Having a vague sense of humour failure towards the end of my fourth night. Not helped by the thought that today I shall be mainly hanging wallpaper, painting walls and trying to buy some carpet.
The stand out silly job of the night was…

40 year old male who'd drank some water and some of the water went down 'the wrong tube', so he coughed and spluttered a bit and his family called an ambulance.

I got it as 'difficulty in breathing'.

Raced, at high speed, across town (with all the dangers that this involves) to find him unsurprisingly fully recovered.

Quick check to make sure he hadn't suffered a stroke (because that can muck up your swallowing function), and then I was on my way.

Back across town at exceedingly high speed for a seven year old asthmatic.

(I do love smelling the burning brake pads when you hop out the car at your destination).

How do you reach the age of 40 without coughing on a drink? I mean, I nearly choked on my tea when I saw this posting., and that was just today.

This post is completely egotistical – but sod it, I can blow my own trumpet sometimes…

I think I’ve just saved someone's life, but only because I’m honest.

It’s 6:20 am, and I had ten minutes to go until the end of the shift.  I’d just finished a maternataxi at the other end of my patch, so I considered sitting there for the ten minutes of my shift before ‘greening up’.  That way I wouldn’t get another job, I could get back to station near enough in time, and by extension be safe and warm in bed before 7am.

“Sod it”, I thought, “what are the chances of me getting a job in these ten minutes”.  So I ‘greened up’, and started heading back to station.

6:28am.  My computer display starts buzzing, “58 year old Male, swollen tongue”.

“Bugger”.

It’s at the other end of my area, on go the lights, on goes the siren, and I key the mike to ask Control if there is anyone nearer, or anyone who finishes at 7am who could take the job.  There isn’t.

The problem with getting a job at 6:30 is that pretty much every other ambulance and RRU in the area finishes their shift at 7am.  So if they have all been on jobs, they’ll sit out the last 20 minutes of the shift at hospital.  Or they could all be genuinely busy.

If Control are holding a job, then they’ll broadcast it over the radio, and hope that someone will take it, which to be honest, someone normally does.

So I race around there, getting there is Nine Minutes.  Damn, the job is a failure…I need to get to every job in under 8 minutes.

The patient has a swollen tongue alright, so much so it’s nearly falling out of his head.  Apparently it started swelling up from last night, and has just been getting worse.

It looks to me that he is suffering an allergic reaction, quite a serious one as well, although he has no idea what he might be allergic to

Ok, I think, if it’s taken that long, he has plenty of breathing time, we can wait for the ambulance, and the hospital can treat him with the nice drugs.  The only drug I have in this situation is adrenaline, which can have some fairly nasty side effects (nothing serious, just it’s not a pleasant drug to have injected into you).

So we wait, have a bit of a chat, and I manage to calm him down.

“It’s still getting bigger”, he says.  So I have a look, and it is indeed getting to a dangerously large size.  If it swells much more his airway will obstruct, and he won’t be able to breathe.

“Alright then”, I say, “Time for that injection I told you about”.

500mcg of Adrenaline, straight in the muscle.

4 minutes later, and he tells me that “It’s getting smaller”.

10 minutes later and it is noticeably smaller, and he is able to talk in a much more normal voice.

His mum, 86 years old, and dressed in a little checked work pinny comes down and offers a cup of tea.

50 minutes after arriving on scene and after having a good chat about the state of English rugby, the weather and the good the NHS does, an ambulance rolls up outside.

The ambulance has also ‘greened up’ with 10 minutes to go on the end of their shift.  Bless them.

I get back to station and finish my paperwork – it’s now 8am, one and a half hours overtime then.  Back in 10 hours to do the same again.

Then I start thinking…  If I hadn’t been honest (read: scared about getting caught and getting the sack), then I wouldn’t have gotten the job, the patient’s tongue would have swollen, and he could have choked to death.

All those little random decisions came together to help this patient.

And I managed to go home with a warm glow inside, rather than the sickness of fatigue, and the dejection of yet another drunk/assault/drunken assault.

Medical stuff is easy, I know exactly what to do when someone is having a heart attack, has a broken leg, or has driven their car at speed into a wall.
It's the 'social' stuff that is really tricky.

3am in the morning, and I find myself going to a call, “Female, fell down stairs”. On arriving outside the flats I heard two people arguing, and initially the female wouldn't let me into the flat. Then a young looking boy (he looked and sounded about 13 to me), 'buzzed' me into the flat.

The patient had a black eye, and a possible broken nose. She was covered in blood and was extremely upset.

She also refused to go to hospital, because she had her young daughter asleep upstairs.

The patient maintained that she had been out drinking, while the young looking lad had been looking after her daughter – she didn't want to go to hospital because she didn't want to leave her daughter with the lad anymore.

I did confront her over being happy leaving her daughter to go drinking, but not to go to the hospital – she was still determined not to go to hospital

I also asked her if she was telling the truth, and that she hadn't been assaulted. She stuck to her story that she had simply fallen down the stairs.

Unfortunately, I can't drag people off to hospital, and even if I could, I'd have to arrange care for the young daughter.

I asked the young man how old he was, and he told me he was 22.

If he is 22 then he has some serious hormone imbalance problems, as his voice hadn't broken.

So, I had a woman who looked to me as if she had been punched, refusing to go to hospital. I had a 13 year old boy (or thereabouts) looking after her and her daughter. And I had heard them both arguing loudly from the street about something.

I couldn't just leave them like that. But what to do?

At 3am, there is only really one thing to do – although I hated doing it.

Call the police.

Contacting Social Services would have taken weeks to sort out the problem, and there was nothing us ambulance folk could do – so that left the police.

I know that they are busy, I know that they don't like attending this sort of thing, and I know that their hands are tied as much as mine. But I live in hope that they could do something about this situation – at the very least get it calmed down.

I'm still not 100% sure that I did the right thing, but compared to ignoring the problem I think that getting the police involved is 'the path of least evil'.

For all I know they have a huge file on this woman.

So, to all the police who read this blog – Sorry.

I am so unbelievably busy at the moment, mainly because of my impending move (and the fact that the place I’m moving into was left in a barely habitable state), couple that with some nightshifts, and a few other things that are going on, and you have a very tired, busy and generally worn out EMT.

I apologise if I need to email you, phone you or generally do something for/with you at the moment, and haven’t gotten around to doing it.  I will do it in the near future.

However the last nightshift did throw up a few possibly interesting stories – so I won’t need to search for inspiration for the next couple of posts.

Night buses are wonderful things, they allow nightclubbers in London the opportunity to find their way back home after the tube network has closed down for the night.  They also seem to collect people with *ahem* ‘colourful’ personalities.

The only problem is that they tend to rock you to sleep.

Bus drivers aren’t allowed to touch their passengers.

So when a driver reaches the end of his route, and there is someone still asleep on the bus, then the driver can shout, bang on the handrail, and stamp their feet.  But they can’t shake the person awake.

So they call the police, and the ambulance service to wake the person up.  The police in case they are violent, and the ambulance service in case they are ill.

The details are often sent as ‘person unconscious’.  Which makes it a high category call…

Can you see where I come into the situation?

As it is a high category call, myself, or someone like me is often sent along, on blue lights and sirens, to well…

…give someone a shake, and wake them up.

This is how our resources seem to be allocated these days.  Waking people up who have fallen asleep on the bus.

I don’t mind the patient, because who hasn’t fallen asleep on the train or bus?  But I do dislike the need for us to turn up to a call where there is no injury or illness because bus station staff are too scared/not allowed to gently shake someone awake.

I am part way through reading the Ambulance Report, and have already thought of a few comments for it.  Stay tuned.