Читать книгу More Blood, More Sweat and Another Cup of Tea - Tom Reynolds - Страница 48

We were called to a fourth-floor flat in one of the many housing blocks in the east of London where we found an unkempt man in his forties pacing back and forth along the access balcony to his flat.

He wasn’t wearing any shoes, socks or a shirt, and his trousers and pants were falling off him.

While he paced he was muttering about God and the Devil.

The patient obviously had mental health issues, but we also suspected something else was causing this behaviour. At one point he made to throw himself over the balcony. We stood in his way to prevent him doing this, and more importantly to stop him making us go through the, frankly hard, work of trying to save his life in the face of major trauma.

As we led him back into his flat to get some shoes/clothes we realised that the reason why he was behaving so strangely might have been exacerbated by drug use. We nearly tripped over an empty bottle of methadone.

The flat was—as I’ve mentioned before—exactly how you would expect a drug den to look. There was drug paraphernalia strewn around the place, mattresses on the floor and the heavy curtains looked like they had never been drawn.

The patient continued to pace around while occasionally becoming quite agitated. While we didn’t think that he would become violent we were still rather wary of getting too close to him or letting our guard down.

After half an hour we had managed to get him dressed and were able to lead him downstairs where we ‘ahem’ ‘gently’ got him into the ambulance.

While I drove us to the hospital my crewmate did his best to keep the patient calm. We pre-warned the hospital that they would need security and the secure room ready for us. Unfortunately, the hospital switchboard wasn’t picking up the phone so there was no one there to meet us when we rolled up outside the A&E doors.

At one point he exposed his genitals to my crewmate.

A bit of a struggle began where the patient wanted to jump off the ambulance and run away, so my crewmate and I ended up restraining him until security arrived to help drag him into the department’s ‘padded room’.

I had a similar job the day before, another job where I ended up wrestling with a mentally disturbed patient.

What struck me as amusing was that on consecutive days the first job of the shift was to someone with an altered mental state who was blaming their God and the Devil, and who would later go on to show us their genitals.

I wonder if it’s something in the water?

I also sometimes wonder what the mentally disturbed would rant and rave about if we hadn’t thought up the idea of religion.