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

I just wish I could be a fly on the wall when our original drunken patient tries to explain to his wife exactly why he has pissed his trousers.

‘He’ll end up in the bush,’ I said.

‘Nope—the road,’ replied my crewmate.

‘Bush.’

‘Road.’

The man we were watching dropped to the floor—in the road.

It was the last call of the night—a police CCTV camera had seen a man sitting in the middle of the road in what can only be described as a ‘dangerous’ part of town.

We arrived to find our patient rather drunk and sitting in the road under a CCTV camera. Circling him was a hungry pack of feral children who scattered when they saw us arrive.

We had a pleasant little chat with him—he had scraped his face when he had fallen over, and had no desire to get out of the road.

We spent twenty minutes trying to persuade him to get out of the road. We tried being nice, we tried reverse psychology and we even tried explaining that the police would soon be here and they would make him move on. He refused to move, and he refused to go to hospital—he was a very stationary object.

We got back into the ambulance, where it was warm, to await the police. We’d already parked in a ‘fend off’ position so that a passing car wouldn’t hit our patient.

I don’t believe in making work for myself.

‘Control, have we got an ETA for the police please?’

Control replied, ‘I can only tell you what they have told me—there are no policemen in the big policemen storage box, as they are all out dealing with other things.’

Great.

Right, I thought, time to try a little trick I learnt while reading a book about how the human brain works. Certain gestures and objects have ‘hard-coded’ responses in your brain. So if you walk up to someone who is sitting in the road and give them your hand (as if you were about to shake theirs), they will often take it, and from there it is fairly easy to get someone standing.

Success! Our patient was now standing (well…swaying) and indicated that he wanted to go home. His home was about 400 yards away in one of the tower blocks that surrounded us.

He took two steps and started to fall—he grabbed at my crewmate’s jacket, spun himself around her and by some miracle remained upright.

‘I’m fine,’ he said. ‘I don’t want you helping me walk home.’ He pulled his arms out of our grasp and started to stagger home.

We got into the ambulance and slowly followed behind him.

A message from the police (via our Control) appeared on our display terminal. ‘Are you all right? Does the man have any warning signs?’

Warning signs?

‘Control,’ I was back on the radio, ‘I’ve got this message about “warning signs”. Well, I don’t think he has any signal flares, or any of those reflective red triangles you put behind your car when it breaks down.’ Yes, I know…I was being silly.

While trying not to laugh Control replied, ‘I wondered what the police meant by that as well.’

What I think had happened was that the CCTV operator had seen what looked like my crewmate being attacked by the patient when he was just stumbling around.

We kept following the patient.

He started to swagger.

He started to sway.

He swaggered some more.

We quickly laid bets on him falling into some bushes by the road.

I chose the bushes.

I lost.

We got out of the ambulance and picked him up again. This time we decided that ‘technically’ breaking the law and frogmarching him home would be in the patient’s best interest. So we grabbed an arm each and in a jolly fashion walked him home.

With the three of us all with linked arms making our way down a deserted street, it was inevitable that I’d start whistling ‘We’re off to see the wizard’.

The patient got home safely, although I’d guess that the family member who answered the doorbell wasn’t too pleased with him.

Way back in my past I trained to be a teacher (of small to medium-sized children). Rather thankfully I’ve managed to block out much of the trauma from those days. My poor memory does have some positive sides.

However, I’ve just done a job in a primary school, and all those memories came flooding back.

To be honest I think it was the smell that did it. Smell is strongly tied to memory, which is why certain odours can transport you back in time, say to helping your mum bake a cake, or to painting a shed with your father.

In this case it was the smell of the floor polish coupled with the scent of the powder paints in the air that flung me back to my days of trying to control 33 mini-disaster machines (or as they are known to the general public ‘children’).

I’m sure that new parents must have the same experience when they first visit their child’s school.

The job itself was quite an easy one, one of the teachers was having a panic attack, which is fair enough really—I know that if I were still trying to teach, I’d be in a constant state of panic attack.

I know I’ve written about having a wager with my crewmate about which way a drunk would fall, but I don’t want to give you the wrong idea.

I think betting is silly.

I have no idea how to work out any odds. Terms like ‘odds of 11/7’, ‘each way’, ‘accumulators’ and ‘handicap’ make no sense to me at all. Since childhood the betting shop has always seemed to me to be a seedy place where hard-drinking, and hard-smoking, men flush their money down the toilet. Not somewhere I would ever visit.

Occasionally I do find myself, because of the duties of my job, frequenting these dens of vice. And to be honest most of them aren’t that bad. The most common reason why I am sent to these places is because someone has passed out in the toilets due to drugs, or less commonly, drink. For some reason betting-shop toilets seem to be really popular places to take drugs.

Don’t ask me why.

These jobs are fairly rare, so I was surprised to find myself called to betting shops on two separate jobs in one day. Even more surprising was that neither of these jobs was junkie related.

The first job was to a 50-year-old male who had collapsed, and when we arrived the FRU driver was looking a bit concerned. The patient was as white as a sheet and not talking. We were all worried that he was going to die while in the shop, so we quickly loaded him into our chair and removed him to the ambulance.

While trying to do this, every other user of the betting shop continued around us without batting an eyelid. Normally we’d get a bit of an audience, but not so in this case. At one point a man ‘tutted’ me because I was standing between him and some vitally important bit of paper on the wall.

I’ll leave it to you, dear reader, to guess my reply to that.

As soon as the patient was in the ambulance he started to come round. All of our investigations showed nothing unusual, so we concluded that it was just a ‘simple’ faint. As it was a slightly prolonged one we took him to hospital for a few more tests.

The second job to a betting shop was for a 60-year-old male who was having a critically low blood sugar. He was a diabetic, and when we arrived he was rooted to his stool watching the horses racing on the TV screens. His wife was starting to get frantic at his refusal to talk.

On checking his blood sugar we discovered that it was very low, and this would explain his strange behaviour.

We tried to persuade him to drink a can of coke but he refused so we made the decision to give him an injection of glucagon. This drug, when injected into a muscle, is often good enough to reverse a low blood sugar for a short period of time. The plan was to get his blood sugar high enough for him to come out of his confusion for long enough so that we could get some sugar in him.