Cyanide & Happiness @ Explosm.net

So here’s the straight deal.

I work a twelve hour shift.  I am entitled, in those twelve hours, to forty five minutes of break.  I get a twentyfive minute break somewhere between the third and fifth hour of my shift and a twenty minute break between the seventh and ninth.  If I work beyond the fifth or ninth hour without being sent back to station to take my break, I am “Booked out of the system”, meaning that my vehicle ceases to be available for jobs.

While I am on a break, I am unavailable for jobs.  The breaks are not paid and as such, the time is mine to do with as I please.   I should not get despatched to jobs, nor should I be asked to attend.

This can lead to the unfortunate situation of a job happening right around the corner from you, but you knowing nothing about it, because you are on a break, on your way back to station to have a break, or perhaps heading back to station after the end of your shift.  In all these cases, you are unavailable for despatch and as such will not be told about jobs nearby to you.

The tabloids *love* this fact, because it makes for wonderful headlines :”Ambulance crew feast on roast beef and yorkshire puddings while communist illegal immigrant paedophile sets drug crazed dangerous dog on war hero’s orphan toddler, child dies while paramedics look on, sipping chilled Moet.”

Funnily enough, that depiction isn’t completely accurate.  In a number of cases, crews have downed fork and turned out to jobs near by, or offered to work on beyond the end of their shift.  I’ve done it myself, volunteering to leave my scran behind to attend this call when the alternative was to send a single responder.  And when joyriders called in a hoax “kid vs car - traumatic cardiac arrest” in an attempt to throw the pursuing police cars off their tail, EVERY crew in the Station turned out.

Because you just do, don’t you?

Ignorance, thankfully, is often bliss.  I once booked myself off for a meal break just as a job was arriving on my screen, the transmissions obviously passing each other in the ether, the message sounded horrible “Child caller, sounds of screaming in background.”

My colleague took the keys out of my hand and spoke kindly, but firmly.

“There are other crews, you can’t treat everyone.  Come and take a break.”

You’d have to be a stone-hearted bastard to refuse to attend a cardiac arrest, whether you’re in the middle of your food, or overdue a break.  But the dilemma comes about when we start to work our way down the list, I consider my break to be more important than your cut finger, or split eyebrow.  Not to mention the fact that calls frequently sound far worse than they really are.

So I present to you a number of hypothetical situations.  You are an ambulance technician eating lunch in the station when the phone rings, you are the only available resource, control realise that you’re dining and apologise, but you know, you’ve gotta get those patients seen.

Bearing in mind that NOT resting and eating will leave you fatigued and potentially dangerously distracted while driving and making clinical decisions, for which of these jobs will you turn out, allowing your food to congeal and which will you finish your sandwiches before attending?

For simplicity’s sake, I’d suggest listing your comments as “Go” or “No”, eg “2. Go”

1. 40 year old male (YOM), collapsed, drunk and incapable

2. 21YOM cardiac arrest

3. 30 year old female(YOF) assaulted,broken wrist

4. 23 YOM, deliberate self harm injuries, not seriously bleeding.

5. 60YOF, emergency interhospital transfer for neuro-surgery.

6. 2YOM, fall, head injury, concious and breathing.

7. House fire, persons reported.

8. 75YOM seizure, now concious, facial injuries, police in attendance

9. 80 YOF, fall, broken wrist.

10. 14YOM drug overdose, unconcious, ?breathing.

11. 40YOM drug overdose, unconcious, ?breathing.

12. 30YOF, depressed.

13. 92YOM, RTA, Pedestrian vs Car.

14. 101YOF cardiac arrest, caller states body “cold and stiff”

15. 1YOF, not completely awake, not hungry, persistent crying.

Your results, and thoughts, are most welcomed.

Pre day shift breakfast.

Oats.

Milk.

Cinnamon.

Raisins.

Mmmmm.

Maybe I’ll treat myself, I shouldn’t, but I love sugar in my porridge.

Grabbing the sugar bowl, I shake it gently over my concoction…apparently the sugar’s got damp somewhere along the line and, just below the powder-dust upper surfaces, lies a behemoth of solidified sucrose of around about a metric ton.

Which falls into my bowl and immediately dissolve.

I have no more milk or raisins….

Fuck it.

Into the microwave, two minutes, ping.

Now my teeth itch.

80 YOF CCP

Her husband, demented, bumping about behind us, the perfect mix of understanding to scare him and not understanding to scare him more.

“Will you manage?” he asks “Will you manage alright?”

83 YOF - Fallen from bed.

Her carer finds the three of us chatting in her room, the crumbs from her tea and toast on the bedside table.  She was lonely and scared, so we tarried, I mooched about her kitchen as dawn’s light stepped in the window, buttering bread, adding a medicinal sugar or two.  She nudges Benny-  “He’s a good lad…useful…keep a haud of him.”

31 YOF ?D&I

Finding your housekeeper at the bottom of A. the stairs and B a litre of Smirnoff may weaken your mutual professional relationship.

2YOF Seizing.

Is there a law that says toddlers must be dressed in brown cordouroy dungarees?

26YOM Ambulance Technician -Stressed and insomniac.
He needs to study, and sleep, and work the extra hours to afford to buy a flat.  He’s a lot on his plate.

It’s oh so terribly fashionable for those in the higher echelons of the health service to do some “back to the floor” time, where they come along on a shift and observe their staff at work.

Typically when this happens in the ambulance service, it seems that people come out for a day shift.  Not a whole day shift, you understand.  Just a few hours in the afternoon.  Enough to see a blue-light drive and a GP transport job.  Enough to sit with gimlet eyes and declare, in a voice just above those used to discuss one’s time in ‘Nam, that “I’ve been out with the crews…I know what they face each day.”

I’ve just spoken to a gentleman so high up in our management structure that I’m surprised he doesn’t have a permanent nosebleed.

He’s riding along on an RRU tonight.

Tonight is a Saturday, the first Saturday after pay-day.  It’s pissing rain, the streets are going to go mental and he’s planning on staying for the whole night.

*salute*

Did your Mammy never teach you to knock before entering someone’s workplace?

Because regardless of the fact that it’s on wheels and people climb in and out all the time?

This is my office.

You do not have the right to open the doors.  Even if we are blocking the road.

You do not have the right to ask us if we’re “going to be long?”

Your journey is not as important as my job.

Because see this kid?

This one right here.

You might find him hard to spot, he’s very small.

He shouldn’t really be here, he was due to be born next week, but emerged a little early.

Six weeks early, in fact.

And do you see how his skin is sucked in between his ribs with each breath he takes?

Do you see how fast he’s breathing?  Nobody should have to breathe sixty times a minute to stay alive.

Do you see this triangle of purple across his nose and lips?

We call that central cyanosis.

Without Benny and I looking after him?

He’s fucked.

His mother is watching us work, she is blissfully unaware of how sick he is.  She appears, thankfully, somewhat glaikit.

A combination of shock at your sheer gall, distraction by my patient’s condition and an attempt to retain professionalism has stopped me yelling at you, shoving you backwards down the steps, calling the police to have you lifted for interfering with our work.

Instead I snap that I’ll be “As long as I need to do my job.”

Your eyes flick about the back of the vehicle, you’ve apparently not spotted the kid, because I see the moment you notice his tiny feet sticking out of the bottom of the blanket.

You flush, mumble something under your breath and slink back to your car, softly closing the doors behind you.

I fear that, being the foetid, flaccid sac of bones and plasma that you are, the rightful shame of what you’ve done may not hit you.

But I pray that it does.

- Written with a bellyful of haggis and clapshot, cold beer in the glass and dark, dark chocolate waiting for me.  Happy Burns’ Night.  Slainté. -

Sleep patterns fucked all tae fuck.

Woken from a nice dream where someone warned me what would be in my pre-entry exam.

Lay in bed staring at the ceiling for an hour before getting up and sitting here.

Day shift in an hour.

I’m a fairly easy going guy.  Calm, tolerant, outwardly serene.  It takes a lot to scratch this smiley surface and expose the raging howler monkey within.

But one word will do it, one word is my hair-trigger, the blue paper to my supa-fly TNT and that word is…

“Turn”.

People insist on using it to describe patients who aren’t responding normally, or who’ve blacket out.  “He’s taking a turn, son.” can mean the patient is convulsing, or smacked off their chops, or suffering a haemorrhagic CVA.  They might be acting funny because they’re drunk, or because they’re dead.

It means nothing.  And yet it still appears on the screen - “Pt having a funny turn - making strange noises.”

What kind of strange noises? Are they strange “I’m aspirating gastric juices” noises?  Or are they “I’m singing along to Sadé with my eyes closed” noises?

I accept that callers can’t be expected to give medical chapter and verse,  but surely the call-handlers can intercept this loathsomely vague phrase.  They do it for other jobs,  we don’t get sent to “Some cunt’s chibbed anither boy a sair yin an’ there’s aw blood pishing ower ma new suite.”

If I’m honest, the reason I hate the word so vehemently is because is disarms me; it gives me no indication of how scared to be while going in.  A turn can be life-threatening, or left at home with a note for the GP.  Will I be hoovering gallons of vomit out of someone’s airway, or will we put them back to bed with a cuppa and a Rich Tea?

The job has too many unknown unknowns already…and they scare me.

New look.

Check it out, Santa’s offski.

Still hacking about with the edges, so forgive me if things are a little screwy.

And yes, that’s me up there.

Yes, I have a love-heart on my steth.

Yes, I get the piss ripped for it.

No, I don’t care.

Mad props to Trina for the photo.

So far.

You may remember a few weeks ago I was raving about wanting to be rechristened Turtle Bunbury, because, as we can all see, it’s the best name in the world.

Yeah, so anyway.

Mr Bunbury apparently follows his track-backs as diligently as I do and left a comment.

You should all go and visit his page and buy his books and ask him not to sue me