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

‘What about my shoulder blades man?’

‘Look, you’ve taken cocaine right? You are feeling paranoid, it’s normal, just try to relax a little.’

‘WHAT…ABOUT…MY…FUCKIN’…SHOULDER BLADES!’

He turned his back on me again. I gritted my teeth and grabbed his shoulder blades. ‘They are fine. Now. Sit. Down.’

He sat down. Then he stood up, then he paced around the kitchen, then he did a few circuits of the sofa, then he sat down again, then he stood up and hopped around a bit. I was getting tired just watching him.

‘Look,’ I said trying to calm him, and me, down, ‘is this the first time you’ve taken cocaine?’

‘No man!’

‘OK, well if you want we can take you to the hospital, get you checked out if you’d like?’

‘NO!’ he shouted. ‘I’m not going to hospital.’

Fine, I thought, not that the hospital will thank me.

‘OK mate, then are you alone in the house?’

‘Nah, my dad’s asleep upstairs.’

‘Well, I’d like to have a chat with him, so he can keep an eye on you.’

‘NO! Get out of my house.’ He started advancing towards me. ‘No hospital, no waking my dad up, just get the fuck out of my house!’

I left the house. While a fight with the patient would have done absolute wonders for my stress levels, it certainly wasn’t worth the hassle, the risk of injury and, most importantly, the paperwork.

But what should I do now? If a patient isn’t transported then we should leave a copy of our patient report form with them. Should I post it through the letterbox? The problem with that was if his father saw the report I’d be breaching patient confidentiality. I guessed that the police wouldn’t be too interested in paying him a visit either. So I left the form sitting in my car—there was little else I could do for him, as he didn’t want help.

I sat in my car, filled out my forms and took a couple of deep breaths. It would be a long Christmas…

I’ve had a couple of people send me a story that appeared in the newspapers.

Nursing staff from a Telford hospital have been accused of using an ambulance as a taxi after a night out.

It was claimed some of the nursing staff got into an ambulance outside The Swan in Ironbridge on Sunday.

The ambulance service has found a crew did provide unauthorised transport to staff but said it was not in operation and returning to base at the time.

To be honest this tends to happen a bit with nurses asking if you can give them a lift to the train station and the like. You tell the nurse ‘Hop in the back, we’ll give you a lift—if we get a call you’ll have to hop out again.’ It helps keep relations good between the hospital staff and ourselves. It doesn’t hurt anyone and it definitely doesn’t remove an ambulance from service.

In fact, it can do good. A crew I know was giving a nurse a lift to the train station after her shift finished when they then got a call to a cardiac arrest and the nurse was able to help out. As long as the crew wasn’t refusing calls then I can’t see the harm in it. In London I’d imagine that our Control would love it as it would mean we are out roaming rather than sitting on station, something our management is eager for us to do.

And if I’m going to spend all shift taxiing drunks around, I don’t see why we can’t sometimes help out the poor buggers who work their fingers to the bone looking after those same drunks.

I wonder if the person who complained is the sort who expects an ambulance to turn up seconds after they’ve cut their finger?

I went to two cases of adult chickenpox last night. The hospital says that there was another adult with chickenpox the day before that. It seems like we have a little outbreak here.

As both my patients were Nigerian, I have a sneaky feeling that the big (mainly Nigerian) church in Newham may be where the disease was spread and the timing of the symptoms would support this.

As one of the families had school-age children with the disease, I’m going to guess that a lot of children will be ill over the next few days.

Off the top of my head, I can’t remember if I have been vaccinated against chickenpox—but I do know that I had it twice when I was a child, both times at Christmas.

It was cold, it was dark and it was raining the sort of thin greasy rain that soaks straight through your clothes. I was making my way to one of the Docklands Light Railway stations for a ‘Male—collapsed, caller not willing to approach patient.’ I’d been to this station in the last week for a hoax call and I wasn’t sure if this was a repeat performance.

At the bottom of the stairs just sheltered from the rain was a young man in his twenties, dirty, dressed in filthy clothes and curled up next to a plastic bag. Standing over him was another man, this one dressed in a suit, looking a bit concerned.

(The London borough of Tower Hamlets has both the richest, and the poorest population in London.)

‘He’s just laying there, not talking,’ the smartly dressed man said. ‘I didn’t really know what to do…’

I let him know that I’d take care of the patient, and that he had done the right thing and could go home.

It was just me and the patient. Given the way he looked it was a reasonable assumption that he was homeless. If he was homeless then there was a reasonable assumption that he was drunk and given that he was in such a public place there was a chance that there was something physically wrong with him.

I attempted to wake him up—he was keeping his eyes closed when I tried to open them, so I knew that he wasn’t really unconscious.

‘Look mate,’ I said, ‘if you don’t open your eyes, I’ll have to check your blood sugar, which means poking a needle into your finger. If you open your eyes then I won’t have to do that.’

No response.

So I checked his blood sugar along with the rest of his vital signs; everything was fine.

I crouched down opposite him.

‘Look, you can open your eyes and talk to me you know—we’ll still take you to hospital. To be honest, I can’t blame you, an A&E waiting room has got to be a pretty good option on a crappy night like this.’

Some commuters walked between us; they didn’t look at us. I looked in his plastic bag; there was a sociology textbook.

‘Sociology? I could never enjoy reading that sort of thing.’

He opened his eyes. ‘’S’ all right.’

Excellent. He was talking to me, which meant that the paranoid voice in the back of my head telling me that he might be seriously ill could shut up. It is something that always worries me—that despite my experience I’d miss something serious on a drunk or homeless guy.

We had a little chat while I was waiting for the ambulance to arrive. He’d been a rough sleeper for two years; he admitted to drinking too much. He seemed a nice enough person.

‘Bloody freezing tonight,’ I said to him. ‘I reckon the hospital has got to be a fair bit warmer and drier tonight.’

‘I don’t want to go to hospital,’ he said back to me.

I was surprised. ‘Are you sure mate? It’s no skin off my nose if we take you in.’

‘Yeah, I’m sure. I’ve just had too much to drink.’ He mentioned a hostel nearby. ‘Which way is it from here?’

I pointed him in the direction of the hostel and he wandered off down the road.

I’ve got to admit that I felt sorry for him. I didn’t know why he was homeless, and I’m not a strong believer that all homeless people are victims, but because I’d sat and spoken to him, because he hadn’t tried to hit me and because he seemed like a reasonable person I felt some sympathy for him. He must have made some sort of impression on me as I can still remember the job six weeks after it happened.