Posts filed under 'Random'
I have blogged before about the strange and not-so-strange things that people have searched for when finding my blog in the past, but these things never fail to amuse me, so I thought I’d post some more. It may even answer some questions!
Everything below is word for word what my hit counter has picked up, and these are genuine search queries that have resulted in a click to this blog. Enjoy!
birmingham red light district 2006
This is a favourite every month. Maybe this visitor was looking for some sort of red light district awards.
placenta curry
Another favourite. Use your imagination on this one, I try not to.
washing up liquid swallowing
Not the brightest of things to do, so don’t do it.
brain evisceration photos
I saw this for real a few weeks ago. Not pleasant.
cpr chest compressions rate 2007
The 2005 guidelines say 30 compressions to every 2 ventilations in adults.
home made curry like mum used to make
Sounds tasty, can I have some?
st john ambulance first responder flashing lights
Don’t get me started on this one…
john robertson
I’m famous! People are Googling me!
what happens in the ambulance on the way to the hospital
Depends what’s up with the patient. Anything from baseline observations, through CPR to a chat about the weather.
alternating flashing headlamps
Yep, we’ve got them.
lucy bus accident
Get well soon, Lucy.
is it legal have blue lights on my car? uk
Well what do you think?
nellie the elephant cpr
Glad it’s not just me!
bright red blood squirting out of wound
You might want to call an ambulance for that… Sounds like an arterial bleed!
elderly women cat urine
Yeah, they smell like that.
what are the step for an emergency call on a women who is going into labor?
Pick up the phone, call a taxi.
resuscitating of a pregnant women
Now you’re testing me! Wedge something under their back so they are at an angle of 30° so that the baby does not occlude the major blood vessels behind it.
an ambulance with lights but no sirens is carrying a dead body
Nope. We just don’t feel the need to use the sirens at that time. This could be because it’s the dead of night and we don’t want to wake people up unnecessarily, there’s no vehicles in the way or pedestrians likely to step out or just we’re going to a load of rubbish but have to put the blue lights on because we’re on the way to a call (very political topic at the moment).
how to commit suicide by carbon monoxide poisining
Make sure the car doesn’t have a catalytic converter.
easiest way to get british nationality for asylum seekers
Re-elect the current government?
what a driver should do when confronted by response vehicle on blue lights
Pull over to the left and STOP! (Don’t just slow down)
singing lessons screaming lessons birmingham
You can get screaming lessons?
what is it like to work in an ambulance
I hope you found the answer in my blog!
stop alzheimer s patients wandering off
Not a bad plan.
why is an ambulance called a bus
Because 70% of our customers could travel by bus.
what is an ambulance like?
Yellow.
do paramedics give injections
They do, and EMTs too.
chavs two fingers
My thoughts exactly.
headlice
Nice.
persons reported fires
Is what a building fire is called when there is reason to believe there is someone inside.
why do people leave a&e without being seen
Because they get there thinking all their problems that they’ve had for 3 years will be solved until they get triaged and find they have to wait for 4 hours. If they were really ill, they’d wait…
amount of elderly patients taking up hospital beds in uk
Do you suggest a cull then? Did you invent MRSA and C. Diff.?
jogging on the motorway illegal
Probably - can you think why?
can paramedics use the siren after 11 pm
Yes. The exemptions state any time.
what do compressions look like on the monitor?
Like a sine wave normally.
mother keeps me still in school uniform
Time to leave home me thinks.
May 26th, 2007
There are many different ways that people learn CPR. I was 21 before I learnt CPR properly - before I joined the ambulance service I might add - and I was just taught to do compressions at a rate of 100 per minute; “you know, faster than one a second, but not quite two“.
This is surprisingly unhelpful, but I tried to do the chest compressions at what I thought was about 100 per minute as best I could. At a subsequent course I did a few months later, I found myself doing 2 person CPR with a friend on a
dummy. It was after a couple of cycles of CPR that it dawned on me that Gareth was muttering the words to ‘Nellie The Elephant‘ whilst compressing the chest. I asked him about it and he said that he was taught to use the children’s song as it had exactly 15 beats after which two mouth-to-mouth ventilations were needed.
A few days ago, I went to a woman who had been having a conversation with her husband when she left the room to get something from the kitchen. She called for an ambulance when she returned to the room and he wouldn’t answer her questions. As me and my crewmate were resuscitating him, all I could think was “Nellie the Elephant packed her trunk and said goodbye to the circus…”
Old habits die hard.
Apologies for the lack of updates lately. Everything will be back to normal again soon!
January 22nd, 2007
Overdoses come in all shapes and sizes. They can be intentional or unintentional; genuine suicide attempts or a cry for help; prescription drugs, over-the-counter drugs, recreational drugs or alcohol. They are quite often non-existant where the person hasn’t actually taken anything at all.
I have been to someone who has taken a large number of opiate based tablets and knew that they would stop him breathing (he stopped breathing just after we found him), to someone who had taken some extra sleeping tablets safe in the knowledge they had no harmful effects and even to a person who claimed someone had forced entry into her house and held her at knifepoint, forcing her to take all the prescription tablets in her house. The latter one later confessed to fabricating the whole story and wasting police time.
On the patient report forms we complete, copies of which are handed to the receiving hospital, we have to identify the ‘chief complaint‘ of the patient - and sum it up in around 20 characters. With an overdose, this is easy. However, when confronted with a patient who has just drunk one cup of Fairy Liquid (washing-up liquid for cleaning dishes), I found it strangely difficult to describe this in 20 letters or less. It’s not an overdose, as by definition, ‘overdose’ implies that the substance in question has been consumed in excess of the normal accepted amount. But as far as I am aware, the government doesn’t currently issue a Recommended Daily Allowance for kitchen detergent.
I settled for ‘psychiatric (poisoning)’ in the end. Every patient I have been out to before who has consumed something unpalatable has been under the age of 10. This detergent drinking individual was 50. When I asked him if this had been a suicide attempt, he replied “no”. He proceeded to tell me how he poured the famous brand washing-up liquid from the bottle into a cup and the drank it neat, stating “the voices in my head told me to do it”.
It would have made my day if he had burped and bubbles had come out of his mouth. Luckily for him, his adventures with flatware sanitation fluid left him unscathed, ready for another day of exploring underneath the kitchen sink…
October 19th, 2006
Once again, my apologies for the lack of posting recently. I have moved house and everything is currently in boxes.
In the meantime, I snapped the photo below of a makeshift sign stuck to the wall in a hospital I visit from time to time a few days ago because in my puerile mind it conjures up a lot of mental images…
There’s something not quite right about that name!
August 6th, 2006
I feel I should apologise for being a bad blogger lately. For a wide variety of reasons I have not been able to post anything, but hopefully over the coming days I’ll have a little more to say.
One of the reasons I’ve been a bit lax is I am moving house shortly. Finding a house to live in wasn’t easy, but has yielded a rather amusing anecdote. For a few weeks now, there has been a small pool of discoloured liquid on the window sill in the kitchen. Both me and my housemate assumed this was leaking in from the gutter, though it had struck me that in this hot weather, it was surprising that it had not evaporated. If anything, it had increased very slightly. Still, up until now, it hadn’t interested me enough to actually do anything about it. But with impending viewers to the house, we both thought it was probably time to clean up the house.
After taking the various junk off the window sill, I slapped a damp cloth at one end of the window sill and wiped along and straight over the aforementioned liquid. I was a little taken back by the cloth not proceeding straight through it, but instead actually stopping, sticking to the substance. I looked up to see where the substance was originating from to find it dripping from the inside of the window frame. It suddenly occured to me that a couple of weeks ago, my housemate had commented on the number of bees flying in and out of a vent in the wall outside - I reached up and touched a bit fresh from the ceiling and cautiously tasted it. It was indeed honey!
I trust the next tenants of the house will be as impressed with fresh honey dripping down the window as I was.
July 26th, 2006
I will be the first to admit that typographical errors are easily made and easily missed. I’m sure this blog is riddled with them. But when you are making something a little more substantial, it’s worth checking, then checking again. Whilst taking a short cut through the hospital grounds (on my day off!), I noticed this little gem and pulled my phone out straight away.
June 23rd, 2006
You’re still there? I should apologise for the lack of insight this blog has brought you lately. I have been back in the country around 3 hours following a long flight back fom America and therefore have no new work stories.*
* I have got one actually - will post it soon.
For those of you who are interested in where I’ve been, I’ve divided the good bits into mini-blog entries. Because I want to.
A Hot Day In Hell
Tuesday 6th June, 2006 - or you could write it 6/6/6. What better place to go to celebrate than to Hell? Hell is a small settlement in Michigan, which consists of one bar, a shop and post office and apparently very little else. According to the Hell, MI website, it is a popular place for people to send their tax returns from. It was a popular place when I was there - and around about 30°C too. Awash with bikers and other curious visitors, it seems the place had vastly underestimated the number of people who would flock to the village which is a shame as it had a lot of potential. As it happened, there wasn’t a lot to do there.
American Indian
It’s no secret that I am a big lover of curry. So what better to do whilst 4,000 miles away from home than to go for a curry at an Indian restaurant in America. Upon walking into the restaurant, my immediate overwhelming thought was “oh dear, it’s been Americanised”. After overcoming the initial disappointment of spacious American-style booth seating (think Happy Days…) and bright lights, the menu was actually fairly extensive and the normal ostentatious décor adorned the walls. It made a refreshing change for rice and poppadoms to be included with the main meal, all for just (equivalent of) £4.85 along with pickles and chutneys served with your initial free poppadoms which had black lumps of what I can only guess were spices inside. I ordered a jalfrezi curry and surprised when I was asked how spicy I would like it. What is the point of having different types of curry if you dictate the spice level? I asked for medium hot (as a jalfrezi is supposed to be) and was generally pleased with my meal. It amused me while eating that the obviously second generation Indian-American waiting staff were touring the restaurant instructing customers on how to eat the food correctly. Aside from the bastardised surroundings, my only complaint was with the fact that the chicken had been obviously roasted prior to its addition to the curry. Overall, not bad at all, but hardly ‘world class food’ as one review of the restaurant online suggests.
Oh I Do Love To Be Beside The Seaside
In near 30°C heat, what better place to go than to the beach. But going to the beach when the nearest coastline is no less than 500 miles away is not easy - you’d think. As someone who has grown up in the centre of England, the nearest beach is around 90 miles away, on the north Welsh coast but in mid-west America, the Great Lakes are also surrounded by beaches. So although not technically beside the sea, it was still a beach! The large number of dead fish that were lying close to the water’s edge surprised me and caused a rather offensive odour all around the beach. I was also surprised to see shells on the beach as I did not think that normal sea creatures would live in a fresh water lake but I put this down to evolution.
Mmm… Beer
I have long been a fan of American beer, regularly drinking the likes of Coors and Budweiser here at home. So what better to do in its native environment than enjoy the real thing. The USA lives up to its stereotype here with 24 oz (720 ml) bottles and cans of beer which are available in shops and bars. The concept of drinking out of a can in a bar is a strange one to me (that’s what you do in the park aged 15), but one you soon learn to live with! The bars I visited certainly had one thing in common - they all desperately needed cleaning!
So that concludes my brief account of my US Visit. Back to the real world now, and straight into nights. Yay for annual leave.
June 15th, 2006
It is now June, and at least should be summer. The current weather may suggest otherwise. Whilst June to me means annual leave and long flights, it’s also a great time to look back at, well, May!
The hosting company of this site generates some pretty good stats and I can see fairly well where my beloved readers are and how they get here. The month of May brought me 335 unique visitors, with a total of 15,322 hits. Once again, I get hits from exotic places like Senegal, Costa Rica and Singapore to name but a few, but the most interesting information I get is what people search for when they visit my site.
Here’s some of the most ‘unique’ searches:
- ‘Living with bundle branch block‘ is my most popular search, and as mentioned before, this is something I do on a daily basis.
- ‘Placenta curry‘ doesn’t sound all that appetising, but someone wants to know how to make it.
- The person searching for ‘breaking and entering‘ does concern me somewhat.
- Another person has some feedback that needs to be directed towards JRCALC as their search ‘paramedic do not carry the right painkillers‘ implies we need some different analgesia. I’ll put their poor attention to grammar down to their pain…
- ‘Where to steal copper uk‘ is another one that concerns me. Especially in light of what happened to the Service’s transmitter the other week!
- At least the person searching for ‘melt down 1 & 2p coins‘ now knows a little more about it
But my favourite search out of all of them was:
- ‘pictures of yellow clinical waste bags‘
To whoever searched for ‘pictures of yellow clinical waste bags‘, here is a photo I took just for you:
June 2nd, 2006
Some time ago, I signed up to YouGov, a website where you get a token sum of money for completing their polls on general consumer issues. I have accrued a massive £4.75 so far and have spent many-a-sleepless night wondering how I am going to squander this new found wealth.
This morning I found a new poll alert in my inbox promising me 50p for my feedback on central heating. Whilst this is not something I consider myself to be either an expert on nor particularly interested in, I had nothing better to do at that moment in time. I usually do these polls during quieter periods at work where I not only get my 50p (some longer ones pay £1), but I am also being paid by the taxpayer for the pleasure of it.
Anyway, I digress. Back to the central heating poll! Along with questions on the main poll topic, you always get some completely random questions which I can only assume are to establish how aware of current affairs and new trends pollsters are. In said central heating poll, the following question amused me greatly:
In recent months there’s been a lot in the news about ‘blogging’.
What do you think blogging is?
- A new Olympic sport
- A new fad diet
- A winter sport
- A village in Yorkshire
- A drinking game
- A new name for swapping music downloads
- A new form of jogging for city types
- A web diary
- A new England World Cup dance
- A sexually transmitted disease
- Don’t know
Every blogger knows blogging should be a new olympic sport…
May 23rd, 2006
So there I was. Sitting at my computer, browsing Google Earth with my housemate when something floated gracefully past my upstairs window. It was a pig.
Okay, so it was a helium filled balloon shaped like a pig, but this is the most compelling evidence I have ever seen that pigs do indeed fly. Given this fact, I am starting to believe Agenda for Change will offer me better pay and working conditions. After all, someone did say it’ll happen when pigs fly.
May 3rd, 2006