As I arrived at work, the night crew was waiting because they had a job and was hoping that the day ambulance crew would in out. We trundled off. Once we finished that call, straight around to another one.
Off we got sent from the hospital to an area of town miles from our base to patrol. After being there for a while, we did a couple other calls, which didn't warrant hospital but we still took them in.
It was almost 2 in the afternoon before we got something to eat, and that got ruined because of lack of ambulances and a load more calls than ambulance control had planned for. The day carried on in this manner, until the end of the shift...BEEP BEEP BEEP my alarm rudely woke me from my nightmare.
Of course I wasn't going to Brighton Ambulance Station, but to the edge of the desert again. In the course of the day, I managed to wash and wax my car, check and reply to loads of emails, iron my shirts for the rest of the week, observe some local wildlife, and eat my lunch.
That was all before going out on the ambulance at about noon for the first call of the day. The guys here were horrified when I explained about Standby and 24 hour Ambulance Response Posts. 
We did a couple calls and thought we had timed the day right, to get back to the station for an on time finish, when we got a call through in a very nice part of town – Ocean Reef (I had been looking in Ocean Reef for somewhere to live.) Excellent I thought, I'll be able to have a little nosey in someone's house and I'll see what at least one of the houses is like.
Sadly the call (once we got there) transpired to be a call that I would have expected to deal with in a murky flea infested hovel in Brighton – it was someone who had almost stopped breathing, because they had taken too much Heroin. Now although Heroin is a problem in most of the big cities in the UK, there isn't much of a problem here in Western Australia, so I have been told.
Needless to say, we treated the person who had taken the overdose (we carry the antidote to Heroin in our kits) and took him in to hospital. All in all it could have been any city anywhere in the world. The type of job really wasn't much different in the end.
And similar to being in Brighton, we did finish late. Oh well, tomorrow holds promise of another brilliant day. This is why I came here...not to whinge and moan, but to enjoy work, and live a good life. I reminded myself of that as I let the waves pound over me in the Indian Ocean on the way home.
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