I got to work last night to find my name on the manning for the West Desk, as opposed to my usual comfort zone of Desk Which Covers The Area Which I Live. My initial reaction to this was to turn around and run home again. The West Desk scares me; it is full of strange places where I have never been and had never heard of until I started this job. Like Ruislip and Southall. I’m still not entirely convinced these places exist. Maybe one day I will have to take a day trip there and see them for myself.
I settled myself down behind the radio, propped open my map book, wrote out a list of the sector’s ambulance stations and phone numbers and prayed for a quiet night. Well, just thinking the word ‘quiet’ had the opposite effect. As soon as I sat down, about five lost ambulances came up on the radio asking for directions. I resisted the temptation to say “haven’t a clue, you might as well be in Bulgaria for all I know” and managed to direct them with my trusty map book.
It got stupidly busy for some reason, mainly with maternities and overdoses, but there were two very dramatic suspendeds. One was a thirty-year-old male who had hanged himself, and amazingly the crew managed to get him breathing again from a state of cardiac arrest. The next suspended patient wasn’t so lucky. She was a youngish woman, and her husband was performing CPR until we got there. It wasn’t enough to save her. The crew requested the police as soon as they arrived: she’d taken a heroin overdose and there was a small child on scene.
Next there was a bit of high drama as a house in Kensington exploded. Fortunately there were no casualties, but we did have an ambulance and a manager there the whole night, along with the HART (Hazardous Area Response Team) people (see Beaker’s post for more info about the HART people) . In fact, I think the ambulance and manager are still there now. Not the same ones, obviously, they have to sleep, so we swapped them over at 7am.
Around 5am there was a bad moment when one of the crews rang up feeling very cross about a decision we’d made. Holding two equal priority calls, we’d decided to send them to the first (semi conscious, vomiting old person) whilst getting an FRU to check out the second (old person with abnormal breathing). It turned out the first call was A Load of Rubbish, so the crew then got sent to the second, by which time the FRU had been waiting for over half an hour and had determined that the second patient was Actually Very Ill. Unfortunately, with the benefit of hindsight, it’s easy to say that this was the wrong decision, but at the time we thought we were doing the right thing. Often “vomiting, semiconscious” people turn out to be having a stroke or heart attack, and people with “abnormal breathing” turn out to have a cold. The crew went off the road to file an LA52 (the form of doom that we have to fill in when something goes wrong) and thankfully the patient made it to A+E safely.
I was just starting to relax when the police sent through a call for a firearms incident! We had to steal a manager from the North West desk because ours was still dealing with the explosion in Kensington.
Dear boss, if you are reading this, please put me back on my normal desk tonight. The West Desk scares me.
