Thursday – A good day at work (for some)

You must be tired of hearing me complain about the lack of work to do, when I'm actually at work, and have recently only been doing routine taxi jobs. I won't do that anymore (or at least for about another week anyway).

In Metro (as opposed to country) Operational Area there are something like 30 ambulance stations (I'm still refusing to call them depots), which have a number of ambulances operating from them. Every full time ambulance that operates has 2 paramedics permanently assigned to it from each shift. (I'm not in that privileged bunch) These guys never have to move around. Then there are the rest of us. Every eight weeks, we are told where our next posting is going to be.

I didn't get the best of postings, and hopefully that will change. I'm being sent to Rockingham (40 miles away), which is a little unrealistic, but still the mileage claim will be about £30 a day for me.

Anyway work today was filled with a lot more genuine cases of sick and injured people. A quick rundown for you;

1. A builder fell off a roof – hurt his arm and shoulder (Morphine and Ketamine given by me) (By the way, Ketamine is a very strong medication that makes you forget that you are in pain instead of blocking the pain. It is also a favourite recreational drug of some in Brighton)
   
2. A diabetic patient who had all of a sudden had her blood sugar go way out of control, going from High to Lo and then back to High and back to low very quickly. She is trailing an insulin pump, so that she doesn't need to have injections 4 times a day, but the pump was not working right.
   
3. A young mum who slipped in her house and broke her leg – We had to break in to the property (took an air conditioner out the wall and climbed through the hole (not me – the hole wasn't that big – we lowered one of the neighbours kids through the hole and she open the doors for us). She does some morphine as well
   
4. 3 car crashes – one of them, there was someone with a broken ankle (more morphine).
   

Sprinkled in between these were the usual hospital transfers and low priority calls, but at least I got to see some sick people, so it was a good day for me. I'm not particularly happy about Rockingham, but I've got a plan in place. I'll tell you about that tomorrow.