Swine Flu

I knew there would be something that would make me return to this thing. Something big, that I’d want to vent about. Or perhaps something reflecting on a past post.

You see, when I come across something I want to blog about, I always think to myself I’ll write about that in a few months or so in an aim to retain a little anonymity (I have read the Tom Reynold’s ‘How To Blog And Not Lose Your Job‘ - several times). But of course, a few months later they have passed into the depths of my mind and any inclination I had to write about them originally has long since departed.

But swine flu would appear to be the impetus I needed to log back in to Wordpress and actually write something. Of course, the piggy flu pandemic seems to have made every other blogger appear from the woodwork and write too.

Most people in this job get annoyed with the time wasters. The people who call an ambulance when there really isn’t anything wrong with them. In all honesty, I’m really not that bothered by them. I see them as job security - my ambulance trust is recruiting several hundred people this year, and there’s unlimited amounts of overtime available. Just the other night I spoke to someone who has worked every single day for the past three weeks.

Despite all this, people who are calling about swine flu are getting to me now. At first, I admit it was quite fun to dress up in all the protective gear, but now it’s really starting to become a nuisance. I am probably seeing between 4 and 8 people a day with flu-like symptoms. Most of them don’t actually want to go to hospital, they just want to know if they’ve got it or not. I must admit that I do find this quite puzzling. What’s the big deal if you have swine flu or not? Just because it has a fancy name, hyped by the media, doesn’t make it any different to normal flu. In fact, from all the people I have seen with it, swine flu is nowhere near as bad as normal flu.

Entire families are calling with identical symptoms, and the first question out of their mouths is ‘have I got swine flu?’ Based on the fact that your six-year-old child’s school has been closed because there has been an outbreak there, said child is showing symptoms and now you are, what do you think? The HPA (in Birmingham anyway) are no longer swabbing suspected patients, so all I am going to do is take a guess based on your symptoms and the contact you’ve had - all things that you already know… because you told me them. So now I have to fill out an A3 size form for each member of your family, while taking a full set of baseline observations (blood pressure, temperature etc.) and passing the details on the ‘flu cell’. After that, all the equipment we took in has to be thoroughly cleaned, so one family of people sniffing and coughing has taken a frontline ambulance off the road for a minimum of 2 hours, as well as exposing both crew members to the virus.

At one house I went to,  no sooner had I uttered the words “based on what you have told me, the likelihood is that you have swine flu“, but someone behind me grabbed their mobile phone and excitedly informed someone else that Dave has got ‘The Swine Flu’.

In all honesty, I don’t know where I am going with this blog entry. I’m not going to lecture you what to do about Swine Flu as you are all educated enough to know better. This is probably a good place to stop…

4 comments July 8th, 2009