Twas two nights before christmas and all through the town.....it was foggy. Very foggy. But the strange thing was it was lieing in banks. You could walk twenty feet in one direction and you could go from a real peasouper to clear air.

The police were forecasting a really busy night but for us at least it didn't really materialise. We were busy but not stupidly busy.

Anyway, last job of the evening. We got sent to a "Granny down". I forgot, we're not supposed to call them that anymore. Off we went, through the fog. I thought I saw a pirate ship on the river but I wasn't sure. Soon we arrived at the address, we had been given a code for a keysafe in which were contained her door keys. It turned out her keys were under the doormat so I don't know what the code number was for.

We let ourselves in and found the lady on the floor by her bed. She was desperate to get off the floor. She insisted she didn't have any pain.

We made ready to get her off the floor. Looking again, we noticed her leg. Her thigh had a sort of step in it. 

Oh dear.

She had obviously broken her leg when she fell. The bone in the thigh is called the femur and it is a big bone. When it breaks it (usually) causes a lot of pain and is quite difficult to fix.

The standard procedure for a braek like this is to splint the leg and put a bit of traction on it to pull the bone ends back together.

The problem was that we were not paramedics so we needed one to give the lady some morphine so we could move her.

We waited. I went out to the ambulance to get bits and pieces. And fell over. It was icy underfoot. I got the bits and slid back to the house.  I asked her if I could nick some of her table salt and went a'scattering.

The cavalry arrived at this point

Long story short we got her to hospital with a minimum of discomfort. Throughout the whole operation she didn't complain at all. Didn't wince and didn't make a fuss. I doubt that she will go home again as she was pushing ninety but I may be wrong.

Lovely lady but a real shame

 A day of oddness, quieter than has been usual

"Woman savaged by large cat. Wound gushing blood"

Wow. Off we went. The address we got was in one of the salubrious parts of town so it was unlikely to be a lion.

My crewmate was on the phone to control asking if we could have Steve Irwin as backup. I reminded him that he was dead so he asked for Terry Nutkin instead.

Help wasn't forthcoming. We were on our own.

I have quite a pictoral mind as you know and images were running through my mind. An old woman with a moggys jaws clamped round her throat: an old woman answering the front door with a cat hanging from her arm; a cat sitting on the roof with its prey (old woman).

We got there and I must say that it was quite sinister. Cats surrounded the house, laying in wait. For something.

It was like "The Birds"

And I swear one of them smiled at us.

Knocking the front door we were met by the womans husband. He was very apologetic and pointed us in the direction of his wife.
 
There she was sitting in the Kitchen with her leg up and a teatowel sellotaped over, presumably, the wound.

Good job by the husband, a bit makeshift, but it did the job. We cut it off to have a look. Tiny wound and it wasn't bleeding. We put a new dressing on it.

Later. One of the private crews that help us out (because its cheaper than paying people to do overtime) had broken down in the middle of one of the main roads into town. They had a patient with breathing difficulties on board and they were in the middle of a three lane road and it was rush hour.

We went to rescue the patient. It must have looked quite impressive. Two ambulances parked in the middle of the road. I had put the blue lights on to warn people we were there and Ambulance people wandering around in shiny yellow jackets.

It wasn't though. 

A memo came out today. This is my responce:

                                                                    Unilateral Declaration of Apathy

I, the aforementioned, being heartily sick of the headaches I am getting from banging my head against a brick wall, do state that:

 I will withdraw from all staff meetings that require my input on new practices

 I will no longer fill in any staff satisfaction surveys

 I will cease to offer any suggestions that do not involve patient care

I will ignore any notes and memos that ask for my opinion 

I will suppress any outbreaks of initiative that I suffer

I will follow all policies and procedures blindly 

 Because the management have proved, again, that they are not interested in any opinion that does not agree with their own, I will cease to offer any opinions, be they positive or negative

 I will come to work, do my job, and go home. And thats it

Any overtime I do will be on my terms, when I want to do it and with who I want to work with. We'll see whose loss that is

Being of sound mind (finally), I Emmbee declare this. 

We got called to an RTA. As is becoming more and more common we didn't get anymore information than that. All we got was the address and that it was an RTA.

We arrived before the police and from the start things didn't smell right. For a start the road was a very small cauldesac. No car would get up to a great speed along there. Two men in builders clothes were standing up the road and another car was parked up on the grass verge. Three people were sitting in it .

So where was the crash then?

The Police arrived at this point. We went to talk to the people in the car.

They had called us because the husband of the family had hurt his head. He explained that the white van (which belonged to the builders) had run him over and he had banged his head on the windscreen.

He had no marks on him at all, no bruises or anything. We were immediately suspicious of his claims so we went to have a look at the van. It too had no marks on it. It hadn't been washed in a while and there were no scuff marks on, no marks on the windscreen where he said his head had hit. 

There was something else going on here.

The police were wandering about, interviewing witnesses and checking the scene.

My crewmate took the chap into the back of the ambulance for a thorough check. I went to talk to one of the police officers

We indicated to each other that we had doubts about the veracity of the mans story.

He told me that several witness statements were completely different from what the man had us 

We went back to the ambulance. My crewmate had confirmed what we both knew. The man was completely uninjured.

The policeman asked the man what had happened. He confirmed the story that he had told us. The policeman then told him that everybody elses statement contradicted his. His colleague joined us at that point and recommended that everybody forget the incident and go home.

Much blustering.

She then pointed out that if he wanted to continue then he, and everybody else would have to be arrested so they could be questioned under caution.

He decided to go home at this point.

It turned out that, allegedly, he was the aggressor and he had actually assaulted the white van. Road rage apparently.

He had tried to pull a fast one on us and the police, as a lot of people do, but we know you know

Last job of the day. A female who had drunk a bottle of vodka and taken some tranquilisers. Ironically she was at an AA meeting.

So we turn up (we were just around the corner) and are met by the usual chorus of "She's completely unconcious" and "I want to come with her when you take her to Hospital"

We rolled her over and she opened her eyes and told us to "Fk off". So she wasn't unconsious.

We asked her if she wanted to go to hospital because she had taken some pills and had a lot to drink and it could be dangerous. She told us to "Fk off" again. Legs and arms were flaling around.

We left her to it, as per established procedure. I got onto control and asked them to send the police.

Next thing I know all her buddies are carrying her out. They insisted that she was unconcious (She still wasn't) and wanted us to take her to hospital.

She didn't want to go.

"Well, can't you take her anyway?"

No. To remove someone against their will is called kidnapping. I don't want to go to prison.

As all her friends were standing around she decided to start punching herself in the head. She was plainly playing up to the audience so we asked them all to leave. They did and she calmed down

The police arrived at this point.

Anyway, to cut a long story short we got her to hospital with the help of the police.
 
On the way to hospital I got thinking. Apart from the fact that we have been sworn at (again) by someone we've tried to help. Apart from the fact that again Alchohol is causing an otherwise healthy person to take up a bed in a Hospital that is bursting at the seams. The thing that really bothered me is that we just accept it.
 
Both me and my crewmate are quite experienced and we tend to accept physical and verbal abuse as part of the job. We're resigned to it. But in what other career (apart from the police) do you go to work knowing that you could get hurt by people you want to help.

But why is this right. Alchohol seems to be an excuse for a lot of people to behave like children. But as a society we tend to say things like, "They didn't mean it " and  "Its just the booze". It's the old thing that nothing is anybodies fault anymore. Nobody is to blame about anything.

I'm getting fed up with it. I wish that people would start acting like grownups 

End of Rant. Thanks for listening.

The best and most useful piece of equipment on our ambulances is the airhorn.

Make that the best, most useful and most satisfying.

On the dashboard is a big yellow button. Press it and you unleash hell.

When you need to get somewhere in a hurry (as we do sometimes) sirens are not quite enough. Its quite funny (and I'm picturing it in my mind). You come up to two lines of traffic stuck at lights. You have the lights and sirens on but nobody is moving.

One press of the big yellow button and they are thinking "Ooh, P'raps they do need to get somewhere quick"  and its like Moses parting the Red sea.

Also its quite good for signalling your frustration at idiots. People who won't get out of the way, pedestrians who decide that the ideal time to cross the road is right in front of three and a half tons of yellow and white noise machine

And finally, although I would never do this and would never condone it in any way at all, at night you don't always need the sirens, and sometimes you can sneak up on a drunk who is walking home and accidently use the airhorn right behind them. Obviously I've never done this and I didn't get someone to levitate three feet in the air once.

Because that would be bad