- Female, late 60's, left sided arm pain, relieved with GTN, recently discharged from hospital...and promptly recharged to hospital (well...admitted is probably the more correct term....but if you can be discharged, don't you get recharged at some point in time?).
- Stood down, call cancelled. I had an inkling this would happen...the ocation was 20km away, and was a report from someone driving by of a person lying on the ground. Thanks to the police, we got to go back to our beloved depot.
- Priority one inter facility transfer - from one hospital to another. Interesting case this one actually, our patient had had a minor accident a couple of hours previously. To cut a long story short, the patient was not acting strange after the accident because of the accident, she actually had the accident because of having a body wide infection, with a couple of other things going on. Eventless transport, but some good insight thanks to the nice doc and nurse escort. Also an eye opener: you never know what could have caused an accident or funny behaviour!
- Kid who had grabbed mums sleeping tablets. Two of them to be precise. Two and a half hours prior to our dispatch. I didn't really clue in why we got sent light and sirens, but I was happy that kiddiewinks was alright. We transported mum and kid to hospital for a checkup. En route, child showed me he had a little bit of tummyache, so I gave him one of our great little vomit bags. He then proceeded to open it up, stick his head in to the bag, and make loud farting noises. Yep, this kid is healthy, and this is a taxi job :-)
- Male, Post assault in pub. No ordinary party at the pub though. It was flintstones night! I was met by Fred, one of the security fellows, who walked me though the club and introduced me to Barny, our patient. Wilma was on scene too, applying some TLC. And Betty was quite upset about her boyfriend. And the whole situation was quiet comical - literally.
- Picked up a job on our way back to a fitting octogenarian. Poor fellow didn't know what had happened, but he was compliant and came to hospital with us. His wife was pretty upset about the whole situation, and calming her down was not easy, as she didn't speak english.
- RFDS transfer for a non STEMI patient.
- Stood down, picked up a Priority One.
- Female complaining of migraine. But with associated health issues - so warranted an ambulance if you ask me.
If you were to see my case sheets, you would see a direct correlation between progressing of nighttime, the readability of my handwriting and the amount of information on the sheet. Working at 4am brings out the minimalist in you, treatment wise.
I did an additional Sunday nightshift for a mate who did a dayshift for me the other week. Actually, it was bastard mate who tried to tell me he did two resuscitations in a row.
Well, his dream job is to have a really off-yer-knob psychiatric patient. So I told him just that: We had a really psycho crazy mofo who we had to inject with Midazolam and Haloperidol, or else the police would have had to Tazer him. We also tied him down to the stretcher, and placed the scoop stretcher on top of him (tied down again), as a sort of makeshift cage, in case he arched up again. Wow, what a job, crazy.
Well, of course non of this happened, but revenge is sweet. In reality, it was a very cruisy night:
- Stood down for a Priority 1
- 80+ female post collapse, heart and abdo problems, all around not too healthy. Off to hospital.
- Transfer hospital to mens hostel. Nice fellow, great carers!
- 80+ female, who tripped whilst going to the telephone. Probably won't be coming back home, she had broken some bones and was aware of the implications it had. I felt sorry, held her hand, but couldn't speak her language. Sad.
- Stood down, the police took care of our person lying on the pavement.
The shift was good. I worked with another paramedic who I really get on with well. Throughout our jobs, we had monty python blaring on the radio, and we were singing along to such hits as "always look on the bright side of life", "eric the half-a-bee" and "never be rude to an arab". Brilliant.
