I hope you haven’t all been sitting on the edges of your seats waiting for Part 2. Circumstances have got in the way of my blogging a bit over the last few weeks but normal service shall be resumed from now on.
This post takes up where the last one left off, at 1am on the streets of South London, with me in the passenger seat of a FRU being driven by Steve of Eyes of an EMT…
Call #5 - Old Lady With Breathing Problems
We sped off to a sheltered housing block for the elderly on the hunt for 62-year-old Betty, who, according to the MDT, was suffering from Severe Respiratory Distress. Steve pushed back her front door, and nearly tripped over a large blue and black striped suitcase which was packed ready to go to hospital. It’s nice to see that a life threatening emergency doesn’t prevent people getting their essentials together!
In the living room, we were greeted by a large, slightly wheezy 70-something lady sat on the sofa in front of a large, overflowing ashtray. Steve took her obs, which were all normal or near normal. It looked like she had a bit of a chest infection, so we asked her if she wanted to go to hospital. She nodded an emphatic “yes” (it’s sad how old people who live alone always want to go to hospital, even if they are fine, but old people who live with other people never want to go, even if they are at death’s door) so the crew, who had just arrived, got her ready to go, and I carried the striped suitcase out to the ambulance.
While we were doing that, Steve asked her a few questions about her medical history:
“Are you diabetic?”
“No”
“Epileptic?”
“No”
“Any heart problems?”
“Yes”
“What’s wrong with your heart, Betty?”
Betty paused, as if she was trying to remember the name of a complex medical term.
“It don’t tick right!”
Steve wrote this on the PRF. It made us laugh for the rest of the shift.
Call #6 - Epilepsy
You have noticed that none of the calls so far have been bone fide Category A emergencies. Well, that was about to change. We rushed into a tall ceilinged Victorian house with crimson walls to find a 30-something blonde girl prostrate on the floor and a very thin, tearful girl with a crewcut flapping her arms in the air and repeatedly hanging up on a phone with Nee Naw Control at the other end of it. (I was very good and didn’t lecture her on this, even though it was obvious from the MDT she had been a nightmare for whoever was call taking).
As the girl had stopped fitting and was a known epileptic, there was nothing particularly worrying at first and Steve and one of the ambulance crew people started doing her obs whilst the other ambulance crew person tried to calm down the distressed friend. Unfortunately, at this point, the patient started to fit again. Having multiple fits without waking up in between is generally not a good sign (although not necessarily life threatening) so this was definitely a hospital case. I have only seen an epileptic fit once before, and that was many years ago when an epileptic friend decided to fit in front of me. Somehow this one seemed a bit more violent (although that might just have been because I was rubbernecking trying to get a good look), and the foaming at the mouth and rolling eyes stuff is quite scary, not to mention the noises that came out of her mouth.
We were just getting her on the trolley, and off she went into a third fit! After that, no time was wasted getting her to the hospital and she was bundled off to hospital on blue lights and nee naw sirens.
Call #7 - Suspended?
Every time Steve’s phone had rung to notify him of a call, I had jumped up and down excitedly going “Is it a suspended? Is it a suspended? Is it?” (for those of you new to Nee Naw terminology, suspended means “dead” or “not breathing”). Yes, I know it says something about my personality that I was so keen to see one. Don’t let the psychiatrists near me, they’d lock me up. Anyway, my wish was finally answered when my perpetual question was answered with “Yes, it’s a suspended. Now get in the car; I’m going to drive really fast!” I thought he had been driving really fast anyway, but now my dinner threatened to make a reappearance and I realised that my heart was pumping, just like it had when I took my first suspended over the phone.
I’ve never seen a dead body before, you see.
Then the phone rang. It was Control.
“Bit of a strange one here! We’re not sure what’s going on. A woman has just called saying that someone told her that her son is dead in his flat… but she’s not sure of his address. We think it’s 116 Long Road in SE16 — there’s definitely a six in the number — could you stand by for confirmation?… Yes, it’s definitely 116. Flat 8. The police are on their way.”
I had a lot of conflicting thoughts at once. The first was that I knew the type of call we were going to; the kind when someone mutters unintelligable nonsense about someone being dead and you have to send on it just to find that they aren’t dead. The second was that if someone was suspended, they’d certainly be dead by the time we’d tried every house in Long Road that has a six in it. The third was, how the hell can you not know your son’s address? The last thought was that I should be careful what I wish for in future. Then we were outside 116 Long Road. Knocking at the door yielded no answer, perhaps unsurprisingly. Corpses don’t generally open doors. The police pulled up seconds later and one aimed his steel toecapped boot at the door. It swung open with minimal effort. (Burglars, I recommend you give that house a go). Two police and four ambulance people trooped up the stairs at knocked on the door of Flat 8. There was no reply, so the policeman took aim once again. Just as he was poised for the kick, the door creaked open, almost causing the policeman to fall horizontally through like a comedy sketch.
A bleary eyed dark skinned man stood in his boxer shorts looking bemused.
“Are you Peter Jones?” enquired the policeman.
“No…” said the man.
“Your parents rang us, they were worried about you.”
“My parents are in Brazil!”
The police exchanged glances. “I think we have the wrong house” said one.
“I think we do.” agreed the other. “Well, he’s definitely not dead. Sorry to bother you, sir. Goodnight.”
And we all trooped out again. We did try all the other houses in Long Road with a six in them but none of them had a Flat 8. So it was that we conceded defeat and returned to our vehicles. I felt kind of guilty that I was actually disappointed to find the occupant live and well.
We figured that the parents would ring back once they had determined their son’s address. I checked the logs when I got back to control, and they never did. So perhaps somewhere in Long Road, a body is still festering…
Call #8 - Chest Pain
In Control, a chest pain call is a fairly routine call. Almost every chest pain call comes up as a category A, so the patient will get an ambulance promptly, but there’s nothing that can be done for them until the ambulance arrives, so we don’t need to keep them on line. For crews, who actually have to do something with the patient, chest pain calls are far more exciting.
Steve took one look at the MDT and groaned. “Oh no, that dive!” Sure enough, soon we were heading through a concrete jungle of council blocks and dead ends. Outside one of the blocks stood a man waving us down as if we were his taxi home, so we took an educated guess that this was where we were headed for. The man lead us into a dingy two bedroom flat, which was full to the rafters with Asian people of various ages gibbering to each other in their mother tongue. The flat smelled of a mixture of vindaloo and wet dog. We were pointed towards the back of the flat, where a morose looking lady in her sixties sat on the edge of a single bed amongst an impressive collection of homeopathic remedies. She didn’t speak a word of English, but luckily the man who met the ambulance was able to translate. Steve took her obs, some of which indicated a possible heart attack, some of which didn’t, and gave her aspirin and GTN. This helped a bit with the pain (which is what you’d expect if it was an angina attack), but no-one was taking any chances and she was blued into hospital.
Call #9 - Idiot
By now the birds were tweeting and the shift was drawing to a close, so I was really hoping for a suspended or something dramatic to go out on. It was not to be. My heart sank when I saw the MDT: “42 year old male, temperature for two days. Severe difficulty in breathing”. I have taken enough calls like this to know that they also come under the heading of Timewaster, Big Girl’s Blouse, Man Flu, etc, etc. But we dutifully piled into the FRU and headed off to a modern, wooden floored flat above a parade of shops.
“Thank you for coming so quickly,” smiled the patient’s wife, looking distinctly unconcerned and unlike the wife of someone suffering a life threatening emergency. “He’s in here!”
In the toasty warm bedroom, 42-year-old Pedro was propped up in bed with a cup of cocoa, surrounded in snotty tissues and empty packets of lemsip. Never mind severe difficulty in breathing, he didn’t even have slight difficulty in breathing. At a push, he might have had a cough.
“You know” he exclaimed. “I haven’t felt so ill in about… five years! My nose is running, I have a cough *coffcoffcoff* — you see, there it goes again! And now I’ve woken up in the night feeling really cold!”
It was minus three outside. I knew how he felt; I felt pretty cold leaving the nice warm ambulance station to go rushing across London to him.
“You have a cold,” said one of the ambulance crew, after taking the obs. “You could call a GP out, but I doubt that a GP would come out for this. Try taking some paracetamol and going to sleep.”
He actually said it more politely than that, but I’m kind of projecting what I would have liked to have said to him. In fact, I didn’t trust myself to say anything, so I kept quiet. Then we all marched out again, muttering stuff about man flu and “didn’t need the defib for that one, then”.
And that was the end of my night of excitement! I didn’t see a suspended, but I certainly got my money’s worth, and thank you to Steve for accommodating me. I will definitely be doing it again (although not until it gets a bit warmer or I get some thermal vests) and I recommend any other control bods reading pester your local friendly nee naw crews for a day on the road. It’s an experience you won’t forget, and really helps you see your job from a new perspective!
February 4th, 2006 at 7:22 pm
“We were just getting her on the trolley, and off she went into a third fit!”
Out of curiousity, how did you handle that? My training basically says that if someone is having a fit then you shouldn’t try to restrain them, but what happens if you’ve already strapped them onto a trolley-bed? Do you leave them restrained, or try to undo the straps while they’re thrashing around?
February 4th, 2006 at 8:15 pm
Hello, for those of you who dont know i also work in Nee Naw control, I went out observing with a NE crew on Friday 07-19 and it was as mark says a great experience!! I was only meant to stay until 1500 but i thought i would stay to 1900 as thats what im used to….so i was sat in the mess room and *ring-ring* a crew (not the one i was observing with) said “its a suspended” , so not to give up a potentially very interesting job, i asked if i can jump aboard with them on this one and they said ya thats fine, so off we went. We got on scene and it was as given, the FRU was already on scene and working on the pat, we used the de-fib and various other peices of equipment and rushed him into hosp..all very exciting and just like a episode out of ER - everyone waiting in resus for us and the pat and we left them to it. I went back into resus to see how they were doing, at this stage they were still working on him, but unfortunately he died, we dont know what of tho, RIP. Hopefully next time you go out mark you will be able to see one, It was really interesting. Anyhow i didnt mean to rant on , on someone elses blog, sorry!!!
February 4th, 2006 at 10:10 pm
All this, while most of us are cozy in beds, our only worry being what to wear to work the next day.
Keep up the great writing Mark. I’m enjoying reading other people’s work habits.
Out of curiosity, if someone asked how you felt about your job and the satisfaction level of it and you had to sum it up in under five words what would you say?
A
February 4th, 2006 at 11:46 pm
If anyone from Control, or you Mark, want to come and join me on a shift, just let me know.
I’ll be glad for the comapny, even though I am on a truck now.
February 5th, 2006 at 12:34 am
Hey Mark,
“Suspended” is an interesting term. I guess it’s a way of being medically polite. We just call them arrests and are done with it.
Glad you’ve seen the other side now, especially some of the big girls’ blouses.
I had the chance to go and visit your counterparts a couple of days ago - an hour or so in dispatch, listening in on the call-takers and the dispatchers (and a clinician) is fascinating. I can truthfully assert that the dispatchers are far and away the hardest workers in the service.:)
Klig
February 5th, 2006 at 3:24 am
I’m glad to hear you’re returning to regular service, I thought posts seemed a bit thin, but then I’m sure you’ve a life to lead other than entertaining us.
Anyhow, this incident happened in Washington DC several weeks ago & I thought I’d ask for thoughts regarding the issues involved.D.C. to Probe EMS Response to Fatal Attack in the 19 January Washington Post (www.washingtonpost.com).
February 6th, 2006 at 1:34 am
Good posts. Good site.
Does the ambulance service use a different symptom list for women with possible heart attack than it does for men?
February 6th, 2006 at 6:02 pm
Totally off topic but I enjoy your blog and I also enjoyed this Australian radio programme: Radio Eye - 04/02/2006: 000 Ambulance about a 000 call taker and just thought I’d pass the link on.
February 6th, 2006 at 11:03 pm
Mark,
Great to get out and ride isn’t it? The whole evening sounds like a taped replay of my day today, just not there in person. When you finally get to view your first DOA you’ll be surprised about how peaceful it is. Not really off putting at all, unless it was a result of some kind of violent trauma. That’s a bit sticky in more ways than one. As always terrific writing!
February 7th, 2006 at 10:51 am
You have been busy! Probably, despite your protests, a good thing that you missed out on a ’suspended’. I can’t imagine it’s be particularly nice, however exciting it is. Sounds like you had an exciting time anyway! Hope your business hasn’t been down to anything bad.
Take care
DrC
February 7th, 2006 at 4:26 pm
‘The flat smelled of a mixture of vindaloo and wet dog’
What is wet dog? A very interesting evening, sorry to hear you did not get to see a suspended, though the way you guys want one so bad kind of makes me cringe.
Keep up the good work.
The Driving Instructor
February 11th, 2006 at 5:08 am
Warrington
no we dont, why is there something specific you where thinking off?
February 11th, 2006 at 8:35 am
It’s just that I’ve read that women are more likely not to experience severe chest pain and might be more likely to be written off as having the flu or something.
February 11th, 2006 at 10:45 am
The only difference is that women with chest pain who are under 45 don’t get an automatic category A, whereas with men it’s only those under 35. This is because women under 45 very rarely have heart attacks.
If they have any of the symptoms of a heart attack along with the chest pain, it becomes a category A. In practice, it is very rare for a chest pain call to come up as any other category.
February 11th, 2006 at 11:01 am
Driving Instructor - Wet Dog is not a euphemism for anything, it is what a dog smells like when it is wet. If you do not know this smell, then you have obviously never been a dog owner. Ask to borrow one and then you will see what I mean.
John C Kirk - We had only just got her on to the trolley when she started to fit again and she wasn’t even strapped to it. So we all stood around the trolley bed and pushed her towards the middle if it looked like she was starting to fall off. You’re not supposed to hold them down but a gentle shove in the right direction is harmless!
April 20th, 2006 at 9:47 am
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April 30th, 2006 at 10:11 am
Sounded like a very exciting night despite not seeing a “suspended”. Its certainly a much more fast paced job than sitting at an office all day. The only suspended I’m ever likely to see is if an overweight manager walks too quickly up the stairs while trying to eat his donut and collapses when the donut gets stuck in his throat.
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