Nee Naw

Being a glutton for punishment who is seemingly unable to step outside the world of Nee Naws for more than five seconds, I decided to forgo my usual Friday night pastime of drinking myself silly in a local pub, and instead headed south of the river for another night of fun and frolics observing what goes on in Steve’s FRU.

Much to my surprise, we were in for a fairly quiet night. There’s no such thing as a quiet Friday night up in Control — the calls come in thick and fast throughout the night, starting with pissed teenagers in parks, progressing to the kebab related fights at closing time, all the way through to spaced out clubbers collapsing at sunrise after one pill too many. The area where Steve works is relatively posh and civilised, so the crews there get off quite lightly, but I was told this was a quiet night even by their standards. We didn’t see a bone fide drunk all night, and (much to my relief) were not called to a single vomit incident. We were, however, called to:

1) Small Child Fallen Off Bike
The evening had already gotten off to an inauspicious start due to the MDT (computer inside the ambulance which tells you where to go and why) utterly refused to start, and whilst I was trying to get it started with a well-aimed steel toe capped boot, Steve’s phone rang with a call. Cue a lot of scrabbling for map books and pieces of paper.

By the time we arrived at the call, the ambulance had already been there for a few minutes - I guess control had been trying to cancel us, but the cancellation hadn’t come through due to the malfunctioning computer. The crew were helping a dazed and morose seven-year-old into the back of the ambulance. He had a large chunk of skin missing from his forehead, but it had stopped bleeding and there wasn’t much else to do, so we bid the crew farewell and trundled back to station to change to a different car with a working MDT.

2) Don’t Care Home
“Oh god, not that place!” exclaimed Steve as the second call flashed up on the MDT. I looked and read “ALDERMAN COOPER SUNSHINE HOME, 1 POKEY DRIVE, SE29. 74 YEAR OLD FEMALE, SEVERE DIFFICULTY IN BREATHING”. If you’ve been reading this blog, you’ll know that care homes are not my favourite places, and sadly, stepping inside this one did nothing to change that opinion. A harassed-looking carer shoved us in towards the lift, telling us “first floor”.

“Which way when we get there?” asked Steve.

“Dunno,” said the carer.

“Um…” said Steve.

“There’ll be a nurse to meet you,” said the nurse hastily.

There wasn’t, of course. We spent two minutes looking gormless in the hallway and asking various disinterested staff members if they knew anything about an ambulance. They didn’t. Eventually someone appeared and jostled us towards poor old Doris, a frail woman languishing alone in a side room. She really did have severe difficulty in breathing (unlike 90% of people who think they do). Steve and the ambulance crew did her observations, which weren’t very healthy sounding. In particular, her blood oxygen saturation was very low, but picked up rapidly when she was given an oxygen cylinder.

“How long as she been like this?” asked Steve.

“Since she got here, on and off” said the nurse unhelpfully.

“How long has she been here?” asked Steve.

“Dunno,” said the nurse, scrambling around for the patient’s medical records. “Oh, two months.”

“So she’s been like this for two months?!” said Steve incrediously.

“Yes,” said the nurse. “No, I mean… we called the doctor this morning and he said she had a chest infection. He prescribed antibiotics. But she hasn’t got them yet.”

“Why not?” asked Steve. It seemed like the antibiotics were rather urgently needed…

“Because they’re not here,” said the nurse, as if this was any kind of explanation.

Steve and the ambulance crew decided they were wasting their breath, and carted her off to the ambulance.

3) Sick Child
After driving three times around a labyrinthine estate with no names on any of the houses, we were eventually ushered through the window of a ground floor flat towards a one year old boy having a possible sickle cell crisis. Working in a control room, I am not used to such acrobatics, and nearly ripped my trousers in the process.

One look at the child told me he was definitely not having a sickle cell crisis and in fact had what could be described as “a bit of a cold”. Steve poked and prodded the offending child with various instruments to confirm this. At this point, the three-strong training crew from Steve’s station all burst through the window and looked totally non plussed by the scene before them.

“He looked a lot worse earlier,” said the child’s mother apologetically.

So there we were, five green clad ambulance staff, two ambulances and a ton of equipment standing around a child with a runny nose. I despair.

4) Unconscious
It was just getting to 11pm, so I strongly suspected our next call would be alcohol related.

“2 BOXY HOUSE, BIG ROAD, SE30. UNCONSCIOUS MALE, ? BEEN DRINKING”

This came as little surprise. On arrival at Boxy House, we found the door open and a frail old lady cowering behind it.

“He’s in there” she said, motioning towards the lounge.

The patient was lying on the floor beside an old fashioned armchair. He was flat on his back and deathly pale. His eyes and mouth were open, but he wasn’t moving. I saw Steve’s eyebrows go up - he was thinking the same thing as me. Had my rather macabre wish for a suspended been granted.

No. As we got closer, we could see the patient was breathing. He was middle aged, and naked except for a greying vest and a lemon coloured blanket which someone had strategically placed over his genitalia to preserve his modesty.

The old lady - the patient’s mother - told us that the patient was called Jeremy.

“Jeremy, Jeremy, can you hear me?” asked Steve. “Open your eyes, Jeremy.”

No response. Steve poked Jeremy, and he stirred slightly and groaned. Steve set about doing his observations. Jeremy didn’t put up a fight, he lay there flaccidly allowing Steve to poke, prod and attach various instruments to various parts of his anatomy. The observations were all normal, but he still didn’t look like your standard drunk to us. Though his mother said that he drank regularly, there was only one empty wine bottle in the house, he didn’t smell of alcohol and there was no abusiveness or vomit (thank god).

“Can you raise your hands?” asked Steve, checking for any sign of paralysis which might indicate a stroke. To our surprise, Jeremy raised both arms in the air as if trying to envelop Steve in a hug. There was certainly nothing wrong with his movement, but yet he retained this glazed expression and inability to speak.

Having established that the problem was nothing immediately life threatening, the crew picked up Jeremy and bundled him into a carry chair. Unfortunately this dislodged the lemon yellow blanket and I got to see rather more than I bargained for. The cause of Jeremy’s collapse remains a mystery.

5) Road Traffic Accident

“Ooh, an RTA!” exclaimed Steve as the MDT rang. “Flipping heck! In E20?! They’re having a laugh!”

The call was four and a half miles away, the other side of the Thames, and we had eight minutes to get there. I made sure my seatbelt was done up and braced myself for a white knuckle ride.

Seven and a half minutes later, we pulled out outside the Queen Victoria pub in Albert Square. The ambulance was already there, parked next to an awkwardly angled car and a pool of blood. Steve and I jumped on board.

“This is James,” the ambulance crew told us. “Hit by a car at 30 miles a hour, bullseyed the windscreen. He’s got quite a bad head injury.”

James was laid out on the trolley bed with his neck in a brace. He didn’t seem very impressed with the inside of the ambulance. He kept telling the crew to “get off” and “go away” and other less printable phrases of similar meaning. It was difficult to tell if his belligerence was due to the alcohol he had obviously been consuming or his head injury. Steve cut his trousers off to see if he had any other injuries (he didn’t seem very pleased about that, either) but his body was unharmed except for a graze on one elbow - it seemed that his head had taken all the force.

We didn’t hang around long and soon headed off to A+E on blue lights. Steve and I followed behind in the FRU.

At Walford General A+E, they took James through to the resus room. He was getting increasingly agigated and thrashing around on the bed, trying to make his escape.

“It’s a bit of an overreaction, isn’t it?” he bellowed. “I’m not even hurt! Get these blocks off my head!” He sat up and for the first time I saw the extent of his head injury. Most of the skin was missing from the back of his head, there was a huge flap of hairy flesh hanging off and a river of blood dripping on to the bed. The ambulance crew helped keep James still whilst the hospital staff bandaged his head and got a line into his arm. James seemed to calm down a little after that, so we bade the hospital farewell and got back on the road.

6) Fight

This call had come through from the police. Police calls tend to be rather sparse in information; this one just said “Two males with head injuries”. Seeing police cars on the road, we pulled up to see two men in their twenties smoking cigarettes and talking to the police. Both were covered with bruises. One was looking morose and not speaking. He had a huge gash on one eyebrow. The other was talking animatedly, a bit like Vicky Pollard in Little Britain, to a frustrated looking policeman.

“And then I said, Phil, look, there’s a guy over there, picking on a girl. Isn’t that right, Phil? It’s not on to pick on girls if you’re a guy, is it? So we went over, by that car over there, they were, and I said, listen mate, leave her alone. It’s not on, is it? And he said, like, f*** off, it’s none of your business. So I went up to him, and I said, and he said, and then he punched me, so I grabbed him by the neck, and I hit him proper hard, and then suddenly three of his mates appeared from nowhere, and they grabbed sticks and bottles, right, and there was at least five of them, and then this Asian guy in a green t-shirt, he grabs Phil, and knocks him to the ground, and - Phil, mate, I’m sorry to tell you this - but you were flat out man, and he was kicking you and kicking you and then he bashed you over the head with the bit of wood and I thought you were a goner, mate. I thought they’d kill us! Ten of them, there were! But you know, man” - here he paused to pat Phil on the back - “I don’t regret what we did, because I know we acted with honour and our consciences are clear. Isn’t that right, Phil?”

Phil said nothing and rolled his eyes. Finally being able to get a word in edgeways, Steve started to examine Phil and Jim.

“Nasty gash you’ve got here…” he began.

“Oh yes,” piped up Jim. “I think he’ll need stitching. Will this need stitching? I think I’ve dislocated my shoulder too!”

At this point, he waved the “dislocated” shoulder around for emphasis, proving that he had done nothing of the sort.

“Phil,” asked Steve. “Have you had any vomiting, dizziness, double vision…”

“It’s okay!” said Jim. “He doesn’t have any brain damage!”

Steve and I started to give up at this point, as Jim was evidently determined to take on the jobs of the police and ambulance services. We watched as he commanded the police to interview every man who walked down the street (Jim: “There he is! The Asian guy in the green shirt!” Police: “Er, that’s a black guy in a red shirt. Are you sure?”)

I got the impression that a) this was neither the first nor the last time this sort of thing had happened b) Jim was actually quite pleased that he had been beaten up and was enjoying the attention and drama c) Phil was going to get very very sick of recanting this story in the near future.

After what seemed like an eternity, the ambulance turned up and took Phil and Jim off to hospital for stitching.

For the rest of the night, nothing happened and I got some well earned sleep on the sofa of the ambulance station.