Читать книгу More Blood, More Sweat and Another Cup of Tea - Tom Reynolds - Страница 16

I left work this morning with a song in my heart and joy in my step; last night was my final shift on the FRU car.

No longer will I be standing around with my hands in my pockets for 45 minutes while a six-month-old child lies in front of me with possible meningitis. No more will I be told by Control to go and drive around and look busy when there is something good on telly, and no longer will my only conversation with people consist mainly of ‘Where does it hurt?’ for twelve hours straight.

The letter that I wrote my boss telling her that I wanted to come off the FRU takes effect from Friday. I’ll soon be back to working on a ‘truck’, a nice big person-carrying medical-taxi truck.

Lovely!

I was hoping that this last shift would fly by in an exciting cascade of trauma, life-saving and dramatic illness.

Ahem.

It was actually a fairly quiet night. I did seven jobs, four of them being people with coughs (one cough having lasted three weeks before the patient decided to call an ambulance at five in the morning). My last call was to an elderly gentleman with emphysema (and a cough) who actually needed hospital treatment.

However, my first two calls were to drunks.

My second job was a ‘classic’—‘Male collapsed in street, unknown life status—caller refusing to go near patient or answer any questions.’ So I rushed there and found two female police officers standing over a drunk male who was asleep in the street. I did all my normal checks to make sure that he was only drunk (as opposed to being drunk and in a diabetic coma, drunk and has had a stroke, or drunk and has been stabbed). Everything pointed to him being just drunk.

We woke him up and were prepared to send him on his way. He stood up—took one look at me, and smacked me in the mouth.

I ‘assisted’ him onto the floor. The police officers and I then stopped him from injuring himself by sitting on him in a professional manner.

The police have been trained in restraint—they are all careful because they don’t want people dying of positional asphyxia. I haven’t been trained in restraint (well, not in the ambulance service) but I’m guessing that someone isn’t going to die because I’m kneeling over their arm while holding their wrist.

So we carefully restrained him (for around 25 minutes), while he explained how he was either going to kick my head in or sue me. By then the police had tracked down a, now mortified, relative who came and took him away.

No damage done to me, although I would think that as he wakes up this morning he’ll have a number of bruises. I hopped in my car and told Control that I had been assaulted twice in two jobs, so I asked if I could head back to the station for a calming cup of tea, which they allowed. They also made sure that I was all right and didn’t need any other help.

When my mother found out about my being assaulted, did she ask how I was? Did she ask if I had been hurt or damaged?

No.

Her comment was, ‘At least you’ll have something interesting to blog about.’

Bloody lovely that is…