Random Acts Of Reality
Blog in the life of a London Ambulance EMT
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- Sun, 11 Feb 2007 07:02:21 +0000
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- Snow
To be honest, today I'm kind of ashamed to be English.
So overnight and this morning it snowed, the snow lay and as I write this we have about two inches of it all on the streets.
(Rather amusingly, as I don't watch the weather reports I only found out it was going to snow because of my Twitter cloud).
I'd planned to visit my mum, so I had a careful drive to her house - my car felt as if it had power steering and as I opened the front door I was greeted by my brother.
I may have mentioned before how my brother is a teacher, he'd gone to school and had been sent home. Apparently half the teachers hadn't turned up to work and a similar number of children were absent. A cleaner had slipped over in the hall (and then a trampoline had fell on her) breaking her leg. The headmaster then decided to send everyone home.
Cue much phoning of parents and writing of letters. Now the streets of Dagenham are more dangerous than normal, not because of of the snow, but because there are gangs of teenage thugs roaming the place.
So everything shuts down - snow is headline news (although as I'm writing this the BBC is showing pictures of puppies in the snow. No dumbing down there...) Why is it I can remember winters like this, but without all the fuss that this current fall is making.
Ernest Shackleton nailed planks from his ship to his feet to trek across hundreds of miles of frozen tundra, but a bit of snow and everything grinds to a halt. That is why today I'm ashamed to be English.
I *am* however looking to racing around icy streets in a big, heavy yellow van tomorrow (although I'm not looking forward to getting up at 5am to do it).
Thu, 08 Feb 2007 11:31:36 +0000 - Happy Blogaversary
A quick congratulations to Merys who is just celebrating her second blogaversary. She's a close friend of mine and all round good egg. We got to know each other when she was deciding whether to become a doctor or a paramedic.
It's interesting - she has also entered the Love To Lead competition to try and win a laptop, and yet the two leading entries come from blogs that seem to have been set up purely for the purposes of entering the competition (although I think that one is about to be disqualified). It's a shame when people try to 'game' a competition - perhaps something for further thought on my Mental Kipple blog when I get home.
Tue, 06 Feb 2007 14:10:54 +0000 - How Evil Can Help
I'm 'third manning' at the moment, which is a way of easing me back into work. I'm a third person on an ambulance, which means I get to see how other people work.
We were called to a man who had been pushed over following an arguement over payment at a shop. The man (the customer) was sitting on the floor wailing and shouting as our patients who feel aggrieved often do.
My mate attempted to get a history from the patient, but he refused to talk to us. He would talk to his friend, but not to the ambulance crew who were trying to help him. He was being generally obstructive.
We gathered, from other people, that he had a painful leg - he didn't tell us this himself, he just ranted about how he wanted the person who had pushed him over arrested.
So, without being able to get a verbal history my mate decided that he would physically examine him - so he got out his scissors and cut the trousers off of the patient so that he could examine the injured leg. The patient still refused to talk to us, he was too busy trying to get the other man 'nicked'.
I mean - he'd been pushed over, he was hardly going to hurt himself in anything but a most minor way...
Except that his femur - the strongest bone in the body had snapped.
We have no idea how this could happen in a middleaged man with no other illnesses and (after the x-ray) no sign of pathological bone disease. It's the sort of job that you pick the person up off the floor, dust them off and they refuse to go to hospital.
So we got him into the back of the ambulance to discover that the traction splint that we would normally use was missing a small, but vitally important, bit.
So I got the job of hanging on his leg providing traction while my mate gave him some excellent painkillers and *his* crewmate drove us into hospital.
The hospital was impressed as well.
It's a good job my mate decided to be 'evil' and cut his trouser legs off. The patient didn't have an accident history to suggest a broken bone, the patient themself didn't suggest a broken bone and we could have quite happily taken to lifting him off the floor.
There is a reason why we don't cut the clothes off everyone who falls over, it costs them money, it's very cold at the moment and it's frankly undignified. But now I'm wondering if I need to start stripping everyone I come across...
Tue, 06 Feb 2007 14:00:55 +0000 - Back To Work / Laura's Nasty Job
I’m back to work later this afternoon – three shifts as a ‘third man’, it’s part of LAS policy that those of us daft enough to injure ourselves for long periods of time should be eased back into work. I’m just looking forward to a lovely Newham
FridaySaturday night…I can finally stop moping around being bored and get some new material.
Laura had a nasty job earlier and she’s written it up on her blog as an incredibly moving post.
Update: Date changed because I had no idea what day I was writing this - the perils of shiftwork.
Sat, 03 Feb 2007 10:00:00 +0000 - Error
Driving back from shopping I came across this. (Traffic was stationary at red lights so I wasn't a danger to anyone with this photo).
If I made a basic error like that people could end up dead.
Fri, 02 Feb 2007 16:38:10 +0000
