Tom Reynolds

I’ve just had a week off*
I was coming off my first set of night shifts in some time, I’ve been burning my annual leave allowance to avoid doing them and it’s been a right trauma trying to reset my body-clock back to day shifts.
Winter is approaching, and with it my Seasonal Affective Disorder. During this week off I’ve been unable to be motivated about anything - I’ve been sleeping between nine and eleven hours a day and I’ve been alternating between not eating and binge eating. There are other symptoms, but you don’t want to read me moaning.
So I’ve dusted down my SAD light and checked that the bulb still works - time to start blasting myself in the face with it.
I hate this time of year.
The problem is that you have to be careful not to let it affect your work - it’s incredibly easy to start snapping at people, and that way leads to written complaints and warnings from those above me in the LAS pecking order.
It’s been said that over half the complaints against our service are due to ‘attitude’, so as the nights draw in I try and be a bit more mindful of what I say and do and of the way I present myself.
Of course it doesn’t always work; take the drunk who was asleep in the street. We were getting run ragged and this was the third person of the night who’d decided that going home wasn’t for him, instead he’d just kip down in the middle of the pavement.
Be aware that it’s only around seven in the evening.
So we parked next to him and I deployed the ‘diagnostic boot’**. Essentially it’s not a good idea to kneel down next to someone who is drunk, you never know if they are going to take a swing at you. If the person doesn’t wake up to me shouting at them, I gently kick the sole of their shoe with my boot, not with the purpose of hurting them, but just to shake them awake.
Sure enough he woke up and I introduced myself and asked if he was alright.
‘Fuck off!’
I informed him that he couldn’t sleep on the pavement, someone might trip over him.
‘Fuck off!’
I let him know that if he kept sleeping here we, or our colleagues, would keep being called to him as a ‘unconscious male, caller refusing to approach’.
‘Fuck off!’
I asked him if he would like to go to hospital, it was less than 200 yards away.
‘Fuck off!’, he then spat a gobbet of drool at me.
‘No’, I replied through gritted teeth, ‘You don’t get to tell me to “fuck off” four times and then spit at me. If you don’t ‘fuck off’ yourself I’ll get the police down here to have you nicked. And they are a lot less pleasant than me - but I would guess you know that already’.
At this he got up and wandered home.
I am, after all, only human and I don’t get paid to have drunks swearing and spitting at me.
The trick, is to not lose my temper when it’s a cold and dark February evening and turn the ‘diagnostic boot’ into the ‘your head is a football, you annoying twerp boot’.
Fingers crossed.
*I’m typing this while manning ORG’s stall at the Green Party conference. I really like being able to write things in advance - comes in handy for the twelve hour stretches.
** Before I start getting emails of complaint, I was told to do this at our ’self defence’ course. I didn’t have the heart to tell the course leader that we’d all been doing this for years.

• At green party conference. It’s like a flashback to the 80’s. Fulla hippies… #
• One of the people here has been incontinent. I can smell it. #
• And no. It’s not me. #
• Well, that’s the last time I use public transport on a Sunday - four hours travel to get home with me who hasn’t slept since Friday night. #

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• I don’t often promote on here - but http://openrights.blip.tv/#1235354 for video evidence of me making a prat of myself for ORG. #
• Why do I have a hangover when I’m not drinking? Where is my caffeine!? #

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Obviously I am superb at everything that I turn my hand to. To believe otherwise would mark you out as a fool.
So when the Open Rights Group asked for volunteers to star in a promotional video it would have been dreadful not to give them the benefit of my Oscar wining acting style.
So here I am.

Who’s Watching Who? from Dean Whitbread on Vimeo.
(What you should perhaps keep in mind is that I was asked to ‘ham it up’)
For those with lower bandwidth you can also watch this on Youtube.
And if anyone is at the Green Party Conference, I shall be manning the ORG stall there. I may also threaten some bunnies with death and cooking if they don’t all join immediately.
That should work.

I look at the screen and see the words, “Patient in labour”, it’s 4 a.m. in the morning and I huff at the thought of going out to another ‘Maternataxi’.

My crewmate groans and tells me that while the patient lives in our patch the maternity department that she is going to is way outside our area to a hospital that we don’t like much.

‘She doesn’t speak English’, says my crewmate, ‘oh, and she’s fifteen’.

‘No wonder her maternity department is in Essex’, I joke.

We get there and her parents meet us at the door, they are babbling away in their native tongue and they basically push us, and the patient, into the ambulance. Her mother comes with her - all the time shouting the only word in English that they seem to know - “Quick!”

‘Quick! Quick! Quick!’ they shout at us, they aren’t interested in us doing anything, you know, medical, so I grit my teeth and we drive them to the hospital.

I’m fuming. I’m sure that it doesn’t help that this is the last of our very busy nightshifts, that it’s silly o’clock in the morning, that our professionalism is being ignored for our ability to drive a free taxi and that we are being forced to go out of our area when all we really want to do is local jobs so that we can get off shift on time.

At some point my crewmate leans through the dividing door of the ambulance and lets me know that this is the third baby our patient is having and that the father of the baby is her cousin.

Again I mutter something about Essex*

We drop her off at the hospital, I neither expect or receive a ‘thank you’. The midwives at this hospital were lovely and we returned to the ambulance to try and race back to our own area.

It was only after I’d had seven hours sleep at the end of my shift that I start to wonder about this call.

I wonder about our patient getting pregnant for the first time when she is twelve. I wonder about her cousin, I wonder how old he is, and how old he was when he first started what can only be described as child abuse. I wonder about the isolation that our patient would feel in being unable to speak the native language of the country in which she lives. I wonder about why the social services allow this child to remain in a situation where she has seemingly become a baby factory.

The pregnancy is all above board, the maternity notes are genuine, the history is good and action has probably been taken. But somehow the father of the child isn’t in prison, isn’t on the sex offenders register. Is it because he is a child as well?

I think about the fate of our patient, this child. I’ve heard things about Romanian gypsy families, that they marry their child while they are still children. Some private ceremony, unsanctioned by the state or by law, yet occurs without much fuss because to do otherwise might lead to accusations of racism**.

So now I’m angry again - I’m angry that a fifteen year old girl has been raped at least three times presumably with her family’s consent. I’m angry because it would seem that nothing is being done about it and I’m angry that this isn’t an isolated incident.

I think that this delayed anger is the more positive sort.

*I can make these jokes, I spent my childhood growing up in Essex. The fecundity of the women of Essex is the reason why I was a virgin until I left the area.

**Yes, I know it’s the Daily Hate Mail, but it seems like reasonably factual reporting.

• @imajes Starbucks is open #

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• @imajes Starbucks is open #

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• Only *nearly* told our stabbed patient to pull it together and stop wimping out. #
• Giving birth at 13,14 and 15 means that you and your cousin/boyfriend should get separate bedrooms. #
• If you greet me by clapping your hands at me and shouting ‘QUICK!’ do not expect a smooth ride. #
• I hate people. #
• I still hate people, but at least I get to sleep now. Enjoy your commute day-workers. And sweet dreams @davidwynne #

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First off, thanks to everyone who left a comment in the last post - at some point once I’ve had some sleep I’ll be looking at al of them.
Many, many moons ago when I was a lot more enthusiastic for the job that I do I wrote a post called ‘What’s in your pockets‘ - in it I detailed the things that I carried around with me. I thought that, with four more years of experience it might be interesting to see how things have changed.
Shirt Pocket - Right - Personal phone No1, 3G USB modem, Optrex eyedrops (to keep my eyes working on nightshifts).
Shirt Pocket - Left - Pen, pair of scissors, pentorch that is bright enough to sear flesh, lighter (I don’t smoke, but you never know when you need to set something on fire)
Upper Right Trouser Pocket - Car keys, door keys, Swiss army knife, Wallet.
Upper Left Trouser Pocket - iPhone, cloth for cleaning glasses.
Lower Right Trouser Pocket - Gloves, bandage dressing, torch bright enough to burn skin and to play the ‘Go towards the light, all your loved ones are waiting for you…’ game with sleeping drunks.
Lower Left Trouser Pocket - Normally nothing, occasionally my stethoscope.
Everywhere else - Nothing, I don’t put anything in my back pockets and as I don’t wear my stab vest (except when it’s very cold) there is nothing there either. I no longer have anything hanging from my belt as it would only dig into my overflowing gut.
Amongst the other things that missing which I used to carry are my service provided emergency phone (I used it once, it’d would have been quicker to dial 999 on my own phone), the drug cheat sheet (I rarely need to give drugs as I rarely go to anyone who needs them, for those patients who do need drugs I’ve memorised the information).
I no longer have a security card for the Royal London hospital, as it was stolen along with my car and has never been replaced (despite my hassling people), I don’t need a key to the oxygen cylinders because they have changed the tops of them to be openable by hand (a change for the better).
I don’t need a Pocket PC as I have an iPhone and in my personal bag I have a netbook computer (which is what the 3G modem is for should I ever get the chance to use it) it is also for this reason I no longer have a paper diary. And I no longer carry mints because I rarely eat a kebab any more.
I also don’t carry as many gloves because I seldom wear them, I can often get through a whole shift without needing to touch a patient any further than I need to to take a pulse.
So I’ve slimmed down the stuff that I carry by quite a bit, although I seem to have picked up another phone somehow…
So, your turn now - tell me what is in your pockets when you go to work.

• Only three knife attacks tonight so far. #
• only 3 hours sleep in the last 48. LAS holding 15 calls in our patch alone. Blood very much diluted by litres of coke. #
• Trying to work out if it’s the ambulance or me that smells of an old woman’s infected leg ulcers. #
• I really wish that this ambulance had windows that opened. It bloody stinks. #

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