Nee Naw

A few weeks ago, I went on an observation shift with Steve and his crewmate. We had a touch of Observer’s Curse - only four jobs over the whole shift, about half what I’d expect for a busy station like theirs - but all the calls were interesting in their own way and I’d rather see four “real” calls than eight cases of flu!

There was also a rather amusing incident when we took our rest break at another ambulance station, and all the crews at that station, not knowing who I was or even that I wasn’t just another paramedic/EMT, decided to launch into a diatribe about how much they hate control staff, how evil we all are and how all we care about is screwing them over and giving them rest breaks. I covered my “Emergency Medical Dispatcher” epaulettes and sank into my seat. I now know how it feels to be a mouse in a room full of cats. All I can say is that if the offending crews were on my sector, I’d have them attending every projectile vomiting call I could get my hands on for the next week!!

Anyway, on with the four calls. I don’t have time to write about them all at once so each will get a separate entry. Just to keep you on tenterhooks, the last one is the most exciting!

The first call of the day was to an elderly female on the floor. In Control terms, this is about as simple as you can get - it is non life threatening, so you do not have to bust a gut getting someone there, but it is also a valid call, so as soon as someone is available, off they go. But I was about to discover that something simple for us is not so simple for an ambulance crew.

Elaine, aged 80, has lived alone her house since the death of her husband. Her younger friend, Sandra, comes to visit every day and helps out with the shopping. She also has meals on wheels and a home help. Despite having arthritis, bilateral knee replacements, heart trouble, mild confusion and depression, she gets by. On this bitterly cold morning, she was getting out her electric fire and, carrying it to her bedside, slipped over. She felt awkwardly against the bed and an agonising pain shot through her right leg.

Luckily, Elaine had fallen by the phone so she was quick to summon help. Not wanting to bother the emergency services so early in the morning, she rang Sandra. Sandra had come straight round but after a quick examination she had realised Elaine had hurt herself badly in the fall and that an ambulance was needed. Enter us.

Elaine was in good spirits and not a lot of pain when we arrived. Her sense of humour was intact, laughing at herself for falling, and she was very apologetic about calling us out. The genuine callers always are. I wondered if it was going to be an “assist only” job, where the crew lift the patient, put her back to bed and make her a cup of tea. However, as Steve straightened Elaine’s legs, I could see clearly that one was shorter than the other and drooping to one side - a clear indicator of a broken hip.

Seeing the concern on our faces, Elaine became worried.

“What is it? What have I done?”

“I’m afraid,” said Steve, “you’ve broken your hip”.

“Oh!” said Elaine, relief coursing across her face. “Is that all?”

I wondered what she thought we were going to say.

Now came the difficult and unpleasant part. With the aid of some Entenox (pain relieving gas), we tried to assist Elaine into the carry chair so we could get her downstairs and into the ambulance. But the slightest movement had her in complete agony. The gas seemed to be making her confused, too, and she forgot what had happened to her and kept yelling out: “What’s happened to me? What could be causing all this pain? I have never felt this uncomfortable in MY ENTIRE LIFE!” She was shaking and turning terribly white. It wasn’t pleasant to watch. As control staff, you are generally distanced to people’s pain. You get all the emotional upset and lurid descriptions of gory events, but the physical pain is something you don’t think about. You tend to think - broken hip - non life threatening - simple without really getting your head around what it is like to have one. Elaine’s agony is something I will remember every time I have a “broken hip” call waiting on my screen.

Once we stopped trying to move Elaine, her pain subsided somewhat and she returned to the cheery old lady we’d first encountered and apologised profusely for “being a big baby”. Meanwhile, Steve’s crewmate, who is a paramedic, decided Entenox alone was not enough to get Elaine out of here. It was time to bring in the big guns. He fired up a vial of morphine and injected it into Elaine. Then we sat around a bit and waited for it to work. Sandra conducted some breathing exercises whilst I helped pack up Elaine’s belongings. Eventually, Elaine started going a bit woozy and getting a big grin on her face and we were able to lift her into the carry chair. There was a lot of hollering as we moved her, but this was immediately followed by relief from everyone as we all announced “Well, that’s the worst bit done! Off to the hospital!” It’d taken over an hour to get her into the ambulance.

By now, Elaine was away with the fairies. Steve tried to get her to give a score to her pain. Earlier, she’d given it nine out of ten.

“Oh,” she said, flapping her arms dismissively. “Hardly anything!”

“I need a number,” said Steve.

“Erm, I really don’t know,” said Elaine. “I can’t remember any numbers!”

“Elaine,” smiled Steve. “I’m not taking you anywhere until you give me a number!”

“Um….. sixteen!!!” announced Elaine, and broke into fits of giggles. Steve gave up at this point and we went off to the hospital.

I am sure Elaine will be fine although it is clear her bones aren’t what they used to be and perhaps she will have to give up living in a two-storey house by herself. It is sad that such a lovely person who is so cheerful and friendly and has clearly lived such a full and rich life has ended up being let down by her own body and even sadder to think that whatever I achieve with my life more or less the same will happen to me. I shall never look at “old woman on the floor” as just a simple, boring call again.

Right folks, this blog is back in business! And what better way to get things started but with my favourite topic, a rant about care homes?

The call went something like this:

Me: “Nee Naw Service, what is the address of the emergency?”

Care home worker gives an address which is not the address the phone is registered to. This is not unusual for care homes as they sometimes go via a switchboard. But I can’t get a match for the address she gives me. Computer says no. Computer says address does not exist. I try to get her to spell it, but she just keeps repeating the address. Then she gasps, and says “No, actually, it’s…” and gives me the address the phone is registered to which has been sitting in front of me all along. Great. Several minutes wasted.

Me: “What’s the problem?”

Care home worker: “She’s dying!”

I type “dying” into the computer and a similar uphill struggle ensues whilst I try to get this woman to explain what she means by “dying”. Unfortunately, it seems like suddenly “dying” is the only word she knows and that if she repeats it to me over and over again, all will become clear. It doesn’t. After all, someone with terminal cancer is dying. Someone who has just had their jugular slit is dying. A lot of the patients who ring with stomach ache *think* they are dying. If you want to be philosophical about it, we are all dying! The ambulance is halfway there by the time I manage to establish that the patient has actually stopped breathing. Not so much dying as dead then. But not necessarily irreversibly dead, if this has just happened. I press on with getting CPR started.

Me: Does anyone there know how to do CPR?

Her: Yes

Me: Have they started?

Her: No

Me: Are you right next to her now?

Her: Yes

Me: Right, get her flat on her back on the floor, remove any pillows and kneel next to her and look in her mouth for food or vomit.

Her: (instantly) Okay.

Me: Do that now.

Her: (instantly) Okay.

I can still hear her breathing at the other end of the phone so I know she hasn’t done it. We have to be very careful about calling the callers liars so I just press on with the next line - “Is there anything in the mouth?” thinking that she won’t be able to answer the question until she does it.

Me: Is there anything in the mouth?

Her: I don’t know.

Me: Have you looked?

Her: No. I am in the next room, I can’t see her.

Me: (Thinks: But you said you were with her! And you just said you were doing the instructions, you great big liar! Do you think I am telling you to do these things for fun?) Okay, go and do it now. Come straight back to the phone and tell me what you find.

Line goes silent. Caller goes away. Caller doesn’t come back. Five minutes pass. Two ambulances and a FRU approach scene, lights blaring. Caller still does not return to phone.

The FRU is a minute away by the time she gets back.

Her: “Cancel the ambulance! She’s fine! I put her on the floor and she complained and told me to get off her. I must have been mistaken! She was just asleep.”

Strictly speaking, ambulance service procedure is that if the caller says “cancel the ambulance”, we cancel the ambulance. However, there are exceptions to this rule and I decided that this was definitely occasion to make one. I had absolutely no trust in this care home worker who didn’t know her own address, could not answer a simple question and who appeared to have great difficulty in telling whether her patients were alive or dead. I noted what had been said on the ticket (since really it is the dispatch desks who should be making decisions such as sending an ambulance even when the caller says one isn’t needed) but finished the ticket as a complete call, rather than one which had been cancelled midway. Dispatch evidently agreed with me, and none of the ambulances were cancelled.

I kept an eye on the ticket, and nearly an hour later, one of the ambulances was off to hospital with the patient on board. Next, what should appear on the ticket, but blue call details! That means that the patient is in a very serious life threatening condition. The crew had established that she had actually had a seizure of unknown cause and now had a very rapid pulse, very low blood pressure and a GCS of 11 (ie. semi conscious). (Medical types - any idea what was wrong? All the other obs were normal and there was no mention of an ECG).

So, in summary, due to this “care” home’s incompetence, there was a delay of minutes reaching this critically ill lady, CPR was almost performed on her whilst she was still alive (which would have given her broken ribs to add to her problems) and she was almost denied medical aid at all because the care home went from thinking she was dead to thinking nothing was wrong in the space of five minutes!

And this is why no member of my family will end up in a care home, even if I have to move in and look after them myself. I appreciate there are a lot of care homes that aren’t like this, and plenty of care home workers who are caring and skilled, but incidents like this are far too common for me to ever take the risk.

As you’ve probably noticed, I haven’t updated this blog for a while. This is for a number of reasons: low morale in the control room (the powers that be have been messing with our rotas, overtime and the structure of the control room, and it would be difficult for me to post without going into a rant about it, which is not what I started this blog for!), general difficult personal circumstances that I won’t go into, the fact that I have just moved house and don’t have a computer desk which makes typing rather awkward, annoyance at hackers, spammers and rude colleagues commenting on my posts and not having the time to constantly check for inappropriate comments that need deleting. I will pick up in the future but right now I cannot give you the entertaining posts that you deserve! Thank you all for reading and hope to see you back in a couple of months.

This week is Relief Week, which means I get to work on other desks. Yesterday, I found myself on the South West desk. The South West is where Steve works, and as I rang his station, I wondered if he was working today.

On my tea break, I checked my phone, and there was a message from Steve. “Listening to you on channel 4! I’m on the FRU, SW500.” I promised I’d keep an eye open for any interesting calls for him!

Back in the room, there was a buzz on my radio.

“Red base, SW500 on channel 4?” said a familiar voice.

“Go ahead, SW500, over.”

“I’ve just been sent on cad 590, an amber* to a woman who has had… vaginal pain… for two weeks. I don’t suppose I could be cancelled?”

I checked that we had a vehicle on the call and asked the FRU desk to cancel Steve. Unfortunately, our vehicle got diverted to a higher priority call, but on close inspection of the diagnosis they decided to cancel him anyway. FRU desk were slightly confused as to why their FRU wanted to speak to me and not them. I didn’t see fit to explain!

Several hours later, my stint on the South West was over and I went downstairs to take some calls. I texted Steve to say I was no longer on his sector, and got the reply “Good luck with the call taking. Try and get me something interesting, like a suspended.” I assured him that if I got any calls in his area, I’d personally get the callers to kill the patients to give his some decent jobs, so he wouldn’t have to go on any Pain In Vaginas.

I should know better than to say things like this, of course.

Fast forward four hours, and a call comes in in South West London. A man is in a state of mild panic. As the operator connects the call, he’s saying something about “not breathing”, so I know straight away what it’s going to be. As I speak to him, he explains that his mother, who is a cancer patient, has just this second stopped breathing. His wife is doing CPR, but she’s not sure she’s doing it right - can I help them whilst the ambulance is coming?

Life is so much easier when people actually want your help and don’t just scream “send the ambulance!” at you. The first step was to get the patient on the floor so there is a good firm surface for CPR.

“I can’t, she’s got cancer, she’s very frail, it’ll hurt her… I mean -” started the son, clearly realising the ridiculousness of what he was saying mid sentence. “Okay, I’ll have a go.”

Unfortunately after about thirty seconds of trying, it became clear that even between the two of them, they weren’t going to budge her. From what he’d already said, my gut feeling was that this was not going to be a successful resus, and that the emphasis should shift from “saving a life” to “making the family feel they did everything they could whilst maintaining as much of the patient’s dignity as possible”. So I pressed on with the rest of the CPR instructions, with the son and his wife taking turns, and me issuing encouragement into the room via the phone’s loudspeaker.

All was going smoothly, which gave me time to check on the progress of the ambulance. You’ve probably guessed this by now. On the log, I saw a very familiar callsign had been dispatched. Steve! It wasn’t his immediate area, which made it even more of a coincidence. I began to feel very guilty about our earlier conversation, as if I had wished this to happen! Like I had killed the patient myself. Suffice to say that is the last time I ever promise anyone a suspended, even in jest!

My thoughts were interrupted by a second female entering the room and starting to scream. The son then promptly broke down in tears, and the wife, who had been the rock of the situation up till now even started to go a bit wobbly.

Then I heard the sirens approach, and someone else entered the room. I heard that familiar voice again, just as the phone line went dead.

Usually, call takers hear very little of what happened after the crew arrive. We can see if the patient is taken to hospital, and, if there is a blue call, their observations and possibly a diagnosis, but that’s it. I knew I’d get to hear more about this one, though, and so will you - when Steve takes up the story later in his blog. He’s out saving lives at the moment, but I’ll add a link once he has written it…

Edit Click here for Part 2, Steve’s post.

* Don’t ask me why a woman who has had vaginal pain for two weeks comes up as an amber. The words “AMPDS” and “useless” spring to mind.

Thanks to Reynolds for this link. Well, no thanks really, because it has made me angry and flabbergasted very early in the morning.

The article is about a 77-year-old man who had a fall in a pub. He fractured his skull and sadly died. His family are thinking of suing the ambulance service, because, wait for it, they arrived TOO QUICKLY and therefore did not see all the information given in the 999 call. Have you ever heard anything like it? Perhaps they should have parked on the opposite side of the road and refused to leave the cab until the call was complete? No doubt then someone would be suing because the ambulance took too long to arrive!

A few points:
- The ambulance took four minutes to arrive. On average, 999 calls take 2-3 minutes. So perhaps someone should sue those helpful bystanders for taking too long on the phone! Or maybe the call taker was talking too slowly. Sue him too!
- Even if they didn’t see the full details of the call before they arrived, they would have been available to them when they got back in the cab.
- And why didn’t the bystanders who gave all this helpful information to the call taker stick around to give it to the ambulance crew too?
- The news report states the patient refused to let the ambulance crew touch him or get in the ambulance. Ambulance crews can’t treat anyone who refuses treatment (unless they are under a section of the Mental Health Act). It is against the law, and guess what, can get them sued! The patient has the last say as to whether they are taken to hospital. Maybe the crew would have pushed the issue a bit more if they’d known the patient had been unconscious, but it still would have been up to him. (On occasions, people in life threatening conditions have refused hospital and while the crew do not take leaving them lightly, once they are convinced they are of sound mind and understand what they are doing, they have no option but to leave them.)
- Crews are neither doctors nor psychics. Their job is not to diagnose but to monitor the vital signs and symptoms and keep the patient alive until they reach hospital. If the patient refuses treatment, they can’t do any of that.
- This crew didn’t “just leave the patient to die”. They left him with the police, who would monitor the patient and send for the FME (police doctor) if they had any concerns. It sounds to me like this is exactly what happened.
- The report mentions that one member of the crew was scared of being assaulted, seeming to imply this is a bad thing, and that crews should put the patient’s health above their own safety. Nonsense. Crews are people too and they have every right to put themselves first. Why should they get hurt just doing their job? It’s not just self-preservation either. If a crew is assaulted, they’ll be off the road for the rest of the night, and think how many people will suffer because of that. If they are seriously injured in the assault, they could be off for months. Why risk it?

This has turned into a bit of a rant and I hope it does not come across as unsympathetic to the family who of course are in shock at the loss of their relative and probably not thinking straight and looking for someone to blame. On the other hand, I can’t help feeling sad and angry when someone turns on the very people who were trying to help in this way. Sometimes, people die and it is a tragic accident but it is not anyone’s fault. All that needs to be said to the ambulance crew is “thank you, I know you did all you could.”

Also, grammar pedant’s note… did anyone notice that this report has my worst ever pet hate in it? It’s not LAYING ON THE GROUND, it’s LYING!!! What was he laying? An egg? Urgh!

Our regular callers are a funny lot. There are nice ones, nasty ones and downright annoying ones, like Mrs Haddock, an elderly woman with Parkinson’s disease, who calls every night without fail, claiming to be on the floor when really she wants the nice ambulance crew to change the TV channel for her. Legend has it that when one ambulance crew refused, she tried to attack them with her walking stick!

Probably the second most frequent caller on our sector, after Mrs Haddock, is Jimmy. Jimmy is 26 years old, a psychiatric patient and an alcoholic. His address is tagged on our computer system, and the warning reads something like this. “Jimmy Smirnoff, alcoholic, psychiatric, can be violent and unpredictable, self-harm, injects self with disinfectant and bleach, carries knives. Send police.” Jimmy sounds like the sort of person you wouldn’t want to meet on a dark night, right? Well, in actual fact, Jimmy is one of the nicest, politest callers you’re ever likely to speak to. He’s well spoken, intelligent and somehow has retained his sense of humour throughout the hundreds of suicide attempts. I’ve spoken to him many times, both as a call taker and on the dispatch desk. Sometimes when he calls, he’s overdosed or self harmed again. Sometimes, he’s in pain because of his previous attempts. He likes the call taker to stay on line until the police and ambulance arrives, and when he called a couple of weeks ago when I was call taking, I was happy to do so. Much nicer to have ten minutes of Jimmy than umpteen rude and ungrateful members of the public! Jimmy says he likes talking to us because we’re always nice to him. (I sometimes wonder if we should be LESS nice, so then he wouldn’t want to call us, and wouldn’t self harm. If only it were that simple!) Apparently he enters the lottery every week and if he wins, he’s going to give the money to the staff of Nee Naw Control so “you can stop working in that awful place and stop having to spend all night talking to idiots like me”. He doesn’t want the money for himself, because it can’t buy him the one thing he really wants - friends. He says we’re nice to him because we can’t see what he looks like. With a wry laugh, Jimmy tells me he looks like Frankenstein’s Monster. The alcoholism has caused his teeth to rot to stumps. His arms are gnarled from all the injecting and cutting. His neck is the same, because he’s tried to slit his throat countless times. Jimmy doesn’t know if he really wants to die or not. He just wants the pain to end, but every time he attempts suicide, he’s straight on the phone to us, telling us he’s “been stupid again”. Once, he told me, he went too far and ended up in intensive care for a week. The doctors said he was going to die and his family had all come to say their goodbyes. But somehow Jimmy had pulled through, albeit with massive liver damage. Jimmy was told that if he carried on drinking, he wouldn’t live to see his 26th birthday. He’d tried really hard to stop. He’d cut down from two large bottles of vodka a day (a day!) to one small one. His 26th birthday was last week. I said to Jimmy that perhaps the fact that he’d survived all the suicide attempts and the drinking against the odds was a sign, and maybe he really wanted to live and was meant to live. And then there was a knock at the door, and the police and ambulance took him off to hospital.

I hoped that maybe we’d hear the last of Jimmy, that he’d reached a turning point, that the suicide attempts would stop and he’d get on the road to recovery and start making the friends he craves.

A week later, Jimmy was back on the phone. Another overdose, another conversation with another call taker. Nothing solved.

Now I’m starting to think the only way we’re going to hear the last of Jimmy is when we get a call to him in cardiac arrest. So now when I see a call to his address pop up on my screen, I don’t think “oh dear, not again” any more. I just feel relieved that he is still alive.

If you’re at a loose end, I strongly recommend you have a read of Siren Voices, a new blog by an Emergency Medical Technician. I know there’s a lot of ambulance blogs out there now, and I do enjoy reading all of them, but I think this one is something special. Go and have a read!

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On a less cheerful note, there has been a spate of comments on my blog recently from a disgruntled colleague who seems to think that I make up tales to “spice up” this blog. This simply isn’t true. I change details to protect patient (and colleague) confidentiality, but that’s it. As for background information, I use reliable sources like the BBC and the LAS website. If ever there is an error in anything I have written, it was made in good faith and not to “spice up” my writing. Quite frankly, there is enough drama in that control room to last a lifetime without me having to make things up!

In particular, I did take the first call on 7/7. One of my colleagues was featured heavily in the media after 7/7 for her call taking involvement, and that’s because she took four very significant calls that day, and I think this has led to other people thinking that she took the first one. I’m not grumbling that she got more attention than me, because what she did was probably more important, but I don’t like being accused of lying!

The last couple of comments have started to cross the line into abusiveness and I think this is a real shame because us control bods should be sticking together. We get enough abuse from callers without starting to turn on each other. So in future, if anyone spots an error in my posts, or wants to clear up anything I have said, perhaps a private email might be the best way to go, as this is meant to be a Proper Serious Grown Up Blog and not Livejournal. Cheers.

Many of my non-ambulance friends say they don’t like New Year’s Eve. Everywhere’s packed and expensive and you are forced to hug people you don’t like and then make your way home with a bunch of puking drunks. Well, let me tell you that compared with my New Year’s Eve, that sounds like heaven! You people with normal jobs don’t know how lucky you are. A New Year’s Eve of call taking is about as close you can get to hell on earth. However many ambulances you have, however many call takers you have (we had more call takers than telephones), you are never, ever going to cope. There were 1,825 calls between midnight and 4am, and 6,114 for the entire day. (To compare - on an average weekend night, I’d expect about 700 calls between midnight and 4am, and probably about 300 on a weekday.)

Broadly speaking, there were four categories of calls:

1) Alcohol Related Accidents
My mate’s got drunk and got in a fight. My mate’s got drunk and fallen down the stairs. My mate’s got drunk and taken some dodgy pills, and now he’s having a fit. My mate’s got drunk and fallen out of a jacuzzi. My mate’s got drunk and fallen out of a first floor window… It never ends. Some people grumble about these calls, complaining that these injuries are self inflicted and therefore not deserving of our sympathy and help, but I don’t agree with that. It is not like anyone deliberately has an accident and it isn’t against any laws to get drunk, so unless you think people should avoid doing anything fun just in case it ends in an accident, I think these calls are just as deserving as any other. On the other hand, I wish they wouldn’t all happen at once. And I wish I didn’t have to talk to drunk people in order to help with them. As well as the abusive ones, you get a lot that won’t shut up or don’t make any sense. There was one woman slurring so much I had to get her to repeat herself three times and I still couldn’t understand so I had to get her to put someone else on. She wasn’t even the patient!

(The worst thing about the calls is possibly the realisation that if I wasn’t at work, *I* would be one of those drunken fools…)

2. Just Drunken.
“My mate’s had too much to drink and now he’s puking up and staggering around!” Yes, that’s what happens, you idiot. He’s drunk. And if we send you one of our fully equipped emergency vehicles on blue lights, he’ll still be drunk. I realise it’s a bit of a pain watching your mate puke on a street corner because none of the taxis will take him home, but really, do you have to make it our problem? Do you realise you are going to have to spend the next six hours in A+E waiting while the doctor sees the people who are actually ill? Do us all a favour, and ring your mum to pick you up instead. And don’t you dare puke in the back of the ambulance. You do realise that it’s the crews themselves who have to clean them, don’t you?

3. People Who Don’t Know What Day It Is
Maternataxis, broken fingers, bellyaches… they all seemed to think that we’d got a special service running just for them and it would be unaffected by the fact it was New Year. I got a call from a man who’d rung a total of six, count ‘em, minutes ago, whose teenage daughter had backache. It may have been more serious than that, I wouldn’t know, because he’d refused to answer any of the original call taker’s question and hung up on her. He rang back to say he was taking her in the car (so why didn’t he do that in the first place?) because “she could have died in the time you get to get here!” and “your service is ****ing rubbish”. Cheers, mate, so are your manners. Don’t envy the staff who had to put up with that for the next six hours in A+E…

4. People Who Are Genuinely Ill
And of course, it doesn’t stop just because it’s New Year’s Eve. I felt desperately sorry for the old people with breathing problems and heart attacks - and due to the cold weather, there were loads of them - knowing that all the ambulances were out dealing with the drunks and they wouldn’t get a vehicle until one finished up at the hospital. I reckon that if you are struck down with a life threatening illness on New Year’s Eve, you must be one of the most unlucky people alive. Along with those poor suckers who have to work.

Fingers crossed that this is the last New Year that I will EVER have to spend call taking…

Just as everyone is whinging about going back to work, I am finally getting four whole days to myself. I only managed two complete days off between December 21st and today… so I was looking enviously on at everyone else enjoying the post-Christmas and New Year Festivities (more on the latter later) and eagerly looking forward to joining in… only to find it’s too late and everyone is busy taking their trees down! Damnit. Who’d be a shift worker?!

I was hoping for a q-u-i-e-t shift yesterday. It was my last one, and having changed from days to nights and back again in the space of four days, my body clock had packed up and I was half asleep. Still, a chilly Wednesday at the beginning of January - there wouldn’t be much going on, would there?

Wrong.

“Hello, it’s the fire brigade here. We’ve got an eight pump fire going on.”

“Okay. What’s the address?”

“It’s the Royal Marsden Hospital…”

Well, that woke me up.

“The fire’s in the roof. At the moment there’s no casualties, but we’re going to need an ambulance on standby…”

Funnily enough, these words didn’t make me feel any better. It was the exact phrase the fire brigade had used to me at 8.53am on July 7th, 2005, two minutes after bombs killed 52 people and injured 700 others. Don’t ask me why I always get these calls! Perhaps the powers that be should stop putting me on call taking if they want to avoid major incidents.

The Royal Marsden is a medium sized hospital in Fulham, which specialises in cancer treatment. There is no A+E there, but there are operating theatres, wards and outpatient clinics. At the time of the fire, there were around 900 people in the hospital - including around 40 bedridden inpatients and two under general anaesthetic.

The dispatch desk sent the requested ambulance, along with a manager and the HART (Hazardous Area Response Team) vehicles. The manager was quick to report back with what was both good and bad news. The hospital had quickly been evacuated and no one had been hurt. This meant there were now 900 people standing outside on the icy streets, many of whom were seriously ill cancer patients. The doctors and nurses - some just in their surgical scrubs - were busily ferrying them into a nearby church to protect them from the cold. The manager requested another nine ambulances while beds in nearby hospitals were found for the patients. Those patients that could be were sent home, but many were far too ill for that. The ten ambulances spent the afternoon going back and forth, taking patients all over London.

Call taking became a bit hectic after that. Of course, we weren’t getting calls about the fire itself, but being ten ambulances short for an entire afternoon lead to delays, particularly in the west and central areas. As vehicles moved out of their areas to cover, the shortfall was felt all over London. It wasn’t so bad that we had to refuse any calls like we did on 7/7, but response times were definitely slower than you’d expect.

The response of callers was an interesting insight into human nature. I must admit I quite liked having a ‘proper’ answer to the ‘why isn’t the ambulance here NOW?’ type questions. Terribly sorry, but we’re having difficulty finding someone to deal with your bellyache because there’s a hospital full of critically ill cancer patients on fire and we’re out SAVING LIVES like we’re meant to. Not everyone knew about the fire, and some people were incredibly apologetic. One woman, a perpetually drunk regular caller, seemed absolutely mortified when I told her, and was silenced for the first time in her entire life. Others were understanding and offered to make their own way to free up ambulances for the fire. Others, on the other hand, made me sick to the core with their selfishness. “I don’t care about the fire, what about me? You have to get here NOW.” If there was an award for selfishness, there’d be two callers fighting for it. A nurse at another hospital, who was waiting for an ambulance for a routine transfer, so she could go home. And a first aider in a well-known department store, who rang because a child had cut his foot and couldn’t walk properly. Sometimes I feel I am going to lose my temper with these kinds of people. I’m glad I don’t have to do call taking so often these days as I definitely feel I had done my time listening to the stupid and selfish.

Griping about The Public aside, though, I went home with a general sense of relief. It may have been a hectic afternoon but it could have been so much worse. The incident was winding down and all the patients were safe in their new hospitals. The outcome could have been so different.

… I will update my blog more often!

Sorry. I’ve been so busy! At the moment I am in the middle of a hellish block of shifts: Friday, Saturday and Sunday days, Monday night, then Wednesday day! By the end of it I won’t know if I am coming or going. I am gritting my teeth and thinking of the Christmas Attendance Bonus…

A little piece of Christmas cheer for you. Two days before Christmas, we had a call in to a man in his early fifties who, by the sounds of it, was having a heart attack. Just as the crew arrived, he stopped breathing and went into cardiac arrest.

The crew got out their drugs and zappers and whatever else they use on the euphemistically “suspended”, and thirty minutes later, we got the following blue call (well, not quite, I’ve substituted the medical terms for ones everyone can understand!):

“H701, blue to Chase Farm, with a fifty-something year old male, post cardiac arrest. Now has pulse of Very Good, oxygen saturation of Perfect, blood pressure of Not Bad and a GCS of Fully Conscious and Having A Chat With My Crewmate In The Back”.

Hooray for Christmas miracles!