Industry
Originally uploaded by Kalshassan.

You know, if you guys can’t comment nicely to each other, I’m pulling over and we’ll just sit by the side of the road until you can.

(Yeah, like I don’t *love* it when people start ‘debating’ in the comments. There’s only one thing worse than being talked about, and that’s not being talked about, right?)

Anyway, in the interim, we’ll have a funky shot from Prague. It’s some dude welding with his funky Czech orange trousers and purple shirt. Those crazy Czechs, they can fairly clash when they want to.

A month ago I was partnered with Jaffa, a great girl who came out of the college a fortnight after I did. We spent the first few jobs shitting ourselves, what were we to do without a paramedic, or at least an older, experienced technician? We were two probationers, we’re not meant to know anything, adrift without grownups!

Within a couple of hours, we’d worked out the advantages to working like this, without the older, more experienced colleagues being with us we had no excuse to rest back at jobs, we were it. We arrived in the big white box with flashing lights and jumped out with our kit and fixed people, because there was nobody else to turn to and go “I don’t know what to do.”

On more than one occasion older patients mentioned how young we both were, I wondered how many of them were thinking “What’s going on? I called an ambulance and a couple of kids turned up.”

By the third night we’d swung into a routine and an hour before we were due to finish the radio chirped.

“Kal’s vehicle, divert to cardiac arrest at **** Avenue, RRU’s enroute.”

We glanced at each other, Jaffa gulped.

“The RRU’ll get there first, right?”
I nodded. “Yeah, I’d imagine so.”

On pulling into the Avenue, there is nary a RRU in sight. We’re it.

Equipment is lugged up the stairs and we start our basics, airways in the mouth, bag-valve mask over the guy’s face and shock pads on his chest, blood smeared from an unexplained injury around the room, his wife choking tears in the hallway.

The RRU arrives and we work him, but he’s DADCB (dead as dead can be), we pull his ET tube out, remove cannulae and pack our life-saving debris up into an orange bag. We discuss our next move.

“Do we put him back to bed, d’you think?”

I glance around the room, it would be nice to put him back to bed, prop pillows behind his head to disguise the slack in his jaw that hangs his chin on his chest, his mouth a hollow cave that screams “corpse”. But we can’t.

“There are too many questions, there’s blood here and here, but it’s of different ages, this is fresher than this. Let’s get the cops.”

We all nod in agreement, the RRU crew troop off, leaving us with sombre paperwork and a long wait for the police. In the living room the gentleman’s mother and brother have arrived to be with his wife, the three of them sit anxiously on the edge of ratty sofas, start up when I enter the room.

“I’m afraid I have some very bad news…” I begin and they all nod, they all know.

“What happened?”

I have no answers for them, I’m no pathologist, I can only tell them what I know.

“His heart had stopped when we got here and he wasn’t breathing for himself, so we’ve passed a tube into his throat to give him oxygen and given him drugs to try and stimulate his heart into beating. We’ve been breathing for him and compressing his chest in the meantime, but I’m afraid there’s nothing more that can be done, he died a few minutes ago.”

That’s not what they want to hear, they know all that, they mouth the last words of each sentence and I give them the spiel - “stimulate his heart…” “that can be done…”

They want to know why, how.

I don’t know.

“I’ll give you folks some time and space, the police will arrive shortly, but until then, we’ll be out in the corridor if you need anything.”

There are no ways of telling people the truth “I’m not convinced this isn’t suspicious so I’m securing the scene until the police get here.”

Half an hour of parade rest later and the police are with us, we hand them our paperwork, alert them to our concerns and head off into the night, two kids playing at a grownup’s job.

Since then Jaffa and I have both been trusted with taking new staff out on shift, ‘being the grown up’ at each job, having the final say, watching everyone’s actions and reactions to make sure that we all stay safe. No longer are we the scared, wide eyed kids that turned out to this job, snapping at errant children as our stress levels climbed. We grow and develop, take charge and responsibility, grow our shoulders into our uniforms. It’s starting to fit us both.

Yesterday I did laundry, load after load, uniform, underwear, darks, whites, delicates. I marched up and down to the communal garden with baskets of wet clothes, pegged them onto the lines. Earphones in, sun shining, I chatted to my neighbour, her kid scampering around our feet, stomping on ants, running from lazily woken bumblebees.

This morning I stepped back downstairs to bring it in, imagining the cool air that the summer wind would have trapped inside their fibres, the stiffness of the sleeves, the fresh smell on the collars that would sit with me at work when everything else smells of sweat and bloody breath.

I picked through the building’s motley collection of bikes tethered to the bannister, hauled open the heavy, black back door of my stair and saw the rain.

Edinburgh’s rain is omnipresent; it hangs, concrete grey, over the high flats. It’s always there, insipid and bland as a smack addiction. Sometimes the city has good days, sometimes bad ones, but we all know the rain will come back, because it always does.

On the line, my laundry hangs like gralloched animals, limp sleeves, collars heavy with shitty, grime filled water.

I shake my head in disgust and head to the shops, the diet’s fallen by the wayside over the past few weeks, birthdays and breakups are bad for my waistline, I am miserable and so I eat, and so I feel guilty, and so I feel miserable, and so I eat.

My bags full of good intentions, I return home, dump them on the kitchen floor and glare at the sky, at the wet laundry.

Everything feels stagnant and damp.

I want clean, crisp collars, sunshine, clear intentions and defined spaces. I want to wrestle my shoulders out of the sopping, sobbing great coat I’ve got on, it weighs me down and makes each step harder than the last.

Fucking rain…

Terrified and embarrassed in equal measure, you’re still sitting on the toilet seat, phone in hand, when we come in.

Your hospital bracelet still on your wrist from leaving the ward, a termination, you tell us.

You sat down to pee and felt “something fall away” into the water beneath you.

We send you to the living room to sit on a bath towel and, gloves on, slide our hands into the murky water to remove…we dread to think. An arm? A leg? Something unrecognisable, but unequivocably human?

My partner’s fist rises from the depths like a Tennysonian hero, a chunk of placenta between his fingers. Dark as liver, firm as good steak with silky, blue-white wisps clinging to the surface. It’s rounded at one end, carved and pointed at the other, like a flint arrow head, but inarguably organic.

And not a foetus.

We nod at each other, flush it away and return to the lounge to give you the good news, to leave you at home and to return to our vehicle where we blow out our cheeks, shake our heads and punch clear.

I worked on two arrests last week. One was pretty straightforward, the other will almost certainly end up in court.

The former had a knot of onlookers who did a splendid job of being completely useless, I got an idea that they weren’t going to be brilliant when we arrived and saw them all shaking their heads at the one poor schmuck who was doing CPR.

As we worked they helped us by shouting “Go on, son, you can do it! Get him back!” as though we were in some Life And Death It’s A Knock Out Special. Some of them helped by stepping over us to use the cash machine next to us as we tubed, cannulated and defibrillated him in the street.

One wee woman grabbed my arm and sobbed “Don’t let him die, son, you mustn’t let him die.”
“Are you a relative, madam?” I asked, thinking she might be his wife and we could get some medical history.
She looked at me blankly.
“Nut.”
“But you do know the gentleman?”
“Nut.”
Unbefuckinglievable.

Still, we managed to elicit an audible “Ooohyah cunt!” from them when we shocked him the first time and he bucked off the floor. Apparently they thought that only happens in the movies.

Right folks, I’m off the map for the next 3 or 4 days, so I’ve left lots of work with Mrs Aarayan for you all to be getting on with…

The place needs a spruce up (by which I mean I need a new masthead and have to fix the sidebars) and I’m also thinking of making some TQ teeshirts, and my graphic skills are rubbish, so I thought we’d have a wee competition.

Your task is to produce/design either a new masthead or a teeshirt (or both!) for TQ that embodies the spirit of the blog, the struggle of the lowly emergency worker to save life and limb in treacherous and terrifying cirumstances….yadda yadda yadda.

You can use any medium you wish, extra points wil be given for entries that manage to convey a world weary sense of cynicism (I quite like “Trauma Queen - earning the same whether you make it or not.” and “Do I look like bloody Josh?”).

Please send JPGs to kalDOTtraumaqueenATgmailDOTcom

We’ll have a Tony Hart style gallery viewing once I’m back and the winner will receive a prize that I am yet to decide, it all depends on who they are. Ooooh! There we go, there’s the line, the winner will receive a PERSONALLY selected prize!
Fuck yeah, I should work for Readers Digest.

On you go guys, if you’re all finished quickly we can play heads down, thumbs up.

That’s ^ almost certainly incorrect.

Those of you who read SMM will know what’s been going on, those of you who don’t, probably should, he has my emotional honesty this month. I’ve got my stone.

It’s been a fortnight of tearful phone calls, blunt text messages and awkward cups of coffee. Of repeated conversations “Two and a half years, my doing, still hurts, you know?” I am the break-up doll, pull the string from my back and I’ll bring you right up to speed, distill an entire relationship down to an excerpt in the back of the Independent on Sunday - just enough that you can discuss us at dinner parties without looking like a philistine…or talk to each of us and not put your foot in it.

A fortnight of collected wisdom from older friends, of wan smiles and unmet glances. A conversation with The Parents.
“You know, at some point you’ll realise that sometimes things aren’t great and aren’t terrible, that everything’s just balancing out and it’ll seem really boring, but it’s not, it’s just stable.”
“Sounds hellishly adult.”
“It is, you’ll get used to it.”

I’ve worked this past week with new hands, old hands and hands a month longer in the job than I and, as Node put it, I’m “filling out the uniform.” Trusted to work with the newest guys on station, given the chance to prove I can handle myself and a partner, pulled discreetly aside into the kitchen, the office - “The new laddie doing ok?”

The early summer we’re enjoying has the city smelling of dust, rubber and washing lines The streets are filled with bare chested men and women in diaphonous skirts, they stand on corners with illicit cigarettes and cold beer, dogs run up and down the pavement or slither into the shade of parked cars, kids march home from the park with cricket bats and pads on their shoulders, young couples play-fight in public without the slightest hint of self-conciousness. I spend a week running back and forth to “police call - assault” around the city.

I wipe up cuts and scrapes, feel for shattered cheekbones or errant mandibles and announce to cops “He’s just fine, all yours.”

It’s all minor stuff, nobody dies, there are no RTAs, no cardiac arrests, no major trauma or violent punters, my new-start partner is antsy in the attendant’s seat, stabbing “clear from hospital” a little too fast, eager for the next tragi-drama.

SMM and I do-si-do, hurting and healing each other in equal measures, carving out our new roles and rules as we once carved out space together under a duvet too small for the two of us.

Nothing is great.
Nothing is terrible.

Back to my stone.

“We drink coffee and coffee and coffee and coffee
And coffee and coffee some more.
And he’ll go to work and she’ll take a sick day
And rot at the core.”
Regina Spektor - Buildings

Dear parent somewhere.

Your child was lying in the road while my partner and I scraped up the bloke who’d argued with a moving bus.

From the conversation his pal was having with him, it appears they were playing at being run over.

He was lying in a spot that I wouldn’t stand in, hi-vis jacket or otherwise.

We park the vehicle at this angle for a reason, stand in it’s ’shadow’ while we work so we don’t get flattened ourselves.

Your kid was not in the shadows, he was well out into the sunshine.

Our patient was an adult who’d been dealt a low speed, glancing blow by a vehicle; he had a fractured skull.

Thankfully I don’t know what your kid would look like were a ton of metal to drive over him at speed. The scene is well set, his mate by his side, the afternoon sunshine of his sixth summer shining on the wet tarmac, commuters bustling by.

I *do* know I’d have little to do. We have a clause - “Injuries incompatible with life.” which we invoke if more of you would be left behind than travel with us when we pick you up.

Child protection laws and political correctness be damned, I grabbed him by his jacket, hauled him onto his feet, hustled him onto the pavement and snapped at him “Not to be so bloody stupid”.

The tabloids panic if you let your kids out to play, the bogey-man lurks around every corner, if we’re to believe their hype.

Your kid is more at risk from himself.

Have a word, eh?

A police call for a male assaulted, his face looks like a cheap pizza. There are no assaults in the world that make your face look like expensive pizza; maxillo-facial fractures just can’t simulate proper chunks of spicy quail or sliced chanterelle.

“Alright mate? Jump in the motor for me and we’ll have a look at you?”
“Ah! An ambulance man!”
“That’s right.”
“Don’t you be touching my arse, now.”
Eh?
“Ummm, ok, I won’t.”
“Good.”
“So, what’s been going on tonight? Bit of hassle?”
“Yeah, a bit. Look, before we continue, can you promise me you’re not going to fuck me in the arse?”
Ohhh-kay
“Yes, I can absolutely promise you that.”
“Because I don’t want anything in my arse.”
“Whatever, mate, let’s have a look at your face, it looks sore.”
“You’re not going to shag me, then?”
Oh for God’s sake.
“Listen pal, I’m here because you’ve had your face burst, you need my help and I’m doing my job, so give me a bit of respect and let me get on with it, right?”
“Ok.”
“Thankyou.”
“Sorry.”
“No problem.”
“If you want to put your cock in my arse, that’s fine, I’ll not complain, you get on with it and I’ll stop making trouble.”
…
“Get out.”