Tom Reynolds - More Blood, More Sweat and Another Cup of Tea

Chapter 152 – Anger

Chapter 153 – A Night on the FRU

Chapter 154 – Attention

Chapter 155 – Meal-Breaks

Chapter 156 – Battered

Chapter 157 – The Long Job

Chapter 158 – Christmas

Chapter 159 – Man Down

Chapter 160 – Pre-Christmas Crisis

Chapter 161 – Bus/Follow Up

Chapter 162 – Curse of the Observer

Chapter 163 – His and Hers

Chapter 164 – On the Possible Causes for a Collapse

Chapter 165 – Non-Carers Who Care

Chapter 166 – Canvas, with Handles

Chapter 167 – Essex Boy

Chapter 168 – Parents

Chapter 169 – A Query on a Phone Call

Chapter 170 – Wheelchair

Chapter 171 – More of the (Shameful) Usual

Chapter 172 – Violence

Chapter 173 – Increasing Calls

Chapter 174 – Mr Grumpy

Chapter 175 – Yellow Card

Chapter 176 – Fat Bastard

Chapter 177 – On the Failings of My Stab Vest

Chapter 178 – Broken Finger

Chapter 179 – Returnee

Chapter 180 – Another Good Job

Chapter 181 – Infested

Chapter 182 – Small Annoyances

Chapter 183 – Friday

Chapter 184 – The Same Old Story

Chapter 185 – Yellow

Chapter 186 – Hive Mind

Chapter 187 – From Sun to Scum

Chapter 188 – More Real Work

Chapter 189 – More Strokes

Chapter 190 – Midwife to Tragedy

Chapter 191 – Rat Poison

Chapter 192 – Filth

Chapter 193 – Why I Like Old Folk

Chapter 194 – Cordoned Off

Chapter 195 – Invisible Dogs

Chapter 196 – Why the Government Hates Us

Chapter 197 – Thanks to a Bystander

Chapter 198 – Smoky

Chapter 199 – How to Fix the Ambulance Service (Part One)

Chapter 200 – HOW to Fix the Ambulance Service (Part Two)

Chapter 201 – Hidden Abuse?

Chapter 202 – The Term of the Day

Chapter 203 – A Good GP

Chapter 204 – Twit One and Twit Two

Chapter 205 – Two Amusing Things

Chapter 206 – Deceased

Chapter 207 – Fuming

Chapter 208 – Night Swimming

Chapter 209 – A Sheet of A4

Chapter 210 – Tough as Old Boots

Chapter 211 – Strength

Chapter 212 – Lexicon of the Ambulance Service (or What ‘Punter’ Means)

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Also by the Author

About the Publisher

Two a.m. and we are standing on the side of the road waiting for the fire service to take the top off the car in front of us. The wind whistles across the flats making us all shiver despite our fleeces and our jackets.

Two cars have been involved in a high-speed road traffic accident (RTA), the parked car that was hit has been shunted forward leaving ten-yard-long skid marks. The cars aren’t too damaged but the seats inside have shifted around, trapping the occupants.

There are seven ambulances here, four fire trucks, half a dozen police and three ambulance officers with clipboards. There are eight patients, all but one need cutting from the cars and collaring and boarding. The only woman involved is ‘walking wounded’.

The reason that it is taking so long for our car to get its lid removed by the fire service is because of the position of one of the patients inside. He looks rather unwell and the crew looking after him really would like to get to him sooner rather than later.

Our ambulance was fourth on scene. When I arrived I spoke to a stationmate to see what he wanted us to do, who he wanted us to look after. Normally he is the station clown, now he’s all serious and professional, no fake beards or silly glasses.

Everyone gets checked over, all the ambulance crews are calm, it’s serious but it doesn’t look like anyone is about to die; more a case of being careful moving the patients ‘just in case’.

The roof comes off the car and with the help of another crew and some firefighters we get our patient out safely and strapped to a board. He is freezing cold. He is not wearing warm clothing so the delay in getting him out and the terrible weather have us concerned for his body temperature.

We are in a new ambulance so the heater works. Turning it up to full we are soon sweating as we assess the patient and prepare for transport.

I get on the radio to pre-alert the hospital. For some reason the radio isn’t working properly and our Control can’t hear me, so I use my phone instead. Thankfully it works.

I travel a mile over speed-bumps to get to the hospital; there is no other route and every bump makes me aware of my patient in the back being jostled around. It’s not the first time that I curse the council.

After all our patients are safe at the hospital we stand outside and laugh and joke. We reconstruct the accident, we talk about the more injured ones and we mock the driving skills of one of the officers.

We occasionally help people.

It’s a good job sometimes.

I’m not special. All I am is one of the faceless people who work for an ambulance service. If you are lucky you’ll never meet me in a professional capacity. Most of the time you won’t even think about us; perhaps only occasionally sparing a thought for our work when an ambulance whizzes past you on the street, lights flashing and sirens sounding.

This book is a series of snapshots from the life of one ambulance worker. For the past few years I have been writing about ambulance work on the internet, regularly updating my website. From around the world people have come to read, and comment on, the sorts of jobs that I go to on a daily basis.

This book is not special—there are no tales of heroics, no exciting derring-do, nothing to compare with what the dramas on TV and film would have us believe. This is what ambulance staff the world over deal with day in and day out.

This is a book that lets you understand some of the situations that ambulance staff encounter every day, some of the pressures, and some of the humour that we use to let off steam.

Every time I talk about a patient in this book that situation has happened for real, to a real person.

The staffing of ambulances at the moment is…to put it bluntly…poor.

Working on the fast response unit (FRU—a car that is designed to get to the sickest patients quickly) means that I often get to an emergency call within minutes of it being made. Unfortunately, with so few ambulances on the road, the patient and I are often left staring at each other for long periods of time; in a couple of cases up to an hour.

I was sent to a young man having an asthma attack. It was late at night, and he had been queuing to get into a nightclub when he had started to feel his breathing getting tight, the sign of an asthma attack, so had headed to a taxi office in order to go home. Unfortunatel, his asthma progressed and so an ambulance was called. What he got was me, on my own, in a car.

After dealing with the drunken group of teenage girls that had taken time out of waiting for a cab to start loudly ‘caring’ for my patient, I started my assessment. It was a cold night so I sat the young man in the taxi office and listened to his chest. I could hear a nice loud wheezing from his lungs so I started him on the first dose of our asthma medication. I got his details and checked his vital signs, and waited for the ambulance to turn up.

It takes between five and ten minutes for the asthma medication to finish, and by the end of it there was still no ambulance.

I listened to his chest again, still an audible wheeze, so I gave him a second dose of the medication. So there he was, sitting in a cab office at three in the morning with a mask over his face, ‘smoke’ pouring from it, and all around us were intoxicated people getting cabs home.