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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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