What do you do on Sunday?
Discussion
Well I naturally wake up about 08:30/09:00. Morning consists of practice qualifying and race on F1 2019 (Xbox One) whislt the wife catches up with her TV shows. It's the only time of the week I actually feel alert enough to concentrate on it and it's a nice way to unwind for a couple of hours. Then whatever the wife wants to do really.
Might go do a bit of shopping and grab a pub lunch somewhere. This time of year we are often at the inlaws for a BBQ in the evening. We fit dog walks in there somewhere too, and usually a nice drive in my car, around the beautiful North Dorset countryside. As I don't work Mondays I'll stick a film on Sunday evening or have a blast on Forza or something till the early hours. I do enjoy Sundays
However this afternoon apart from walking the dog I've been put on painting the spare room duties
Might go do a bit of shopping and grab a pub lunch somewhere. This time of year we are often at the inlaws for a BBQ in the evening. We fit dog walks in there somewhere too, and usually a nice drive in my car, around the beautiful North Dorset countryside. As I don't work Mondays I'll stick a film on Sunday evening or have a blast on Forza or something till the early hours. I do enjoy Sundays
However this afternoon apart from walking the dog I've been put on painting the spare room duties
55palfers said:
MDMA . said:
popegregory said:
Is an orangery a posh conservatory?
Sort of. But used for growing oranges in. 
via Imgflip Meme GeneratorA Sunday at work:
Arrive around 05:50.
Check over the ambulance. It’s getting on for ten years old, has a six figure mileage and is maintained on a public budget so it’s less a case of checking it and more a case of listing everything that’s broken or missing, then taking it on the streets anyway.
First job, 89yo male “fallen, unable to get up”.
Get to the address quickly as the streets are still empty.
The front door latch is held open allowing easy entry. The patient is lying on the floor in a comfortable position with a cushion under their head. No signs of anything being knocked over, the patient has no injuries and all their obs are fine. We assist Stan to his feet without much effort, in fact, he probably could’ve done it himself.
“D’you feel you need to go to hospital?”
“Oh no, I’m fine now”
“So if you fell over, how come the front door was open?”
“Errr......pardon?”
“If you were stuck on the floor, who opened the front door?”
“Oh....Ermm......I leave it like that all the time”
“You live in London, you’re nearly 90 and you leave your front door wide open? Ok, shall we just make you a cup of tea?”
“Oooh would you? That’d be nice”
He plops in to an armchair and puts the cricket on the TV.
Job done.
It’s a more reasonable hour now and there’s a Pret nearby who sometimes give us complimentary coffee so we head there and mingle with those ordering breakfast to take back to their orangery.
“That’s on the house, thanks for your work” says the manager.
Small victories.
Next job, a mid-30s female “with a headache”.
Arrive at an affluent apartment in West London. Patient answers the door in their dressing gown, holding a cat in one hand and rubbing their forehead with the other.
“Yeah it’s like I was out with, like, friends last night and we had like LOADS of shots and like now my head hurts and it’s just like THE worst headache EVER and it’s like I just don’t know what to do”
“Have you taken any, like, pain relief?”
“What’s that?”
“Paracetamol?”
“No”
Give the patient some paracetamol, and fill out some paperwork.....
“How’s the head now?”
The patient is now holding their cat in one hand but their iPhone in the other, FaceTiming their mate reflecting on what a f*cking fab time they had last night and did they know Tanya got off with Dom?
Onward.....
Cat 1, cardiac arrest. “s
t just got real” or something.
We charge across town literally as fast as possible, dodging Sunday traffic which is, bizarrely, often worse than weekday rush hour.
Tourists on hire bikes riding with one hand, looking at Google maps with the other, Ubers doing u-turns without warning, Deliveroo scooters going the wrong way down one way streets. Oh well, it’s only four and a half tonnes of Mercedes doing upwards of 50mph. It probably won’t hurt. The screen in the ambulance pings with a few updates on the job...
“Confirmed cardiac arrest. Not conscious. Not breathing” followed by “MetPol on scene. CPR in progress”
Arrive at the address, a council tower block, where there’s a solo car, two police cars and another ambulance already on scene.
In the flat there’s a mass of uniforms, a police officer in full stab vest and belt kit is pumping up and down on the chest of the patient, sweat dripping off the end of his nose. A colleague crouched in a small space around the patient’s head is peering down the throat in preparation to intubate whilst another is slapping the patient’s forearm looking for a good site to insert a cannula.
The small room is crowded with medics, the furniture has been unceremoniously pushed back against the walls, accidentally knocking over the TV, the patient’s wife stands in the door, one hand over her mouth, the other steadying herself against the door frame.
After about 45 minutes, several shots of adrenaline and 50,000 refreshing volts, the patient has a pulse again and is relatively stable but still very unwell.
But it’s ok, we’re only on the 14th floor and the lift is the size of a phone box.
A combined effort by police, ambulance and Dave the builder who lives next door sees the unconscious patient carried down to the ambulance.
With a seriously ill patient in the back being tended by several medics, the blue light drive to hospital is a bizarre cross between Driving Miss Daisy and The French Connection.
The patient is delivered to the Resus team at the nearest hospital and we congregate in the back of the ambulance for a debrief, the key part of which is Googling the nearest McDonalds as it’s now way past lunchtime.
Next.....
50yo female fallen on escalator at tube station. Possible disloc shoulder.
Easy job. Pain relief, immobilise, take to A&E. Job made ten times harder by tube passengers stopping to gawp....
Bit tired now so I say to one onlooker, complete with back-to-front baseball cap....
“Mate, imagine this was your mum, would you want everyone staring at her while she’s in pain like this? Just keep walking will you?”
“fk you, I can do what I want”
Nice.
Next up we go to a 24yo male who “just doesn’t feel right, it’s like my heart’s racing or sumfing innit bruv?”
After a very long, very protracted conversation about how we’re not the police, he finally admits to having used cocaine the night before.
His mates find this inadvertent disclosure hilarious.
Take him to A&E as a precaution. He’ll probably be fine. Probably.
What next?.....
“RTC Motorcycle v car. Active haemorrhaging”
Charge across town, again, and find a Prius perpendicular across the road with a scooter wedged in the front offside wheel arch. There are two people on phones, pacing up and down the pavement, gesticulating wildly, one of whom is wearing a helmet.
“Are you the rider?”
Bad move. Evel Knieval launches in to a tirade of accusations and allegations against the Prius driver, who retaliates with volley after volley of similar attributions of blame.
No one is actually hurt and when asked about the “active haemorrhage” the scooter rider suddenly acquires a limp, rolls up his trouser leg, winces, and points to a graze on his knee the size of a 20p piece. My four year old daughter wears greater injuries as a badge of honour.
We invite the scooter rider in to the ambulance much to the disgust of the Prius driver. Shortly afterwards, and having ascertained he’s fine, a police officer knocks on the door.
By coincidence it’s the one who was doing CPR when we arrived at the cardiac arrest.
“Oh hello again mate, alright?”
“Yeah, you?”
“Yup, did our man make it?”
“Dunno....sorry”
“Oh well, mind if I have a word?”
“Go ahead, we’re pretty much done”
The copper turns to the scooter rider and the friendly camaraderie vanishes....
“Ok we spoke to you once already this morning didn’t we?”
“I no inderstund?”
“Well, you’re under arrest for driving whilst disqualified, driving without insurance and driving without an MoT”
“But....but....my scooter?!!”
“We’re seizing it”
An ambulance can help with many things. Legal advice isn’t one of them.
So it’s now getting to the time where we need a nice little “off job” which will see us just to the end of the shift.
And then....
45yo male, mental health issues
Bugger. This could be anything from someone yelling at their neighbour through to someone about to commit suicide.
Arrive at a normal looking Victorian house converted in to several nice flats.
There are push chairs and kids bikes in the hall.
The patient opens their front door but turns and shuffles back in to the flat before anyone has the chance to say anything.
The place stinks....of cigarette smoke, vomit, urine, stale beer....
The patient is wearing grey jogging bottoms and a t shirt the colour of chewing gum. They’re unshaven, look grey and clammy and their nose is running.
“So what’s going on buddy”
“<sniff> I just wanna die.....”
“Ok....and how long have you felt like this?”
“I dunno......weeks....months......some days I’m fine, some days I’m not”
And he starts to cry.
“I mean look at all this st....”
Looking around the flat, there are wine and beer bottles everywhere. Not stacked up or stock piled, but half a dozen on the coffee table, six or seven down by the end of the sofa, three more on the dining table....two by the phone, a few randomly placed on the stairs....scattered along every window sill...in the bathroom on top of the toilet cistern....
“D’you drink much?”
“All the time. I hate myself but I can’t stop, can I?”
“D’you have any other medical conditions”
“Yeah....depression, anxiety.....schizophrenia....”
“Are you taking your meds?”
“Can’t remember”
The man has chronic conditions, and although he needs help it isn’t an emergency as such.
Various phone calls go back and forth to the local mental health team, and our own control room.
The mental health team can’t do anything as it’s out-of-hours (Sunday, remember?) and the patient isn’t at crisis point, and yet we can’t really justify taking him to a hospital either as he hasn’t got any acute issues that would be resolved today.
He gets up to go for a smoke, sways a bit, and then unwittingly resolves the deadlock for us by falling headlong over the coffee table sending bottles, an ashtray and the latest CG across the floor.
“Look, you’re really not in any state to be left here alone. What if that’d happened at, say, the top of the stairs?”
A brief and pointless argument follows where the man says he can look after himself. We point out the rotting food in the fridge, the soiled bed clothes, the toilet bowl encrusted with dried vomit, and he agrees to come with us....
“A change of surroundings, have a chat to someone....it might help. I’m not saying it will, but it might. And look mate, you haven’t done anything wrong and this isn’t your fault ok? It’s just sometimes people need a bit of a steer in the right direction, that’s all”
He cries again.
Drop him to A&E “as a place of safety”, handing him over to a nurse I’ve not seen in a while.
It’s that shift-change time of day.
“Just starting or just finishing?”
“Finishing. In fact, we were done <looks at clock> twenty minutes ago”
“Gits. I’m here til 6am”
“Ha! See you in the morning then. I’m off!”
Arrive around 05:50.
Check over the ambulance. It’s getting on for ten years old, has a six figure mileage and is maintained on a public budget so it’s less a case of checking it and more a case of listing everything that’s broken or missing, then taking it on the streets anyway.
First job, 89yo male “fallen, unable to get up”.
Get to the address quickly as the streets are still empty.
The front door latch is held open allowing easy entry. The patient is lying on the floor in a comfortable position with a cushion under their head. No signs of anything being knocked over, the patient has no injuries and all their obs are fine. We assist Stan to his feet without much effort, in fact, he probably could’ve done it himself.
“D’you feel you need to go to hospital?”
“Oh no, I’m fine now”
“So if you fell over, how come the front door was open?”
“Errr......pardon?”
“If you were stuck on the floor, who opened the front door?”
“Oh....Ermm......I leave it like that all the time”
“You live in London, you’re nearly 90 and you leave your front door wide open? Ok, shall we just make you a cup of tea?”
“Oooh would you? That’d be nice”
He plops in to an armchair and puts the cricket on the TV.
Job done.
It’s a more reasonable hour now and there’s a Pret nearby who sometimes give us complimentary coffee so we head there and mingle with those ordering breakfast to take back to their orangery.
“That’s on the house, thanks for your work” says the manager.
Small victories.
Next job, a mid-30s female “with a headache”.
Arrive at an affluent apartment in West London. Patient answers the door in their dressing gown, holding a cat in one hand and rubbing their forehead with the other.
“Yeah it’s like I was out with, like, friends last night and we had like LOADS of shots and like now my head hurts and it’s just like THE worst headache EVER and it’s like I just don’t know what to do”
“Have you taken any, like, pain relief?”
“What’s that?”
“Paracetamol?”
“No”
Give the patient some paracetamol, and fill out some paperwork.....
“How’s the head now?”
The patient is now holding their cat in one hand but their iPhone in the other, FaceTiming their mate reflecting on what a f*cking fab time they had last night and did they know Tanya got off with Dom?
Onward.....
Cat 1, cardiac arrest. “s
t just got real” or something.We charge across town literally as fast as possible, dodging Sunday traffic which is, bizarrely, often worse than weekday rush hour.
Tourists on hire bikes riding with one hand, looking at Google maps with the other, Ubers doing u-turns without warning, Deliveroo scooters going the wrong way down one way streets. Oh well, it’s only four and a half tonnes of Mercedes doing upwards of 50mph. It probably won’t hurt. The screen in the ambulance pings with a few updates on the job...
“Confirmed cardiac arrest. Not conscious. Not breathing” followed by “MetPol on scene. CPR in progress”
Arrive at the address, a council tower block, where there’s a solo car, two police cars and another ambulance already on scene.
In the flat there’s a mass of uniforms, a police officer in full stab vest and belt kit is pumping up and down on the chest of the patient, sweat dripping off the end of his nose. A colleague crouched in a small space around the patient’s head is peering down the throat in preparation to intubate whilst another is slapping the patient’s forearm looking for a good site to insert a cannula.
The small room is crowded with medics, the furniture has been unceremoniously pushed back against the walls, accidentally knocking over the TV, the patient’s wife stands in the door, one hand over her mouth, the other steadying herself against the door frame.
After about 45 minutes, several shots of adrenaline and 50,000 refreshing volts, the patient has a pulse again and is relatively stable but still very unwell.
But it’s ok, we’re only on the 14th floor and the lift is the size of a phone box.
A combined effort by police, ambulance and Dave the builder who lives next door sees the unconscious patient carried down to the ambulance.
With a seriously ill patient in the back being tended by several medics, the blue light drive to hospital is a bizarre cross between Driving Miss Daisy and The French Connection.
The patient is delivered to the Resus team at the nearest hospital and we congregate in the back of the ambulance for a debrief, the key part of which is Googling the nearest McDonalds as it’s now way past lunchtime.
Next.....
50yo female fallen on escalator at tube station. Possible disloc shoulder.
Easy job. Pain relief, immobilise, take to A&E. Job made ten times harder by tube passengers stopping to gawp....
Bit tired now so I say to one onlooker, complete with back-to-front baseball cap....
“Mate, imagine this was your mum, would you want everyone staring at her while she’s in pain like this? Just keep walking will you?”
“f
k you, I can do what I want”Nice.
Next up we go to a 24yo male who “just doesn’t feel right, it’s like my heart’s racing or sumfing innit bruv?”
After a very long, very protracted conversation about how we’re not the police, he finally admits to having used cocaine the night before.
His mates find this inadvertent disclosure hilarious.
Take him to A&E as a precaution. He’ll probably be fine. Probably.
What next?.....
“RTC Motorcycle v car. Active haemorrhaging”
Charge across town, again, and find a Prius perpendicular across the road with a scooter wedged in the front offside wheel arch. There are two people on phones, pacing up and down the pavement, gesticulating wildly, one of whom is wearing a helmet.
“Are you the rider?”
Bad move. Evel Knieval launches in to a tirade of accusations and allegations against the Prius driver, who retaliates with volley after volley of similar attributions of blame.
No one is actually hurt and when asked about the “active haemorrhage” the scooter rider suddenly acquires a limp, rolls up his trouser leg, winces, and points to a graze on his knee the size of a 20p piece. My four year old daughter wears greater injuries as a badge of honour.
We invite the scooter rider in to the ambulance much to the disgust of the Prius driver. Shortly afterwards, and having ascertained he’s fine, a police officer knocks on the door.
By coincidence it’s the one who was doing CPR when we arrived at the cardiac arrest.
“Oh hello again mate, alright?”
“Yeah, you?”
“Yup, did our man make it?”
“Dunno....sorry”
“Oh well, mind if I have a word?”
“Go ahead, we’re pretty much done”
The copper turns to the scooter rider and the friendly camaraderie vanishes....
“Ok we spoke to you once already this morning didn’t we?”
“I no inderstund?”
“Well, you’re under arrest for driving whilst disqualified, driving without insurance and driving without an MoT”
“But....but....my scooter?!!”
“We’re seizing it”
An ambulance can help with many things. Legal advice isn’t one of them.
So it’s now getting to the time where we need a nice little “off job” which will see us just to the end of the shift.
And then....
45yo male, mental health issues
Bugger. This could be anything from someone yelling at their neighbour through to someone about to commit suicide.
Arrive at a normal looking Victorian house converted in to several nice flats.
There are push chairs and kids bikes in the hall.
The patient opens their front door but turns and shuffles back in to the flat before anyone has the chance to say anything.
The place stinks....of cigarette smoke, vomit, urine, stale beer....
The patient is wearing grey jogging bottoms and a t shirt the colour of chewing gum. They’re unshaven, look grey and clammy and their nose is running.
“So what’s going on buddy”
“<sniff> I just wanna die.....”
“Ok....and how long have you felt like this?”
“I dunno......weeks....months......some days I’m fine, some days I’m not”
And he starts to cry.
“I mean look at all this s
t....”Looking around the flat, there are wine and beer bottles everywhere. Not stacked up or stock piled, but half a dozen on the coffee table, six or seven down by the end of the sofa, three more on the dining table....two by the phone, a few randomly placed on the stairs....scattered along every window sill...in the bathroom on top of the toilet cistern....
“D’you drink much?”
“All the time. I hate myself but I can’t stop, can I?”
“D’you have any other medical conditions”
“Yeah....depression, anxiety.....schizophrenia....”
“Are you taking your meds?”
“Can’t remember”
The man has chronic conditions, and although he needs help it isn’t an emergency as such.
Various phone calls go back and forth to the local mental health team, and our own control room.
The mental health team can’t do anything as it’s out-of-hours (Sunday, remember?) and the patient isn’t at crisis point, and yet we can’t really justify taking him to a hospital either as he hasn’t got any acute issues that would be resolved today.
He gets up to go for a smoke, sways a bit, and then unwittingly resolves the deadlock for us by falling headlong over the coffee table sending bottles, an ashtray and the latest CG across the floor.
“Look, you’re really not in any state to be left here alone. What if that’d happened at, say, the top of the stairs?”
A brief and pointless argument follows where the man says he can look after himself. We point out the rotting food in the fridge, the soiled bed clothes, the toilet bowl encrusted with dried vomit, and he agrees to come with us....
“A change of surroundings, have a chat to someone....it might help. I’m not saying it will, but it might. And look mate, you haven’t done anything wrong and this isn’t your fault ok? It’s just sometimes people need a bit of a steer in the right direction, that’s all”
He cries again.
Drop him to A&E “as a place of safety”, handing him over to a nurse I’ve not seen in a while.
It’s that shift-change time of day.
“Just starting or just finishing?”
“Finishing. In fact, we were done <looks at clock> twenty minutes ago”
“Gits. I’m here til 6am”
“Ha! See you in the morning then. I’m off!”
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