I’m on nights this week and it has been CRAZILY busy. Usually, the East Central is dead by 2am on a week night. This week, I’ve still been juggling a screen full of calls at 5am.
So what do you think is responsible for the increase in call rate? Drunken people enjoying the good weather? Swine flu? No, it’s the pollen count. Our screens are full of young people having “severe difficulty in breathing”, brought on by hayfever. It’s the first time I can remember this happening, and from a Control point of view, it’s hard to tell how serious these calls are. Some people are undoubtedly calling just for bog standard hayfever symptoms, and as a sufferer myself I know how horrible that “pins in eyes, feathers in throat, corks up nose” feeling is, but I wouldn’t call an ambulance from it. On the other hand, in some cases, the hayfever triggers a full blown asthma attack and the patient really does need us.
In other news, our control room is being refurbished at the moment. They are ripping out all the desks and making them point in different directions. This means we keep getting moved around to different rooms, no one knows where any of the other desks are and management have not been seen for several days. The highlight of last night’s shift was finding a big box of Christmas Belgian biscuits in a hidden cupboard when they dismantled the East Central desk. We ate the lot.
