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

It was not very dignified.

We started chatting, and I was impressed by this polite young man with good manners and common sense. The second medication finished and so we continued to wait, and wait, and wait for the ambulance. I phoned up my Control and asked if there was an ambulance assigned.

‘Sorry EC50, we are still holding calls in that area.’

I was on my own with this patient for the foreseeable future.

Sometimes I can transport a patient myself to hospital, it’s not technically allowed. Actually, we’ve been told that we shouldn’t do it at all, but in some cases I think I’m doing the right thing for the patient. So I will load them into the car (which only has the front passenger seat, the rest of the car is taken up by equipment) and nip into the nearest hospital. Control is often happy for me to do this, as it means one less job that it needs to send a proper ambulance to.

I couldn’t transport this patient, though, because he wanted to go to his local hospital, which would mean driving past two other emergency departments and out of my area. I couldn’t see Control, or my bosses, being too happy with that.

So the patient, at his insistence, got a cab to hospital. The double dose of medicine had cleared his lungs up nicely, but he would probably need some short-term steroid treatment. I rechecked my assessment of him, and was happy that his physical condition was good enough for him to get a cab to hospital. I wasn’t happy, though, that there was no ambulance for this patient who actually warranted one.

As I write this I wonder what would have happened if he hadn’t responded to the medication that I gave him.

I think I’m going to be leaving my job soon.

I went to a six-month-old baby with possible meningitis. The baby had the right sort of rash (although it was only on the back of the knee and, after checking, nowhere else). It had a temperature, but was one of the happiest, most alert children I’ve ever had the pleasure of meeting. It just didn’t seem as if it had meningitis, and trust me, I’ve seen a fair few children and adults with it so I have a pretty good idea what it looks like.

Then, as in the past, I was left waiting for an ambulance.

For around 45 minutes.

There was no way I was going to be able to transport the patient in my car. It’s just not equipped to carry such a small child. We don’t have baby seats and as the family didn’t have a car they didn’t have one either.

So the family ended up phoning a friend to take them to the hospital. The ambulance turned up just as they were getting into their friend’s car.

All I had going through my head was the potential newspaper headline ‘No Ambulance For Baby Dying Of Killer Bug!’

Later that night I went to a woman who was having an extremely painful miscarriage. There is nothing I can do for that on scene, the patient needs to be in hospital. Thankfully the ambulance wasn’t too far behind me, but if I had been waiting on scene then it would have been a very awkward and distressing wait (again, because of the pain, it would have been impossible to transport her in my car).

More and more I’m looking at my watch as an ambulance fails to arrive. It’s only a matter of time before I have someone die in front of me while waiting for an ambulance.

So, I’m seriously considering leaving the FRU and going back to work on an ambulance. That way I can pick up sick people, and take them to where they need to be: a hospital.

So after the holiday season, I think I’ll be sending a memo up to the office asking to return to my ambulance role.

I’m not perfect.

I arrived at work to find that my FRU car was nowhere to be seen. There was no one on the early shift, so where had my car got to?

The week before a friend of mine had had an accident in the Newham FRU car (in front of a load of police officers, which had given them some amusement I would imagine). So the car that I would normally use was being borrowed by Newham station.

So the plan was for me to get picked up at my station by a station officer, go to Newham, get the keys to the brand-new Vauxhall Zafira, return to my station with the car and start working.

The station officer met me and drove me down to Newham station. He asked me, because I was leaving my secondment on the FRU, if I could write up my thoughts on what was good, bad and what could be improved about it.

I told him that I’d be more than happy to point him in the direction of where my thoughts lay.

The brand-new Zafira was parked in the garage at Newham so I hopped behind the wheel and, after some struggling with the new design of handbrake, managed to reverse it out and into the parking area.

Where to the absolute horror of the station officer I drove into another car.

Oops.

Luckily there was no damage to the Zafira (which had less than 600 miles on the clock) and very slight, if any, damage to the other car.

The first accident I had in over 18 months and it was in front of a station officer…

Not a good start to the shift.

My thoughts on the Zafira are these; if you wanted a rapid response vehicle, the Zafira shouldn’t have been chosen. It is too top heavy and wallows like a hippo in thick mud. The acceleration is awful, you hit the pedal and it takes one and a half seconds before the diesel engine gives you any sort of power. It is comfortable to pootle around town in, and the high-up viewing position is quite nice.

But there is no way that it could be considered a ‘Fast’ car.

I think the reason why we have them is because they are able to carry patients, and I imagine that soon FRU drivers will be asked to take the coughs and colds that we see so much of to hospital.

New Year’s night was a busy one for the London Ambulance Service. There were 38 stabbings over the course of the night. I spoke to my workmate who was on the FRU that night; he attended four stabbings one after another.

By 5 a.m. there had been in excess of 2000 calls (we normally do a shade under 4000 calls over 24 hours).

On the television one of our top-ranking management people described the night as ‘horrific’, which I would say is a pretty fair assessment.

I am extremely glad I wasn’t working that shift.

The call details appeared on the computer terminal in the FRU:

‘Nineteen-year-old male—Patient has lump on ribs—difficulty in breathing.’

Halfway to the address, a private house, my screen was updated:

‘Patient has taken cocaine.’

I was met at the front door by a young male, stripped to the waist and obviously agitated.

‘Comein, myribsfeelfunny, andmyshoulderbladedon’tfeelright.’

‘Slow down,’ I said, taking his pulse—110, a bit on the high side, but he was bouncing off the walls.

‘My ribs man! They don’t feel right! Have a feel.’ He then started running his hands up and down his chest.

‘Have you fallen over? Been hit? Anything unusual happened?’ I asked.

‘No man—just feel them…FEEL THEM!’

‘Look, you need to calm down,’ I replied. ‘I can’t do anything while you are hopping all over the place.’

He started shouting, ‘FEEL THEM! JUST FUCKIN’ FEEL THEM!’

He turned his back to me, indicating that I should feel his normal-looking ribs.

A sudden wave of anger passed over me—it was all I could do to not punch him in the back. I examined his ribs; they felt perfectly normal to me.

‘There,’ I said, ‘your ribs are fine.’