I've really arrived into the St. John's Ambulance family now. It didn't really take long, and I am pleased that it's happened. Now I don't need to sit and wonder what I will do with my weekends off anymore. Not that I ever had trouble filling the hours in a day, especially at the weekend. (Hmm – let me think...beach, parks, shopping, cinema, and writing my blog, emails, and letters home, and sleeping; then when I get bored of all of that there is swimming, watching TV, and at the end of a very long list.....studying – don't they call it continual professional development now a days?)
Anyway, I digress; I got a call from Ambulance Control, offering me overtime for the Saturday night. Now you can see why I'll never be bored on a weekend, they have trouble filling the ambulances on weekend nights here as well. The shift was at a place called Kewdale. Overtime here is described as "kicking the till."
No, not everywhere there is ambulance (or should I say ambo) depots are in somewhere "dale", but there are a lot of them. So far, I'm at Landsdale, and now I'm working at Kewdale, and we went to a depot called Armadale to get some equipment this evening, but once more I am digressing.
As it turns out Kewdale is in another industrial area of town, but this one is down south. It slap bang (about 1 km away) at the end of the main runway at the airport, with the main freight rail yard behind it, and the end of the trans-Australian highway is right there. As you can imagine, it was a little noisy, what with planes taking off over our head, Thomas the Tank Engine shunting away in the yard all night, and big trucks all downshifting as they come off the highway, and start turning into their freight yards.
Enough with the complaining, you would think I wasn't grateful for the $50 per hour for the 14 hour night shift (Overtime is paid at double time), and anyway, it was supposed to be work, and not lounging around the ambulance station. Sure enough, it wasn't long before the first call came in.
The night wasn't too bad, for a weekend. The usual collection of drunken accidents, and incidents, and a hospital to hospital transfer. We did get about 4-5 hours on base (yes I did sleep, as you know, I could sleep through a hurricane, and actually once did – I was in the Bahamas when Hurricane Floyd (Category 5 Hurricane) blew through during the night.)
The only interesting thing to report was that one of the incidents in the cafe/club district Subiaco (Subi as it is known here, as the Aussies love to shorten a word that doesn't need shortening) was to assist the police treating someone who had been assaulted. It turns out the police had TV cameras with them (filming their version of Street Crime – called The Force). We may have a starring role on one of the episodes (I think you might be able to see my bottom a lot – and yes, there is a lot of that to see).
So I cannot complain about my day, although I probably will. I am a true Australian ambo now and it is expected to moan about everything. If I'm not moaning about work, I'm sure it will be about the heat, lack of waves, amount of emails to answer, the waves to big to swim in, it's too cold, only getting 5 hours sleep at work or any other number of things. We'll have to see.
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