- Male, not communicating. Really, he wasn't talking, moving - nothing. Physically healthy, but had a history of mental health problems. His mother was distressed, understandably. Not much we could do at scene, so transport to hospital for further psychiatric evaluation. Weird, strange, I felt like a sausage talking to him at home. But I gave him all I could, and I hope he could hear and understand me, and I hope I came across in a good manner.
- Hyperglycaemic patient (high blood sugar). Again, physically fine, but felt thirsty. This is a good sign of high sugar - it makes you sweat, which makes you thirsty, which makes you drink a lot, which makes you wee a lot. Also, the sugar is high in you blood, but not in the rest of your body (it can't reach there). So you eat a lot. In medical terms: Polydipsia, Polyurea & Polyphagia. Another cool bit of info: Back in ancient greece doctors could tell the difference between diabetes insipidus and diabetes mellitus by...tasting the patients urine. You see, all diabetes is, is a pateint excreting a lot of urine. Insipidus is due to the body having hormonal problems, which lead to increased urine excretion - you are born with this. Mellitus is the body either being resistant to insulin (type II - 99% of the time older onset) or not producing insulin itself (type I - an autoimmune disease, the body destroys its own pancreatic cells, you have this from birth). Anyway, I digress. We took our patient to hospital.
- RFDS transfer, liver problems.
- Patient deceased in Nursing Home (see seperate post above).
- Priority 1 to a cold. Patient very panicky. I managed to calm her down a little, but in the back of my mind the question lingered "you called 000 for a cold? Anyway, I hope my patient treatment did not suffer due to the fact that she had a cold and was panicky. It probably did suffer from lack of sleep though, this job was at 5 am.
- This time no priority 1 dispatch, but still a cold. Patient walked sheepishly to ambulance, as he didn't call us, his overly concerned neighbours did. Again, why they didn't take him to hospital himself if they were so concerened remains a mystery. I still treated him as a person, not timewaster.
No sleep that night. Really tired. Slept like a log that day.
