Tom Reynolds - The Complete Blood, Sweat and Tea

Oh, and the baby is a hermaphrodite.

There are jobs that you can recount around a dinner table (or at the pub) when people ask you what your job is like. This is one of those jobs, although for some reason people seem to prefer hearing about me being injured by little old ladies.

Holy Joe’s

The London Ambulance Service doesn’t just deal with emergency calls to people’s houses, we also do hospital transfers – patients who go from hospital to hospital because the original hospital hasn’t the expertise to deal with that person’s medical problems. An example of this would be the transfer I recently did from Newham to the Royal London because Newham’s CT scanner was broken, and the patient needed an emergency scan.

One of the regular places that we find ourselves transferring people to is St Joseph’s Hospice, or as we call it Holy Joe’s. Sometimes we will be picking up patients from one of the nearby hospitals, sometimes from the patient’s own home. Its one of those jobs most of us don’t mind doing. The patients are, by definition of needing hospice treatment, actually sick, and we are not so hard-hearted that we would begrudge an ambulance to someone who is ill. Then there is Holy Joe’s itself …

Holy Joe’s is a religious place, it used to be run by nuns, but now they are a bit few and far between. To be honest, I saw my first nun there yesterday, and she was picking her nose … But, you walk into the place and it just seems nice, it is clean, the staff are all friendly, the patients all seem happy and there is a really good social atmosphere there. I don’t know if it is because of its ties to the religious orders (I hate all religions, but the best nursing homes always seem to have nuns running the place), but the hospice just seems to exude calm.

My crewmate and I had just transferred a terminally ill patient into Holy Joe’s and were having a cup of tea in their tea bar (hot drinks are free to the LAS – another reason to love Holy Joe’s). Sitting in this clean, comfortable area, we were watching the patients chat with relatives, staff and other patients, giving the place a real friendly atmosphere quite unlike anywhere in the NHS. It is very rare to see a doctor sitting down with a patient, chatting about nothing in particular and having a cup of tea with them. We both agreed that this has got to be one of the better places to see out the end of your days, and that it is a real shame that there are not more places like this.

It is a shame that in this increasingly ‘technical/evidence-based/audit/professional development/governmental targets’ style of health service, we seem to have forgotten that sometimes we simply, and honestly, need to care.

I went back there for the first time in 18 months. It’s even better now. I’m thinking that the NHS should poach the board of directors and point them at some of our local hospitals.

Assaulted and Happy About It

I got assaulted yesterday, which made me smile …

We got called to ‘Male collapsed outside park’, which immediately set my ‘drunk-o-detector’ bleeping. This is the sort of call that is nine times out of ten a drunk who has decided to have a sleep in a public place as opposed to going home. In a case like this we tend to wake them up, and get them to move on before another ‘good Samaritan’ calls us out again.

We woke him up, so he stood up and started moaning that we had woken him up. Both my crewmate and myself were actually being quite nice towards him – mainly because it was towards the end of our shift and being nasty to people takes energy that we just didn’t have. Then he decided to take a swing at my crewmate, then he decided to have a swing at me … the next thing that I knew I had him in an armlock up against the side of the ambulance. My mate called on the radio for urgent police assistance, and the radio controller asked if we were both alright, to which my crewmate replied ‘I’m alright, but my crewmate is restraining him’.

The police were quick to turn up, and I had just enough time to tell them that he was drunk and had taken a swing at us before he was under arrest and carted off to the local police station. It was then I realised that in the struggle I’d managed to hit myself in the chest, right where I’ve got a broken rib. It was a bit painful. It had already gotten a whack from a heavy trolley yesterday, so I’m wondering if it will ever manage to heal.

I can tell you what went through my mind as I was pinning him to the ambulance: the first thing was ‘Oops, I hope I haven’t over-reacted’, the next thought (about 5 seconds later) was, ‘By the time I return to station and fill in the “incident form” my shift will be over … Result!’ I’d imagined that, going by the speed that the police arrested him, they were close to the end of their shift as well.

I’m just waiting for a Team Leader to read the incident form and call me into the office to ask if I need counselling …

A police friend of mine emailed me a couple of months later telling me that he had been in court providing evidence and the case before his was of a drunk assaulting an ambulance person. After a further description I could tell him that it was me who’d been assaulted. The drunk was found guilty, but had no penalty to pay as he was homeless. It would only have bothered me if he had actually connected with his punch.

Dead Babies

One of the jobs that we find ourselves going on (perhaps once or twice a day) is that of vaginal bleeding, in a woman who is around 8 weeks pregnant. This invariably turns out to be a miscarriage. Unfortunately, it is normal for the body to ‘reject’ a foetus that has no chance of developing into a full-term baby. I would suppose that this stops a woman from carrying to term an infant that would not survive outside the womb.

While dealing with such patients (some of whom have been trying to get pregnant for some time), I always try to be sympathetic, and explain that what is happening is not anyone’s ‘fault’, and that it is a normal happening.

Because of the number of people we have with this problem, and the rate at which hospitals deal with them (when working in A&E we would have about 12–18 cases of this every day), we have all become a little blasé about it. We feel some sympathy, but deep down in our hearts, we know that there is nothing we can do, and that it is a good thing that this is happening now, rather than in 6 months’ time. Nonetheless, we are worn down by the sheer numbers, and at the end of the day, perhaps we stop caring that these women are losing babies.

I have no intention of getting into the whole abortion argument, I’ve seen them done, don’t like them and would rather have the whole thing stay out of my world view.

I first thought that it was just me, and that as a male I was not best placed to pass comment. However, after having a chat with some female colleagues, it seems that they feel the same way I do, that it is natural, and that it is not worth worrying about. But it worries me a little that I seem to have come to care so little for the dead babies.

GCS 3/15 Outside the Door

There were two interesting jobs today, I’ll tell you about one now and let you wait until tomorrow for the other one.

We got called to the very common ‘Male Drunk – Police on scene’. I’ll not moan about how often we get called to this type of job, you’ve heard it all before …