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

Maybe I’m just getting soft in my old age.

I left work this morning with a song in my heart and joy in my step; last night was my final shift on the FRU car.

No longer will I be standing around with my hands in my pockets for 45 minutes while a six-month-old child lies in front of me with possible meningitis. No more will I be told by Control to go and drive around and look busy when there is something good on telly, and no longer will my only conversation with people consist mainly of ‘Where does it hurt?’ for twelve hours straight.

The letter that I wrote my boss telling her that I wanted to come off the FRU takes effect from Friday. I’ll soon be back to working on a ‘truck’, a nice big person-carrying medical-taxi truck.

Lovely!

I was hoping that this last shift would fly by in an exciting cascade of trauma, life-saving and dramatic illness.

Ahem.

It was actually a fairly quiet night. I did seven jobs, four of them being people with coughs (one cough having lasted three weeks before the patient decided to call an ambulance at five in the morning). My last call was to an elderly gentleman with emphysema (and a cough) who actually needed hospital treatment.

However, my first two calls were to drunks.

My second job was a ‘classic’—‘Male collapsed in street, unknown life status—caller refusing to go near patient or answer any questions.’ So I rushed there and found two female police officers standing over a drunk male who was asleep in the street. I did all my normal checks to make sure that he was only drunk (as opposed to being drunk and in a diabetic coma, drunk and has had a stroke, or drunk and has been stabbed). Everything pointed to him being just drunk.

We woke him up and were prepared to send him on his way. He stood up—took one look at me, and smacked me in the mouth.

I ‘assisted’ him onto the floor. The police officers and I then stopped him from injuring himself by sitting on him in a professional manner.

The police have been trained in restraint—they are all careful because they don’t want people dying of positional asphyxia. I haven’t been trained in restraint (well, not in the ambulance service) but I’m guessing that someone isn’t going to die because I’m kneeling over their arm while holding their wrist.

So we carefully restrained him (for around 25 minutes), while he explained how he was either going to kick my head in or sue me. By then the police had tracked down a, now mortified, relative who came and took him away.

No damage done to me, although I would think that as he wakes up this morning he’ll have a number of bruises. I hopped in my car and told Control that I had been assaulted twice in two jobs, so I asked if I could head back to the station for a calming cup of tea, which they allowed. They also made sure that I was all right and didn’t need any other help.

When my mother found out about my being assaulted, did she ask how I was? Did she ask if I had been hurt or damaged?

No.

Her comment was, ‘At least you’ll have something interesting to blog about.’

Bloody lovely that is…

It is a constant danger in this job that a patient, or more likely a patient’s relative, will make a complaint against you. While a member of the public can moan about a perceived insult (and half of the complaints against the ambulance service are due to ‘attitude’), there is little that we can do about a patient who is generally acting like a twit.

I have been pretty lucky in my career in that I’ve only had two complaints made against me: once while a nurse and once while working on the ambulances.

The nursing complaint was that I checked the correct dosage of a drug with another nurse before giving it to a child. For some reason this person had decided to complain about me for following the sensible rules laid down by my superiors. My boss at the time called me into the office, patted me on the head and told me I was a good boy and should keep up the excellent work.

The ambulance complaint went to a local investigation.

I was called into the office and asked if I remembered calling a patient a ‘bitch’. As I have a poor memory I didn’t remember until the ambulance officer gave me the paperwork for the job.

We had been called to a patient who had been arguing with his family, he’d drunk a bottle of wine and pretended to be unconscious. As he didn’t want to ‘wake up’, we decided to take him to hospital. While in the back of the ambulance he slapped my leg.

I told him that he ‘slapped like a bitch’ and that he really shouldn’t do it again or I might get upset.

I know, not the best insult in the world. He’d surprised me and I had to come up with something witty on the spur of the moment. If he’d hurt me then I would have thrown him off the ambulance, but as it was such an ineffectual strike I found it more amusing than anything else.

The officer had to investigate the allegation so he interviewed the other staff present and they supported my side of the story. He then had to travel to the patient’s home and interview him there. Luckily the officer saw the character of the patient and convinced him not to go any further with the complaint.

If I’d complained to the police it would no doubt have been considered ‘not worth prosecuting’ by the CPS, but if the patient had continued to complain I could have been seriously disciplined.

All of which only makes me think that I shouldn’t leave any witnesses alive…

…We get the call to the RTA, a car has crashed into a bus; normally these things are ‘nothing’ jobs. We put on the blue lights and head towards the crash…

…The radio bursts into life, there is an officer who ‘lucked’ onto the scene—he tells Control that he needs a lot of ambulances, the fire service and the police. The injuries are all serious. We wonder if he is talking about the same crash we are going to…

…We crest the hill, with one look at the car and the bus we know it’s going to be serious…

…I jump out of the ambulance and head to the car; I ask the officer what he wants us to do. He tells me that we can’t wait for the fire service to arrive to cut out the first patient as his breathing is so ragged. We agree that he needs to be out of the car immediately and that a possible neck injury is a low priority…

…We get him out and I watch as he takes his last breath…

…We work on him; he is so young we have to make the attempt. The DSO (duty station officer) and other FRUs work on the other people in the car…

…He is lying lifeless in my ambulance and the BASICS doctor declares him dead—then we rush off to the next casualty…

…This one gets sedation. I write the dose and time on his chest so that the information doesn’t get lost in the chaos. Another ambulance crew speeds him to hospital…

…The next one is declared dead as the firefighters cut him out…

…The other dead man is left in the car, there is nothing to do for him, it will be some time before the firefighters are able to free him…

…I check on the people in the bus, there are some injuries that will need hospital treatment. I’m trying to keep them calm and relaxed. My crewmate and I move from our ‘all-business’ personalities to our ‘reassurance’ ones in the time it takes us to walk to the bus. I deal with the multiple casualties one at a time, my crewmate helps me out…

…My ambulance becomes a mobile mortuary; the police are checking for identification. The blood is pooling on the floor…