Nee Naw

I’m off on holiday for a week and I don’t intend to have ANY run ins with ambulances while I am away. Except for my reading material — Katherine Howell has very kindly sent me a copy of her paramedic thriller ‘Frantic’, which I’ll be reading on the beach.

See you next week!

95% of the calls we take on a shift are the same old things: suspected heart attacks, strokes, breathing problems, road traffic accidents, diabetics, epileptics and timewasters with minor ailments. While all except the latter are deserving cases, we could deal with them blindfolded. There’s only usually a handful of calls on each shift that make us sit up and go “Crikey! Look what’s happened there!” On a nightshift, the calls tend to be even more mundane and if you were to walk into the control room about 3am, you’d see a lot of bored faces and people trying to prop their eyes open with matchsticks.

It was therefore rather strange that one night this week, we received two identical sounding unusual calls to our sector. Two adult males, living within five miles of each other, fell from third floor balconies on council estates within two hours of each other.

The first call came in from the police. The incident had been spotted by someone in a neighbouring block. Police and ambulance rushed round there, to find a rather tipsy man staggering around cursing and wincing at a pain in his lower back. Though he’d fallen 30ft, he appeared not to have any life threatening injuries. Apparently (according to my colleague) being drunk is a good thing if you happen to fall off a balcony, because the drunkenness makes your body go floppy, which makes you more able to withstand the impact, or something. Or maybe this bloke had nine lives, like a cat. The crew blued him in, but it was purely precautionary.

The second patient, however, was not so lucky. His flatmate had woken in the night to find the window wide open, and on going to close it, had spotted the patient lying motionless on the ground outside. He’d called 999 immediately, but even as he requested the ambulance, he had known from the unnatural way the body lay that the patient was beyond any help. The patient was not taken to hospital since there was no way he could be saved.

Two identical calls, two very different outcomes. I wonder if Fall Guy Number One will hear about Fall Guy Number Two and realise how very lucky he was…

My recent entry about seeing my first ’suspended’ - or, to be more accurate, my first dead body - prompted a bit of a discussion (okay, a bit of mudslinging and an argument about grammar) in the comments section. It’s been pointed out that some people, probably including myself, come across as far too eager to experience a ‘juicy’ job such as a resus or serious trauma. To some, it appears that we are almost willing people to die in order to give us the job we want. We are only happy when someone else is suffering.

I don’t see it like that, but I do hold my hand up to being a bit overeager. As a fresh faced trainee at Control all those years ago, I still remember how I anticipated my first ’suspended’ call; on my observation shifts with crews I’ve practically cajoled them to hover round ’suspended’ hotspots in hope of picking up a call. But let’s get this straight: I absolutely, totally and utterly in no way, want *anyone* to die, except very elderly people who go peacefully in their sleep at ‘their time’ with no need for the indignity of a resus attempt. I don’t want anyone to be sick, injured or in pain. Nothing would make me happier than if all medical problems could be wiped off the face of this earth and the ambulance service could close down and turn into a minibus firm giving people free rides to the seaside. But that isn’t realistic, is it? Cardiac arrests happen whether or not I am the one who takes the call. I’m not willing it to happen, but I am willing it to be my turn to take a call when it inevitably does. Arrests aren’t glamorous or pretty, but they are what I am here for — I have been trained to help people do CPR and deal with other serious emergencies. I haven’t been trained to help people with the flu or a broken toe; if those were the people I wanted to help, I wouldn’t be working for the ambulance service. When I go out with a crew, I don’t want to see a suspended because I want to be a hero or because I think it’s exciting — I want to see one because I want to see the crew using their skills, or in the case of the ‘purple plus’, I just want to see what happens next or see with my own eyes the scene I’ve imagined so many times as I’ve listened down the phone.

In the case of that elusive ‘first suspended call’, be it on the phone or in real life, I think part of the reason every ambulance worker appears to look forward to it is so they can have it ‘over and done with’. Dealing with a dead body, an unsuccessful resus, hysterical relatives, etc, has got to be the hardest thing this job brings and the relief of knowing you dealt with it and didn’t crack up or make a mistake is overwhelming.

Being excited by the prospect of a serious call may seem wrong, but compared with the other reactions that we could exhibit, it’s really for the best. Imagine standing over the collapsed body of a relative, only to have the ambulance crew turn up and burst into scared, hysterical tears and run out the room. Or maybe, potter indifferently over the body, cracking jokes as they plug in the defibrillator. Your ‘excited’ ambulance person is excited because this job, your relative, is important to them and they are giving their all hoping to use their skills to make a difference. Yes, they wanted to be there, but don’t think for a minute they are enjoying this.

In the wake of the nappy incident, I was feeling rather cynical when the news of the collapsed building in Victoria hit the control room.

“Building collapsed, debris everywhere, people ? trapped,” I read over a colleague’s shoulder (it wasn’t my sector). “Yeah, right. Bet a brick has fallen in the road or something. A bit of scaffolding at the most.”

After the twentieth call on the matter, I was being forced to eat my words. Fortunately Ambulance Control always treats every call as given, whether we believe it or not, and a plethora of ambulances, managers, HEMS, the HART team and the other emergency services were on scene straight away. Any nearby ambulance not on a job was ordered to go on standby at the nearby hospital. And yes, the building had definitely collapsed - or at least one floor of it had. Of course, initially we thought of bombs, especially as the building in question was very near to New Scotland Yard (police headquarters), Buckingham Palace and the Houses of Parliament. This theory seemed to be quickly discounted, though, or maybe everyone was just too busy getting people out of the building to worry about why it had collapsed.

All three services quickly declared a Major Incident, which meant that various people in Control put on ridiculous luminous yellow jackets and ran out into the special Major Incident Control Room. Fortunately, our watch recently did Major Incident Training (we got to clamber over all sorts of emergency vehicles, it was great) so we were well prepared. I wasn’t part of the major incident team so I can’t tell you what they got up to in the other room. I stayed in the normal room training Trainee 3 and dealing with the usual nonsense whilst keeping one ear pricked to see what was going on. One casualty was taken to hospital, but there were reports of up to 10 people being trapped. After a while, it was established that there was only one person trapped, so the major incident was stood down from an ambulance point of view (but not from a Fire Brigade or police point of view) and everyone took off the yellow coats and went back to what they were doing.

The man was rescued from the rubble with non-life threatening injuries long after I’d gone home. I read about that in the paper on the way to work the next morning too. The papers are sometimes the only way we get to find out the outcome of the calls we’ve dealt with!

One morning this week, our desk had a Chemical Incident to deal with. A dustbin man rang in to say that he and his colleagues had been loading a bin into their truck when an unspecified substance had poured out. It was bubbling and smoking and turning the tarmac green. Their eyes were watering, and they felt sick because of the repugnant smell. Police cars, fire engines and ambuli rushed to the scene. The area was cordoned off. The local hospital closed its A+E minors area so the six patients could be treated without fear of cross-contamination. The Hazardous Area Response Team had a field day.

So there I was, several hours later, thinking what an exciting day I’d had at work, and how for once I’d not spent the whole time dealing with crap, when I settled down to read the newspaper on the train home, when I read the following:

Nappies blamed for chemical alert
A rotting bag of nappies have been blamed for causing a major chemical scare which left six east London binmen hospitalised.

The Redbridge refuge workers were taken ill on Monday morning after a plastic bag they were handling split, releasing a flood of suspicious-smelling liquid, which raised fears of possible toxic poisoning.

Police and firefighters in special protection suits examined the scene in Elgin Road, Seven Kings, for several hours, after the men had been rushed to King George’s Hospital, Ilford, for treatment.

A Redbridge Council spokesman said the scare was caused by fumes emanating from a bag of used nappies which had combined with a quantity of household chemicals.