So, what feels like several years ago now, I was invited to come out and see how the other half live, doing a day turn on an ambulance not far from my home in East London. The crew who were kind enough to take me aren’t bloggers, so I shall have to invent pseudonyms for them. I shall call them Ant and Dec. I was expecting this to be rather different from my last shift out with Steve, where the most exciting thing that happened was the football on the telly, and I wasn’t wrong. Steve works in a fairly posh suburban area where all (well, most) of the callers are polite and the calls are genuine. There’s no such thing as quiet in the ambulance service, but it’s certainly quieter. The area where Ant and Dec work — I’ll call it Callsville — in contrast, is a hot bed of activity. When we see a call coming in from Callsville we just know half the time it’s going to be a difficult one — someone shouting at us in a foreign language, demanding an ambulance but refusing an interpreter, and after half an hour we find out the ailment in question is toothache. The map of Callsville is always peppered with the triangular dots which represent outstanding calls, and us dispatchers know the road names up there by heart.
As I expected, our shift hadn’t even started when Control rang asking us to take an early job for an asthma attack. As they had me on board, Ant and Dec kindly offered up for it, and off we went. The first thing I noticed was the inferior standard of driving in the area. I know this is the pot calling the kettle black (my usual reaction to seeing an emergency vehicle is to panic, flap my hands and stall the car) but this was ridiculous — people cutting in front of the ambulance, tooting at it to get out of the way and generally acting like it wasn’t there. We got to the asthma attack, which was actually more like an asthmatic with a cough, and took her to Callsville Hospital. This hospital has rather a bad reputation; callers often ring up and say “you’re not going to take me to Callsville, are you?” The staff there were very nice, but the A+E department was very small and in need of a lick of paint. The cubicles, obviously meant for one patient, had been divided into two with a curtain meaning the patients were practically on top of each other.
Back in the ambulance, it was straight on to another job. A Category A maternity! I was momentarily excited as I envisaged delivering a baby in person. My excitement because trepidation as I approached the house and heard loud screaming, but on closer inspection this seemed to be coming from a small child. The mother-to-be was sitting on the sofa fully dressed in no obvious discomfort. We took her to the hospital, the most taxing part being persuading the aforementioned screaming child to board the ambulance, and waited whilst Callsville’s two maternity departments argued about who would take her.
Next were two seemingly identical calls to patients with “abdominal pain and near fainting” which turned out not to be identical at all. The first was a grown man who was crying and writhing around in agony. Dec had to give him morphine before we could go anywhere. He was later diagnosed with gallstones. The second was a young woman who just appeared to have a bit of stomachache and really should have been given a paracetamol and sent to bed. This was very interesting to me - abdominal pain calls are usually low priority (abdo pain is rarely serious or life threatening and when it is, it comes with other symptoms) and in control, we are taught to ignore how painful an ailment is and concentrate on how likely it is to be life threatening. It’s only when you see it in real life that you realise what it is really like to be in that severe pain.
We were just on our way to a very boring sounding green call when Control radioed for someone to go to a Multiple Fitting call in a school 5 miles away. I suggested we offer up for it.
“They’ll never let us, it’s miles away!” said Ant.
“Bet they do,” I said, and I was right. Eight minutes later, and a nausea inducing sprint down the dual carriage at breakneck speed, we were there. I huffed and puffed my way across the school grounds and up a flight of stairs carrying a carrychair and a blanket, and was ushered into the room where the patient was…
She sat up and smiled at us. Still, all’s well that ends well.
The local hospital was now the Royal London (there is no point changing the name!) so we dropped the patient off there and went for a wander around. Dec saw Martin from Trauma in the corridor (I missed him, damnit) and I got to see HEMS taking off. Ant was going to take me up to the helipad to meet the HEMS team and see the copter, but someone very inconsiderately decided to have a major accident the other side of London, and they all disappeared.
The next call was in another school, and was to a very morose eight-year-old who’d had a fall ice skating and bumped his head. He seemed to be fine but it is best to get head injuries checked out in hospital. Ant and Dec had limited success trying to explain this to the child’s father, who was taking the attitude “if it doesn’t hurt, he must be fine”. In the end they had to use all their persuasive wiles to charm them into the ambulance. I tried to get the solemn looking kid to cheer up by showing him the ambulance and telling him he was very lucky to get a ride in our special ambulance. This made him cry! When I was his age I would have jumped for a chance to ride in an ambulance. I would probably have got injured deliberately if I’d thought of it. Ant said that I was probably one of those attention seeking children at school. I don’t know what he meant by that.
After Miserable Sprog had been delivered to Callsville Hospital, Control decided to put us on a break. I told Ant and Dec to take a scenic route back to station or go off the road with a dirty uniform, but Control weren’t having any of it. Beaten at my own game!
After a false start chasing after an assault victim who decided not to bother waiting for the ambulance, there was just time for one last call. This was to a woman who had everything in the world wrong with her. Her daughter had called because she’d had some unfortunate accident with a falling pole landing on her head, but Ant and Dec were more concerned with the slight chest pains she was having. They got her in the back of the ambulance and did a 12-lead ECG, which showed she wasn’t having a heart attack, but treated her with aspirin and GTN anyway. We took her to hospital. Ant and Dec argued half the way there about whether she should be blued in. In the end, they decided not to, which was very disappointing from my point of view as I would have been the one making the blue call.
After that, our twelve hours were up and it was home for a well earned rest. I was even more knackered than after my usual twelve hour stints in Control. It was a very interesting day and I learned lots of stuff (mainly about why crews hate break) and though I was slightly disappointed that there was no gory trauma or blue calls, I certainly got to see the whole spectrum. I’m still waiting to see a suspended so I will be out observing again soon — but I fear that five observing shifts without a Vomit Incident is starting to push my luck. I might go to the next one wearing a rubber apron!
