Start To Finish

August 13th, 2008

I make no secret of the fact that I have a very short attention span. I get bored of things very quickly (interruptions in blog posts?!), and this is why I love the job that I do. No two days are the same, and it is unusual for me to be with the same patient for more than an hour. The other day, the entire spectrum of the job becomes apparent.

9pm on a very hot summer evening. The phone rings and I hot foot it to a cardiac arrest just down the road. There I find a 95 year old woman who hasn’t been seen for the past 5 hours. She was found collapsed on the floor, and the family put her back into bed - please don’t put dead people back into bed when you call us, we only have to put them back on the floor for resuscitation and that wastes time. This lady was beyond our help though, leaving me to sit in her bedroom in the sweltering heat filling out the paperwork. To top things off, she also had the heating on, leaving the room well in excess of 30°C.

Back into the night and after a few more jobs, I went back to station for my break. I am yet to find an ambulance station that has a cool mess room, so sitting on the step down the side of the station I tucked into my multitude of sandwiches and fruit, enjoying the refreshing 2am breeze.

A little while later, the phone rang again and I was off to a pregnant woman having contractions every two minutes. I did all the normal checks for a woman in labour, and the called control to find out if there was an ambulance crew on the way to me. Standing in the sweltering heat, I looked out the open window when I heard the familiar sound of an ambulance engine stopping outside. Ambulances have a very characteristic noise - think of a diesel engine, then think of one that has done over 100,000 miles and has spent a considerable number of those being driven like it was stolen and you’re coming close. I saw the shadows of the crew climbing out and heard the doors close, only to look back at mum-to-be and notice something wasn’t quite right. A lump had appeared in her pyjama pants, yet the patient appeared to be in no more pain than she had been five minutes ago. I decided I better take a look at what was going on, something I prefer not to do - especially when I’m on my own - for fear of getting wet let alone anything else!

As I feared, the back of a baby’s head was pretty much delivered and I was just in time to see the restitution of it, something I have previously heard described as something out of Alien. ‘Okay, so restitution is a good sign’, I thought to myself. I clearly remembered my obstetrics and gynaecology training that said failure of the baby’s head to restitute was a sign of forthcoming shoulder dystocia - and that was a bad thing! The rest of the baby quickly plopped out in the usual less-than-dignified manner and started crying. Moments later, the crew were with my clutching a maternity pack (cord clamps, scissors, towels etc) and went about drying the baby off and handing him over to mum.

It’s not very often you see such extremes as that, but occasionally you do have to be a Jack of all trades…

Entry Filed under: Work