There’s another reason I’ve not been writing here so much.

And it’s all down to you guys.

Earlier this year, almost entirely down to the kindness of my readers here, I got to fly out to the UAE and work on the Abu-Dhabi Desert Challenge. You can read my stories from that time on the link above.

While I was in the UAE, the Chief Medical Officer, Patch, casually mentioned that he was recruiting a team of medics to work on the Formula 1 Grand Prix which was to have its inaugural Emirates competition at a track that was under construction at the time.

Buzzing after a week of helicopters in the desert, I made sure Patch was clear that I wanted in and was thrilled when he simply nodded.

“Ok.”

Just like that? No interview? No application form?

Cool.

I came home, told folks at work about the work I’d been allowed to take part in and put thoughts of F1 out of my mind.

Until a few months ago, when the emails started coming back in, supplying us with dates and briefings, requesting clothing sizes and photocopies of documents, ID and certification.

My spine started tingling.

From then til now, I’ve received increasingly exciting messages each week and again I’m astonished time on time by the casual opulence of the state we’re working in. One email is casually entitled “Evening entertainment” and the text body is written in terms that suggest a group of local musicians have been hired to tinkle the ivories in the background each evening. On opening the attachment, it becomes clear that the “entertainment” includes Beyonce Knowles, The Black Eyed Peas, No Doubt, Jamiroquai, Kings of Leon and Aerosmith.

Just a few local lads with guitars, really.

Another message breaks down the S.O.Ps for the event, in case of a crash, the FIA car will scramble, closely followed by an FIV (Fast Intervention Vehicle) staffed by a doctor and paramedic. If needs be, dedicated extrication teams aer available to remove drivers from cars and a host of ambulances can transport casualties to the on-site clinic (including resus and theatre) and the onwards by helicopter to one of two designated hospitals.

I hoped I’d find myself track-side, maybe standing by on a corner of the track or assisting in the clinic.

What I didn’t expect was the email that told me I’d been chosen to ride in an FIV, operated by a professional racing driver and clinically lead by senior medical staff.

Not just trackside, but on-track and with a response capacity.

Awesome.

What I’ve had to reset in my head is the concept that I need to pack stacks of equipment with which to live in the desert. This time there will be no tents, we apparently have dormitory facilities with kitchens and bathrooms on-site within the racing village.

This time my flights are paid for. In March we joked that “in the desert, no-one can hear you scream”, this time the messages run “Professional standards will be maintained at all times, please be aware that the event is televised and anticipated audience numbers may run to 400 million”.

The pressure is pretty huge and I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t nervous. Its a huge event and a massive privilege not only to be asked to attend, but to have landed a major role on the team. However, I look over the staff list and familiar names and faces spring up time and again, Patch, Gus, Nina, Hurls, Christina, Booker, Rolf, Lisa, Laura. Mates and colleagues.

My rucksack is packed on the floor in front of me, I have a few wee errands I need to run before I drive to the airport tonight, but they’re nothing that will hold me back.

Tomorrow morning I’ll be on my flight out to Abu-Dhabi and I’ll be back in a week.

I’ll take photos, I’ll write stories.

I’ll be back soon.

Look after the place while I’m gone.

Things have been a little quieter on here recently for a few good reasons. The first is that I’ve had the past week off and have spent it hanging out with with DigitalSean, DigitalKatie and little DigitalLouis. On the ostensible hand, this is because they moved to Just-Down-The-Road a while back and it’s been nice to catch up, but on the other it reflects the fact that Aarayan moved to Berlin some time ago and, frankly, I’ve missed having a mate to just hang out with.

Everyone else works dumb nine to five hours and through the day I tend to kick my heels a bit.

DigitalKate is a teacher, so last week’s Tattie holidays gave us a great opportunity to catch up. We saw Up in 3D at the pictures, had lunch and coffee and on Wednesday she suggested that we go for a swim with DigitalLouis.

I’m not a great swimmer, me, but I enjoy bobbing about a bit. What I did fancy was a long soak in a sauna or steam room. I sent her a text.

“Does your gym have a sauna?”

She wrote back.

“It has three…”

“?! What kind of place are we going?”

“You’ll see, I’d suggest we just swim tomorrow though, not fair on Louis otherwise. We can go back on Friday.”

My experience of going swimming is very much a Cooncil affair. You know the sort, wooden slatted doors, abandoned plasters on the changing room floor, a single hairdryer in reception that costs 20p for a minute and a paddling pool of chlorine and verruca suspension that you’re obliged to splosh through before entering the pool.

She sent me another text.

“Also, just bring shorts. They have towels.”

On the day we headed in to the reception and it suddenly struck me that I may no longer be in Kansas. I had to restrain myself from texting Kate from the changing rooms with a message that would have run “Fuck me…can you spell luxurious?”

There’s just something a bit lovely about a locker room dressed in dark, polished wood, leather upholstery and a waiting area with mirrors and dressing tables.

And yes, I was in the right changing room, thankyou.

Wrapped in my lovely, fluffy complimentary robe I wandered out of the changing rooms trying not to look too lost.

The corridor I walked down didn’t LOOK like it was pointed towards a swimming pool. It looked like it might lead to a conference centre. I was wearing my shorts and a goonie. This could be awkward.

But nothing to fear, because around the corner I found myself by the side of a wide, blue pool with loungers at its side and an array of vast windows letting in natural light.

Now this? This I could get used to.

So we swam and played catch with DigitalLouis (well. We played catch, he played “kick the ball into a grown-up’s face”) and, when the wee man got knackered, Kate said to me.

“I would suggest you go and explore for a bit.”

So I did.

And there I found…(I went to the spa and I lounged in…)
Hammam (like an Imam, maybe, with more ham?), aroma grotto (nicer than it sounds), Rock Sauna (bring your leather jacket), Biosauna (next year, Mech-Sauna!), something called a laconium, (in which I assume one practices laconicism), hot showers (mmm!), cold showers (oooh!), crushed ice rub down, Cleopatra baths (no asses milk) and a rooftop hydropool (as opposed to…a geo-pool? Jelly-pool? Weasel-pool? What the fuck ELSE do you fill a pool with?)

Suffice to say it’s not quite Porty baths.

Nor is it the kind of place one takes a nearly-two-year-old.

So on Friday morning I met Kate after she’d ditched…excuse me… dropped off Louis at nursery and, having stopped off at a supermarket to load up a bag with grapes and juice and other decadent nibblies, we proceeded to spend six hours lying around in various states of heat and humidity including some frankly orgasmic big stone slab bed things. My only regret was that I forgot to take along a decent newspaper.

Next time, though.

I…glided through the rest of the evening. Nothing hurt. My shoulders were down, my neck pliable and free of tingling or bony crunching noises.

You know the noise the TV used to make, after they’d run out of programmes? The little white dot and that “boooooop” noise. That was the noise my brain made when I wasn’t actively thinking about something. It was glorious and it hung around my shoulders for the whole day afterwards.

I’ll be having some more of that, thankyou.

Having cleared from a job in Wester Hailes, I’m watching my partner complete the paperwork when an ice cream van pulls past us, its chimes ringing around the high rise flats.

It’s almost midnight. Not a traditional time for buying ice cream.

It doesn’t take much deep thinking to conclude that maybe, just maybe, in the heroin centre of the city, he’s moreinvolved in Mr Smacky than Mr Whippy.

Still.

“Fancy an ice-cream?”

She grins at me from the passenger seat.

“Sure.”

I’m out of the cab, jogging up to the driver’s window. I tap on the glass.

The driver stares at me, a gentle sheen of sweat across his brow. He rolls the window down.

“Hello?”

“Alright mate, you still serving?”

“Am I…uhh.. what?”

“Still serving?”

“Uhh…..yes?”

“Awesome. Two ninety-nines, please.”

“Two ninety….oh…ummm….ok.”

He hops from his seat into the back of the truck and stares at us shiftily while he swirls ice-cream into two cones.

“So are you guys…busy…tonight?”

“Not too bad.”

“How come you’re here?”

“Wee man in the block over there, he’s fine.”

“Oh right…that’s good…raspberry sauce?”

“Please.” we answer in unison.

“Sooo….are the…polis coming?”

“Dunno.”

“Cos, sometimes, when you guys come, the polis come too, eh?”

“Aye. Sometimes.”

“But not this time?”

“I dunno, mate. I haven’t called them.”

“So they’re not coming?”

“Not for us.”

“Cool. Cool. Right.”

His shoulders, for once, relax down from around his ears; he hands us the cones.

“These are on the house.”

“Ta.”

A young woman with abdominal pain is straight forward enough, the patient is pleasant, polite and professional. The house is clean and tidy. But the woman sitting in the bathroom is howling like a gin-trapped animal. She gasps out an explanation between each painful spasm, explains that the pain woke her from sleep and that it is “ten out of ten”.

I shouldn’t say this, but I’m going to.

I don’t often believe people when they tell me that pain is 10/10. Mainly because I would imagine someone experiencing the worst pain of their life to be writhing and screaming on the floor and MOST of the people who tell me their pain is 10/10 are often texting their mates to ensure someone record Britain’s Got Retards, as they’ll be in the hospital for a few hours.

Also, a lot of these people are…radges. Chavs, scavs, jakes. The type of people I come home and rant about.

This is almost certainly class-ist, or person-ist, or something. It is definitely prejudiced.

Sue me.

The fact is, the woman in front of me is clean, pleasant and professional. She answers my questions as best she can while we examine her.

I believe her that her pain is 10/10 and she quantifies it further.

“I broke my leg once, open fracture of the patella. This hurts worse than that.”

That’ll do me.

I pop a line into her hand while my colleague gets syringes and flushes ready for the morphine and I quickly confirm with the patient that I’m not about to knock her off into some terribly anaphylactic death-spiral.

“No, I had morphine when I did my leg.”

“Did it work for you?”

“It put me on another planet.”

“That sounds nice right about now. Wanna go back?”

She nods, tears pouring from her eyes.

Ten minutes later she’s relaxed on the pillow, telling me she feels warm and drowsy and would I mind if she just closed her eyes for a moment?

I laugh.

“Morphine really works for you, then?”

“Uh-huh. This is lovely…wouldn’t it be nice to have this in the house?”

There’s a moments silence.

“With respect my love? I think what you’re aspiring to there is called “being a heroin abuser.”

“Oh yeah…oops.”

Just say no, kids.

We had an observer out with us this weekend, a young paramedic from North Carolina.

We discussed differences in protocol and practicalities between our two services.

And occasionally tripped up over language.

When we, as Scottish medics, take a blood sugar, we refer to is as a “BM”. I have no idea why, it’s one of those acronyms that stands alone as a word.

I am also aware that “BM” is a term used in the States by children to refer to the excretion of faeces.

“Bowel Movement”

It took our observer a shift and a half to admit that EVERY TIME we said “BM” to a patient, or to each other, she had to struggle to maintain her composure.

We suggested using “poopie” instead.

“Can you take a poopie from him while I get the defib ready?”

“Where did you put that poopie spike?”

“What’s his poopie? Is it ok?”

“His poopie’s down a bit, but he’s had something to eat, so that should sort it out.”

Walking to cross the road this afternoon, sunshine on the crossing signals, I depend on watching the oncoming traffic. A silver car approaches, slows, slows, cruises up to the crossing at approximately two miles an hour.

Perfect, she’s stopping. Lights must be red.

I step off the pavement.

The car keeps coming.

I make eye contact with the driver. An elderly lady. Her mouth a silent O.

There are many responses that one might have to a pedestrian stepping out in front of you.

Swerving is one.

Braking is another.

Accelerating might be a third.

If you’re from Glasgow.

The response I wasn’t anticipating was for the nice old lady to take both her hands off the wheel and cover her eyes, while continuing to roll forward in her endless, glacial, oncoming traffic death. It was a bit like watching a photophobic roller coaster patron.

A photophobic roller coaster patron who was trying, very slowly, to kill me.

Very slowly.

I saved my own life by thinking fast.

And walking a teeny, tiny bit faster.

Actually, I only took one step faster.

More of a skip, really.

A prance.

That’s it.

I pranced my way to survival.

Once safely on the opposite pavement I turned back, bemused and confused and struggling to understand why a car that was clearly intending to stop instead continued driving towards me.

I looked over my shoulder to see the car continuing to drive at two miles an hour down the street, a snake of traffic following behind like a furious funeral cortege.

Ah. That’s just the speed she drives at.

So, the past weekend I spent at a Casualty Simulation meeting, hanging out at a campsite near Loch Lomond. I’ve achieved a respectable length of service with the organisation that runs this, so much so that I spent most of my weekend training, expanding with newer members of staff on developing believable characters to adopt.

There’s a world of difference for medical staff who are ‘treating’ a patient with an injury vs dealing with a person with a back story, drives and fears and a wider social circumstance who has also suffered an injury or illness.

Further to this, I drank lots of gin, caught up with some dear friends and, when it became apparent on the first night that some of our newer volunteers snored like hippos drowning in phlegm, ended up sleeping in the ‘nerve centre’ of the weekend, rather than the dorms as arranged.

To suggest that I did no work that weekend isn’t entirely true, a scout group were also using the facilities and I was called upon to deal with a kid with ‘a splinter’. On examining him I found a tiny fleck of wood embedded in skin beside his finger nail. A pair of tweezers were procured from a first aid kit - “We’ve already tried that…” warned the scout leader. I grabbed hold of the fleck and pulled, the kid winced and I pulled harder.

An inch long thorn came sliding out of his finger, the scout yelping as it did so. A wipe, plaster and infection advice later, he left us to it, waving the thorn at our colleagues - “Look what came out of HIM!”

Home on Monday and I visited Station to polish the Parabike - I’d been asked to attend the SAS Annual Review (which, I thought, was an event run by the SAS to show off to the government what they’d been up to. Turns out it’s the other way around, an event that SAS are compelled to host by the government to account for their actions!).

The fact is, though, that the Parabike attracted a lot of positive press this summer and had a number of jobs with positive, life-saving actions. Also, it looks shiny.

At least, it does when I spend a day polishing it.

I sat for a couple of hours in the garage at work, washing the bike down and fitting the lights and sirens onto its frame. The lights are great. The siren is…a bit weedy. It’ll do just fine for moving crowds, but I’m dubious as to its abilities to keep me 100% safe in rush hour. Never mind, it’s not as though I’m doing traffic stops with it.

Sarge met me in the corridor. Being a Proper Important Officer, his company car is also fitted with lights and horns, though we have enjoyed ribbing him since his promotion about the frankly insipid noise his car’s siren makes. He looked the bike over.

“Was that you testing your sirens earlier?”

“Yup.”

“You never, ever get to take the piss out of my car’s systems again. Right?”

“Yes, Guv.”

Tuesday morning I was at Station early to load the bike into a Patient Transport Vehicle and drive to *shudder* Clydebank. For those of you who are unfamiliar with Scottish geography, you need to know that we have Edinburgh, in the east and Glasgow, in the west. They are seperated by the M8 motorway.

I get a nosebleed if I get too close to Glasgow, so indoctrinated in Edinburgh life am I.

Clydebank? Where I was going to for the Annual Review?

It’s on the OTHER SIDE of Glasgow. I had to DRIVE THROUGH Glasgow. By the time I’d arrived, I had fewer teeth, more scars from stab wounds and a desire to deep-fry domestic violence.

I spent the day drinking free coffee, initially making very, very polite converstaion with people who are Important Enough To End My Career With A Raising Of Their Eyebrows

Within an hour or so, these people who were IETEMCWAROTE were cracking jokes, matching me latté for latté and agreeing that everyone sees the same problems in the NHS. Nicola Sturgeon had a nice chat with me about the Parabike and then I ate lunch and drove back along the motorway. Ooooh, it was a harrowing day. Harrowing, I tell you.

Today I did a schools and nursery visit nearby the Station and tomorrow?

Hah.

Tomorrow morning I’m going to see Digitalkatie’s Media and Information Technology And Computers And That Class who are, apparently, making a horror movie.

A horror/slasher movie.

In school.

And this is education?

Anyway. The class wants a paramedic to load a body into an ambulance and drive it away. And that’s going to be me.

I figure, it’s just another PR/Schools event? Right?

They’re fifth years.

They’re not going to want to dress up.

Are they?

I’m spinning in the final moments of leaving the house for a shift when my phone rings.
“This is Kal.”
“Kal? It’s Scott.”

Scott is a first aider. He’s come a long way from the student at the first aid course I met several years ago and now occupies the dubiously honourable position of President of the Red Cross First Aid Society at Edinburgh University. He was one of the first aiders in the team that I accompanied to Germany this summer and, through my camera lens, I watched him handle simualtions that posed catastrophic chest trauma and full thickness burns.

“Mate, I’m planning the lectures for the group meetings this Autumn. Any chance you could do a presentation on Paediatrics, or bring a vehicle along and show the new guys around the kit?”

“Sure.”

“Which one?”

I’ve been neglectfully absent from the first aid group this semester, my writing class clashes directly. But my class has finished, my Monday nights are free and I want to get involved again.

“How’s about both?”

“Are you sure?”

“Sure I’m sure.”

“That’d be brilliant, cheers.”

We coordinate diaries and organise dates. I’m about to say my goodbyes when he stops me again.

“One other thing?”

“Yeah?”

“Any chance I could come out observing with you some night?”

“Sure, I’ll let you know my shifts and you can pick some.”

We hang up, I go to work and shake hands with Hoggle, a new-start with the personality and dress-sense (in the words of Pally) of a stack of fucking Opal Fruits. She’s magic, this lassie, used to sing in a band with Node, she oozes banter and has developed the skill of talking to patients like they’re humans while still eliciting clinical information from them under the table.

We’re part way through checking the vehicle when the phone on station rings, a man has been found “unconscious and vomitting” in a square in the middle of town.

On scene we park behind bollards and hike into the square, a scruffy man lies in the recovery position under Victoriana lampposts, a squad of urban drinkers crowd around him. One man kneels by his side, pinching the patient’s ear.

I grin as I recognise him.

“Alright, mate?”

He smiles back at me.

“Scott, meet Hoggle. Hoggle, this is Scott. He absolutely knows his shit.”

Hoggle is attending, so I take a back seat and swing my eyes over the scene. On one side of the crowd a man, possibly Polish, is shouting at us. I’d missed him when we walked on, but now he’s pointing at the patient and yelling at us all. I raise my left hand, fingers spread and gently lower it.

“Calm down, sir.”

He shouts louder, steps forward. I lift my Maglite, rest its end on my shoulder and click the button; the blue/white beam dazzles him as I repeat, louder.

“Calm. Down.”

He skulks back to his plastic bottle of cider on the steps opposite.

Scott is handing over to Hoggle, he concludes by turning to me.

“I’ve had a bit of an argument with EMDC. They wanted me to leave him on his back, but I wanted him in recovery…”

I look down at the patient, his mouth and nose smeared in drool and vomit and shrug.

“Until we get here, it’s your airway mate. You do what you think you need to.”

“But they said…”

“The instructions aren’t written for people who know what to do. They reckon it’s easier to notice a respiratory arrest if you keep him supine. With no kit? I’d have him on his side too.”

Hoggle is pinching the patient hard.

“Kal, I’m getting nowhere.”

I step to her side and deploy my complete range of painful stimuli.

I also get nowhere.

There aren’t many drunks you genuinely can’t wake up, but this guy’s done it. I suddenly realise that this may not be your average D&I.

“Blood sugar?”

“Please.”

Hoggle digs in the bag and we find ourselves remembering the risks of being fired out on a job before completing our daily checks.

“Shit. Kal, we’ve no lancets.”

“Just use a small needle.”

She does so, drawing blood from his finger, but then comes up with a more concerning shortfall.

“No sharps bin either.”

Not having a sharps bin makes me sweat, the thought of anyone getting a needlestick injury from a sharp I’ve used is a nightmare. I take the needle from her and, using a pair of forceps, slide a sheath back over it and push the whole bloody thing into the mud between two paving slabs.

Scott body-checks the patient and helps me roll him onto his back. I slip an OPA into his mouth, but he immediately gags on it.

“Down the nose, then…Hoggle, can you get the bed and the suction? Scott, gimme a jaw-thrust here, please?”

They step to it while I lube up a nasal airway, lewd and long and rubbery. Twisting it into his right nostril it stalls, stutters, caught on some unseen nasal ridge or architecture. I’m about to retract it when it slips in to its hilt and I turn to the bag to get an oxygen mask out when Scott’s voice calls me back, alarmed.

“Whoa! Shit! Whoa!”

Bright arterial blood bubbles up the NPA, its lipstick crimson stark against the artificial pistachio of the rubber airway; maybe I’ve torn a polyp, or banged into the nasal wall. Blood looks dramatic, but at least we’ve got a way to move air into him if we have to.

The nosebleed stops spontaenously, but we leave the patient on his side, jaw thrust in place while Hoggle arrives with the bed and suction. I pass a suction tube down the nasal airway and sook fresh blood from its lumen.

“Let’s get him in the motor, hey?”

Hoggle has, in her rush to grab the suction, forgotten to put a blanket on the trolley, I’m buggered if I’m lying this puking, bleeding monster straight onto the mattress. Would you want your granny to lie on that afterwards?

“Can you run and get a blanket, Scott?”

He nods.

“First cupboard on the right, yeah?”

“That’s the one. Cheers.”

He legs it. Hoggle pats the patient down for ID and MedicAlert while I roll his eyes open. Pupils reactive and equal, but definitely no blink reflex when I brush my gloved finger over the surface of the eyeball.

Scott returns, Hoggle takes the blanket from him and lays it out on the bed. He reaches into my field of vision.

“Thought you might like this, too.”

Daffodil yellow, clean and bright and welcome as sunshine on a rainy day, he’s grabbed a new sharps bin from the vehicle. I retrieve the errant sharp from between the paving slabs and drop it into the proffered bin.

It’s a little thing, but it marks the start of us really taking hold of this scene. Everything is tidy, everything is under control. Airway is secure, sharps are disposed.

Scott helps us haul our kit and patient back to the vehicle, he laughs at me.

“When I asked to come out observing? I didn’t mean so soon.”

We thank him for his help and move to transport. At hospital Hoggle raves about Scott, I text him with her compliments - “Hoggle wants to know if you can be a bystander at every job?”

Observers are hard work, however slick they are. As the qualified member of staff on a vehicle you are responsible for the safety and actions of yourself, the probationer, the observer and the patient.

But an observer that spots problems and solves them without being asked?

Sure, Scott. You can come observing.

House clean and bag packed for a weekend away, I retire to the deli downstairs to edit a script.

Rejuvenated by time, I spot its wide, fat bellies.

A coffee mine, sword in hand, I’ll hack and cut, split and twist, shape it and polish it up.

Caffeine, space and determination will cut 15 pages to 10. Hopefully while retaining the potency of the original.

Wish me luck.

My partner is so new and young, you can still see where the cable ties held her fast in er packaging when they delivered her to station, smiling out at us behind the cellophane, her accessories and uniform all in their own heat moulded plastic cocoon.

We’re called to a hotel, very posh, for a female “diabetic, confused, not talking”. We haul everything up with us, including the defib, electronic prf and a bag of liquid glucose to inject into her veins. These jobs are pretty straight forward; we push their blood sugar levels up, give them some advice on keeping safe and leave the patient in the care of someone responsible.

The hotel is tall, I don’t want to be running back to the vehicle, I’ll take the lot, thankyou.

Even the paperwork necessary to not transport her.

In the room we meet two women in plush bathrobes, one looking a little dishevelled and sheepish. Sweaty and tired, she woke her friend from sleep by trashing and grunting in her sleep. The friends acted fast, helping her to drink Lucozade which had her rapidly compos mentis again.

There is nothing for us to do but check her blood again and agree that she should stay here with her girlfriends. No sense in ruining the girls weekend away unnecessarily. I phone down to reception for some toast and jam for the patient and, on leaving, arrange with the concierge to have housekeeping swing by to change her sheets.

The service is, as one would expect, impeccable. I fantasise about having a concierge service at EVERY job.

“Hello? Concierge? He’s shat himself again, can you have someone scrub the ambulance down for us? Also…I think he might have needles in his pockets, pat him down, won’t you? Coffee for two while we wait? Why not.”

We’re riding the lift down to the ground floor when my partner shakes her head.
“Thats great, isn’t it?”

“The hotel?”

“No, that woman. I hope I’m still able to go out and enjoy life when I’m her age. That’s just incredible, her and all her mates just out and having a good time. It’s sweet, really, isn’t it?”

I draw breath…feel old…and exhale silently.

The patient is 42.