Trauma and Testicles

Originally written in January this year

There were TV cameras in Ambulance Control last night! They were filming for the new series of Trauma, which is like Airline with ambulances instead of aeroplanes. Unfortunately, no-one was interested in us lowly call takers and dispatchers — they were filming the HEMS (helicopter ambulance) desk, although the camera did pan around the room once or twice. As you can imagine, everyone kept on finding excuses to run up to the HEMS desk and ask them something in an attempt to get their mugs on TV:

“Hello HEMS, are you on your way to this?”
“No. It’s a five year old with a grazed knee.”

Otherwise, work has been rather quiet these last few days. There is almost a complete absence of drunks; everyone must have drunk themselves dry over the festering season. There is still an influx of old people snuffing it because of the cold, but the control room is full of call takers doing overtime to pay off their festive debts, so these are quite widely spread. Last night, I was averaging fifteen minutes between calls after midnight.

Some ambulance funnies:

  • “Help! My friend’s taken an overdose of marzipan!” (I suspect she meant temazepam, but the idea of someone overdosing on cake and having call an ambulance was too funny).
  • “My two-year-old is vomiting like The Exorcist!”
  • [From a 'suicidal' psychiatric patient] “The ambulance came earlier, but they wouldn’t let me take my alcohol in the ambulance with me, so I refused to go. I’ve finished the bottle now, so can I have another ambulance?”
  • A foreign man rang to report that he had cut himself shaving. I quickly established that the area of injury was not his face, however, he seemed to be a little coy about naming the exact area. After a while spend with me proferring various body parts as possible culprits (including “penis” and “pubic hair”), the penny dropped that the man did not know the English word for the offending body part. He described it as follows: “Is for sex, there is two and they is round”. This caused me to exclaim “Oh, testicles!!” gleefully in rather too loud a voice.

    • Published Aug 27, 2005 -

    5 Comments on “Trauma and Testicles”
    1. Craig D Says:
      August 27th, 2005 at 2:27 pm

      Brilliant :-D

      Did your cry of “Oh, testicles!!” get you any funny looks from around the room?

      Craig

    2. Mark Myers Says:
      August 27th, 2005 at 3:30 pm

      Nah… people are always shouting out random expletives in there ;)

      Mark

    3. KT Says:
      August 28th, 2005 at 12:39 am

      Why posting you are in wrong order?

      Fab blog by the way. As promised I have added it to the list on Ambulance999.co.uk

      KT

    4. Mark Myers Says:
      August 28th, 2005 at 12:06 pm

      Posting order wrong in am I because I have been going through my old entries in my personal diary and picking out ones that don’t need too much work to make them suitable for public consumption. Once I have put all the old entries up things will start appearing in the right order as they happen kind of thing.

      Glad you like the blog and thanks for adding it to the list!

      Mark

    5. Kirsten Says:
      November 5th, 2005 at 5:12 am

      Yet another funny article about ambulances and the way they’ve been used for public. Brillian any way. :)

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