Tom Reynolds - The Complete Blood, Sweat and Tea

I have my second date with Occupational Health on Friday, for a blood test to make sure that the PEP isn’t battering my liver/kidneys/pancreas and that my white cell count hasn’t lowered. Work have said they’ll do everything they can to supply a vehicle to get me down to south-east London.

I’ve been thinking a bit about the ‘donor’; I wonder how he feels – he’s lying in bed after having a rather frightening collapse in the street, with a broken jaw and the reason for the collapse unknown. Then a couple of days later the medical team ask him to consent to some more blood tests because he may have infected the EMT who helped him out.

If it were me I’d be absolutely mortified.

When I talk to Occupational Health I’ll ask them if they can get a message back to him, letting him know that I’m fine and that I don’t blame him for anything. I know his name and address, but I don’t think it’d be right to turn up on his doorstep to talk to him.

I hope he is alright and that the collapse was something simple – I suspect a ‘TIA’ (transient ischaemic attack), which can be a precursor to a stroke, but with the right medications hopefully the threat of that can be controlled.

I never got to see him again, so he never found out the results of my blood tests. I kind of hope that he gets to read this, so he knows that I’m fine.

Twelve Hours to Go

In 12 hours I will have stopped PEP. Those seven pills are the last ones that I am going to take.

I am extremely happy about this.

It has been a month since my stomach didn’t feel as if I were waiting to vomit, a month since my thought processes have seemed even remotely like mine. A month since I last worked – good grief, am I bored! A month of wondering if my life is about to change for the worst. A month of my mates looking sideways at me when I had to take the pills in front of them (but still friends enough to laugh and joke with me about it). A month of having to get out of bed to eat breakfast, because the pills need food in my stomach. A month without shaving (why bother, I’m not allowed to have sex!). A month of feeling just the tiniest bit isolated. A month of people who I have never met, from places around the globe I have never seen, wishing me well. A month of always feeling grateful to those people, for this is the kindness of strangers – in itself a random act of reality.

All over now.

In two months I get to go for my HIV test, which should be fun and giggles.

But for now – I’m happy.

I really think that if it wasn’t for my blogging and the support of my friends around the globe I’d have gone mad from boredom. My next book should be Blogging as a Mental Health Exercise.

Proper Day

My first ‘proper’ day back at work, working with my new crewmate on a proper ambulance.

The first job was a 66-year-old male who had been fixing tiles on his shed roof and had fallen off the ladder, probably around 10 feet. He was shut behind his front door and all I could hear through his letterbox was ‘I’ve broken my leg’.

The police are much better than me at getting into locked premises (the last time I tried I fell on my arse in front of a crowd of 20 people) so we waited for them to arrive and use their specialised equipment (screwdriver/size 12 boot) to force open the door.

Gaining access to our customer it was pretty obvious that he had fractured his femur (thighbone) as it had a new bendy section just above the knee. The pulse was good in his foot and he didn’t complain of pain anywhere else in his body. This brave man had crawled, with this fracture, from his garden through his kitchen to the living room where he kept his phone. All throughout our treatment he didn’t complain once. We splinted his leg and ‘collared and boarded’ him from the house (a fall of 10 feet can easily break your neck, and the pain from his leg could easily distract him from a neck injury). We could have set traction on his leg, but we were only 5 minutes from the hospital; so we ‘blued’ him into Newham General Hospital, where he was ‘attacked’ by the local trauma team.

The next job we got was a dinner lady at a local primary school who had dropped a knife on her foot. There was a tiny cut to the foot, and after cleaning, dressing and checking her tetanus status we left her at work. What depressed us was that there were no scraps of food left we could have.

Driving back from the last job we saw four workmen chasing another man who ducked into the local mosque. We ignored this until we got a call to the area the men had run from – apparently a man had been assaulted with a ‘Car-lock’. HEMS (our emergency helicopter service) had been activated and were going to make their way to the scene. When we did a quick U-turn and rolled up to the scene it soon became obvious that HEMS was not needed so we cancelled them. The man had been clamping an illegally parked car when the owner and his wife returned. The car owner then pulled a large aerosol can from his boot and hit our patient around the back of the neck, causing a short period of unconsciousness. His wife had also put up a fight, but the owner of the car had run (into the aforementioned mosque) leaving his wife behind. (What a gent!) At one point we thought it was going to turn into a riot as 30 youths from the mosque were adamant that the four workmen doing the chasing weren’t going to set foot in the mosque.

Again, we had to collar and board him, and lift him onto our stretcher, which wasn’t much fun as the man weighed at least 20 stone. Subsequent treatment at hospital showed no serious injuries.

Final job (after having to get our nice, new, shiny ambulance fixed – a problem with the side-door) was a 60-year-old female collapsed at a bus station with slurred speech and ‘not drunk’. Remember that, ‘not drunk’, it’s important.

What could it be? Could it be a stroke? Could it be hypoglycaemia? Could it be cardiac related? So we turned up to find ‘Mary’ having fallen over, smelling strongly of alcohol and with a 5/6ths empty bottle of whisky in her purse. (My crewmate had to tell me about the smell of alcohol, as I’ve mentioned before, I’m pretty much unable to smell it myself.)

‘Not drunk’ – why did the callmaker say that? It’s bloody obvious she was pissed as a fart. I’d guess it was the bus station staff who wanted her gone and were afraid we wouldn’t turn up if we knew she was drunk. Still, it was an easy last job of the shift, even if she did keep grabbing at my balls and kissing my (thankfully) gloved hand.

This counts as a good day.

Now I’m off for some endorphin-releasing Bailey’s ice-cream.

Can you tell I was deliriously happy to be back at work?

These Boots …

These Boots …

Have walked along train tracks

Have been washed in the blood of murder victims

Have kicked in doors to get to unconscious women

Have stepped in more urine, in more tower blocks, than I’d care to think about

Have kept my feet warm and comfortable on long nights

Have been allowed into a mosque

Have climbed fences to reach dead bodies

Have run across football fields to try to save a life, and failed

Have been spat on, vomited on and shat on

Have stood in ‘remains’

Have tried to find purchase while walking backward down narrow stairs

Have defended me from drunks and druggies

Have been run over by a 22-stone trolley

Have been stared at by a daughter when I was telling her her mother had died

For Pixeldiva who denies she has a shoe fetish.

Gamma GT