When I’d sit and read blogs and he’d reach over and casually stroke the hairs on my arms, run his fingers along my wrist.

Now he runs his fingers over the back of my hand, thoughtfully taps my veins to make them stand up, traces their routes, his spare hand flexing for an imaginary cannula.

18 years old, legless, semi-concious outside a local entertainment complex with her mate’s hands down the front of her top, having a good fumble to himself, we get the call from the club’s security guards who’ve clocked her on their CCTV. We call the police and have a chat.

“So listen, Lindsay (NHBCTPTI), you can’t stay out here on your own. Whereabouts do you stay?”

She gives us the address of one of the local halls of residence, she’s a fresher, her home address is a small town 20 odd miles outside the city centre. Seems the bright lights and student happy hour promotions have caught up with her.

“Well, you’re going to need to sober up if you’re wanting a taxi, c’mon, stand up straight and come and wait by the kerb, we’ll see if we can’t get you into a cab.”

Ideally, we’ll get her into a cab, get our paperwork signed saying that she doesn’t want to go to hospital (she really doesn’t NEED to go to hospital) and move onto another job, the radio hasn’t stopped squawking all night, control are obviously swamped.

She watches the cabs coming round the roundabout. I hail one for her and, just as it’s slowing, she vomits down the front of her top. Doesn’t even bother bending over to try and get it into the gutter, just spews down her chest. The cabbie shakes his head at me and drives up the road to the High St where well-off tourists are finishing their late summer mini-breaks in the capital. No vomit from them, just big tips and the ignorance of the city that will let the driver take them on a ….scenic route.

“Look, do you have any mates in the city with a car who could come and pick you up?”

She shakes her head, curdled Baileys dripping from her hair.

“Well then you’re going to have to come up to A&E with us to sleep it off.”

“Naaaoooo! Not hospital, I don’t want to go to hospital, my DAD works at the hospital.”

“Ok then, so what are we going to do?”

She descendes into silence, leaning on a railing. I swap niceities and rolled eyes with the cops who are standing around, my colleague loiters on the edge of the gathering.

We persuade, we joke, we cajole, we threaten, we insist. She sighs “This is so stupid, you must have more serious people to see than me.”

“Yeah, we do, but we’re with you now, you’ve already passed out once and had someone take advantage of you, if we leave you here, who’s to say that that won’t happen again, or worse? C’mon, get into the ambulance and we’ll take you to A&E, nice comfy bed, tea and toast in the morning.”

“I’ve got a lecture in the morning.”

“All the more reason to come with us and get yourself tucked up. C’mon.”

She slumps down against the railing.

My partner draws an ace.

“I bet your parents would come out and pick you up. It’s only 25 miles, they wouldn’t mind, would they?”
I grin.
“Now that’s a BRILLIANT idea, their number will be in your phone, won’t it?”

My partner cracks open the patient’s handbag.
“Let’s see…..”

The lassie jerks up straight, glares at the two of us.
“That’s not even fucking funny.”
“We’re not even fucking joking,” I dead-pan back. “So which is it to be? Hospital or parents?”

She gathers herself up, sways to the side of the vehicle.

“Hospital.”

“Thankyou.”

Yes, he was awesome and did lots of environmental and wildlife awareness.

But it did make me laugh:

A Tribute Poem To Steve Irwin

---

A bright brash Australian,
The Hunter was his name,
And all those slimy reptiles,
Brought him wealth and fame.

Some say he was a looker,
To girls he was a dish,
He knew a lot about crocodiles,
BUT FUCK ALL ABOUT FISH………

From BWTS

Crowds of drunken teenagers at the front of your motor can be cleared very effectively by hitting the sirens.

The yelp tones hurt my lugs when I’m in the cab with the windows open, so I’m not surprised a number of them clutched the sides of their heads and staggered to the side of the road when they were standing right next to it with no nice insulating windscreen in between.

Mwuaa hahaha.

My phone has an ability to add “Categories” to contact information, so, for instance, if I want to see all the details of people I have who work for the Service, I can choose to only look at the “SAS” category.

I’ve added a category called “Bams“, to which I’m adding contact details (Name, address, common presenting complaint, previous violent incidents etc.) for any patient who gives me grief, or calls us out unnecessarily.

A number of my colleagues see addresses and go “Oh Jesus, not HER again.” and without the luxury of twenty years experience, this seems to be the best option.

Unfortunately, my phone’s creators, thinking principally about business users, have set the database fields towards a more corporate leaning, so “Office location” now tends to have “Under the bridge at the bottom of Made-up Street” and “URL” becomes “Drinks heavily, carries a stick.” while “Pager” holds “Reeks, open windows and vents before transporting.”

Maybe there’s a gap in the market? Jakey PDAs?

My shirt got smeared with thick, partially clotted arterial jelly.

I smell like cheap steak.

“Hello, my love, would you like to sit down?”

Jesus Christ, how the fuck am I meant to do this?

“I’m afraid I have some very bad news.”

We’ve just decided that someone’s dead. I called it. I’ve just declared someone dead. What the hell is going on? Surely someone older should have done it, or someone who knows what they’re doing. Oh Jesus…that’s me, isn’t it?

“Your husband’s heart has stopped beating. There’s nothing we can do for him; he’s gone, I’m sorry.”

I’m meant to say “dead” or “died”. They hammered that into us, every trainer I had in the college is screaming in the back of my head “Say “Dead” you poof!”.

“If there was any chance that we could revive him, we’d do everything we can. But I’m afraid there’s nothing for us to do. He died a few moments ago.”

What IS this? I can’t tell someone their husband was alive this morning and now he’s dead. This is the kind of conversation that grown-ups have…I’m not a grown up.
Jesus…I’m not, am I?

“The police will call round, please don’t worry, it’s perfectly routine with cases of sudden death. Your husband is in bed, he looks very peaceful, I don’t think he suffered at all. You can go up and say goodbye if you’d like.”

What the hell else am I meant to say? I’m meant to make people better, or at least take them into hospital and have them die there. I’m not supposed to turn up and announce death. This isn’t right! Jesus, she’s not taking this in, I can tell by her eyes.

“We’ve left some paperwork here on the table, the police will need to see it. We’re going to leave now, your neighbours have said they’ll stay with you and I think one of them has called your son. I really am terribly sorry for your loss.”

Let’s go. Let’s go and fix someone.

Please?

It must be something in the water, because the bams were out in force last night.
Best of all was the man who “Found my mate taking an overdose, so I stopped him by taking the rest of his pills. You know, you just do that when it’s a mate, don’t you?”

Uhhhhh. No.

“I feel a bit funny, now, actually.”
Sympathy? Not forthcoming, particularly as he waggled his head about when I asked to look at his pupils.

“I can’t, I can’t, I’m tripping.”
“Well that doesn’t stop you holding your head still, does it?”
“Noooo! I can’t.”

I grabbed his jaw and pulled his face round, shone a light in both eyes. Average size, totally reactive.

Considering that he was claiming that both he and his friend had taken the same thing, I became a mite suspicious that only one of them was lying on the deck throwing up and clutching his stomach, while another was simply shouting about how terrible and trippy he felt.

I tried a wee test.
“So aside from trippy, how are you feeling?”
“Terrible.”
“Really dizzy and sick?”
“Yeah.”

I call his bluff.

“Kind of sleepy?”
“Oh, really really sleepy, yeah.”
I start to invent increasingly unlikely symptoms, since he seems to be suffering from an overdose of shit, culminating in:
“And you’ll have pins and needles in the palms of your hands, and the soles of your feet, but nowhere else, right?”
“Exactly!”

Uh-huh, right.

We drive them both in, OD boy on the trolley, drifting in and out of conciousness, his tongue bobbing back and forth against the back of his throat and his yammering friend in one of the seats; time and again friend undid his seatbelt and approached the trolley, whereupon OD-boy would become more and more agitated, struggle against his belts and flail his arms around.

I started out nice, became persuasive and on the fourth occurence of this happening (and coincidentally, the moment when the flailing fists caught me a solid one on my jaw) I broke out the voice.

“Right! That’s it. Sit down and do not move again or I *will* have you lifted, got it?”

He slumped down, muttering under his breath “I’m only looking after my mate, fuck’s sake…”

By the time we got them into A&E I was thrilled to hand them over to the staff, though the fact that one of the nursing staff saw his face, rolled her eyes and mouthed “Oh, for fuck’s sake…” gave me more than a hint that they were well used to him.

Lesson learned, next time the voice will come out a lot faster, the ultimatum will be delivered and acted upon earlier and I won’t be stressing about a patient’s airway, shouting at a dickhead and trying to complete two sets of paperwork all at once.

So, you took 3.5 grams of base and called an ambulance because you’re shaking all over, your heart is racing, you can’t sit still, you’re full of energy and ‘everything looks funny’

Sir… isn’t that what you were aiming for?

Mainly though, I’m learning how much I don’t know.

I was at my first cardiac arrest last week, first through the door, first on my knees next to the limp woman on the floor. Thing is, the job had arrived on my the screen in my vehicle as “collapse”, whereas the crew sent to back my partner and me up had received “? arrest”.

To this end, I was kneeling by the woman’s head, rubbing my knuckles into her clavicle and shouting her name and slowly coming to the realisation that things weren’t right as the remaining three members of staff barreled into the room, took one look at her and said “She’s arrested, get her on her back and start bagging her.”

I was crap, people. It wasn’t my first arrest, but it was the first where I was supposed to know what to do. I scrambled about the room, grabbing equipment for people, assembling and disassembling, ripping open packaging, running to the vehicle and back again. In minutes I’m in the back of my ambulance with the paramedic from the supporting crew, swaying with the movement of the cab and trying to perform effective compressions on the patient’s chest, wincing at the celery-stalk sensation of her ribs giving way under my fist.

Half an hour later I’m back at the station, wrestling with the vast form we’re expected to complete after every occurence of CPR and I’m aware that the conversation in the room has turned to how the new boy did at his first arrest. It’s not pretty.

I sit back, chuck my clipboard on the table and say “Right, c’mon then - let the bloodletting begin. I’d rather you say it to my face than behind my back.”

So they do.

The paramedic who was with me in the back summarises:
“Slow down, chill out and stop trying to talk to dead people.”

I mull it over all day and by the end of the shift come to a conclusion that I try out on some colleagues, who heartily agree.

I’m new, I’m expected to be crap, nobody expects me to keep up. To try and work at the same speed and proficiency as my colleagues is not only fool-hardy but counter-productive to boot.
Better to do one thing slowly and well than six things fast and badly.

Lesson learned.