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

…I’m sitting on the back step of the ambulance, two of the dead are in my ambulance; one, wrapped in a sheet, is at my feet. We are waiting for the undertaker…

…The police investigation team is chalking the outlines of vehicles and taking photographs of the scene…

…My paperwork is done. It seems like such a little bit of writing for such a serious call where three men have been killed…

…Medical equipment and wrappers mix with the debris of the accident. There is the familiar ‘tick-tick-tick’ of our blue lights revolving in their housings…

…Back at the station I have a face mask on as I clean the floor and trolley of the ambulance with the jet spray we normally use on the outside of the vehicles. My crewmate is doing the gentler job of cleaning the equipment. The blood comes off eventually…

…It’s time for our next job.

On Saturday one of the first jobs was to go to someone whose name my crewmate recognised.

‘He’s a nice old boy,’ he told me. ‘When his wife was alive she’d call us every time he coughed. He’s deaf and blind. He used to be a British champion boxer. He’s a big fella so I hope we don’t have to carry him downstairs. We don’t see him much now; he hasn’t called us out in ages.’

The patient was sitting alone in his flat, scattered around him were books that he could no longer read. In the corner was a television that probably hadn’t been turned on in years. He was just a frail man sitting quietly in his chair marking time. On the table next to his chair were the remains of some ‘meals on wheels’. I could see that he had once been a ‘solid’ man, like the old men still living in our area who used to work on the docks—tall and thick with muscle. He wasn’t that man any more. He was frail, shaking, and seemed nervous of everything, not something that you’d expect from an ex-boxer.

It was hard getting his history as I needed to lean close to his ear and shout. At one point he let out a hacking cough just as I was up close to him so we took him to hospital with a possible chest infection.

Our last job of the day was back to the same address—he’d been discharged from hospital and just wanted someone to ‘check his pulse’.

We didn’t mind.

Seven-hour shifts are really easy to do, especially when you have spent the last year doing only twelve-hour shifts.

The jobs tonight were pretty easy—even easier for me as I was driving the ambulance rather than treating the patients. We had a 16-year-old girl with a sore throat, a pair of drunks, one of whom had a twisted ankle, a little old lady who’d fallen over indoors and had a nasty scrape to her arm, and a young woman, twelve weeks pregnant, who had been assaulted at work and struck in the stomach.

The real standout job for me shows just how daft some people are.

The patient was a twelve-year-old boy. We got the job as ‘child banging head on walls and floor’ and when we turned up the child was indeed clutching his head and hitting it against a wall. The parents and child spoke poor English, but we easily managed to learn that the child was suffering from an earache, and that this was the cause of the head-hitting.

‘How long has he had the pain?’ asked my crewmate for the night.

‘Five years then, three hours now,’ replied the father.

We understood what he meant—the child had an earache five years ago, but this current episode, and the reason why we were called out, had lasted three hours.

‘Have you given him any painkillers?’

‘No,’ the father looked confused.

‘Do you have any painkillers?’ my crewmate asked.

‘Yes, but we haven’t given him any,’ said the father.

So the family could see their child rolling around the floor, screaming in pain and banging his head against the walls, and didn’t consider that a painkiller might have—oh, I don’t know—helped with the pain.

I can imagine the scene in the hospital when the nurses give the child some pain relief—the parents looking at each other, slapping their foreheads and saying, ‘Doh! We could have done that!’

There are a lot of daft people out there—and I get to meet most of them.

There is a slight problem I have with returning to the ambulances, and that is my new partner is currently on sick leave, and has been for some time. No one knows when she will be fit to return—so I often find myself ‘single’ with nobody to work with.

When you are single you can be teamed up with another single pretty much anywhere in London.

At the moment our sector is having trouble reaching our government targets (which are calculated at the end of February). Of particular concern is Poplar ambulance station which, because of atrocious manning, is struggling to meet them. To counter this management have made it known that any shortfall in manning Poplar must be corrected as a priority.

So, when I’m single I’m often going to find myself making my way over to the Poplar area.

Last night, however, there was no one for me to work with at Poplar so they asked me to work on the FRU.

Fear of being asked to travel over to the other side of London if I refused meant that last night I was once more a solo responder.

This meant I had the right hump.

Thankfully it wasn’t too busy; the usual complaints of ‘my child hasn’t eaten properly for two days’, ‘I’m having an angina attack’ and ‘I’m drunk’ were quite enough. There was one interesting job though—a policeman hit a pedestrian with his car.

Thankfully he wasn’t travelling on blue lights, nor going too fast for the road. The woman apparently ran out into the road without looking, which given some of the pedestrian activities I normally see wasn’t out of the ordinary. Luckily for the woman involved there was an anaesthetist walking past, and he managed the immediate need to keep her neck still. After our examination our main concerns were that she was concussed and that she was cold from lying in the road—thankfully the ambulance was pretty quick, and she was soon in the warm, where our further examination showed no immediate injuries.

The area was cordoned off and as the woman was being looked after by the crew I went to make sure that the policeman who had been driving was all right. He was quite shaken up by the event, and I hope he gets support from his work.

The plan was perfect—we’d just taken a drunk to hospital and the patient (a 45-year-old man, married, father of two) had decided to urinate in the back of our ambulance. Both my crewmate and I were happy at this as we would have to return to our station to mop out, and on the way my crewmate could grab a chicken takeaway meal.

And I could get a cup of tea.

This apparently flawless plan was spoilt when we stopped for the food and a man came running out of a pub to tell me that a friend had ‘a fuckin’ big gash in his head’ from when he had fallen over.

So I dutifully entered the pub, to find a 50-year-old man with a cut down to the skull running from his hairline to his eyebrow. Most impressive.

Less impressive was his friend telling me that the patient had taken some speed earlier.

I don’t know about you, but I consider myself too old to be taking that stuff, let alone someone old enough to be my father.

Not that I’ve ever taken speed myself. I like my brain cells exactly how they are, thankyouverymuch.

Luckily another ambulance turned up and took the patient off our hands, and so we returned to the station where I completed the job of mopping out the urine that had been washing backwards and forwards on the floor as we drove along.