Well I am on nights at the minute and I have had an interesting shift. The workload was nothing to complain about, but two of the calls were ones that have stuck in my mind....
The first call was to a male who had been assaulted in a pub, it turned out that he had been struck across the head with a bar stool by a "Friend". When we arrived we were met by the barman who said "I think he might need a couple of stitches!”
Walking into the bar we were confronted with a male aged in his 30's lying on the floor with a bar towel being pressed firmly to the top of his head by one of the other staff, upon examining the wound it was approx 3cms in length but semi circular, the patient was responding but not fully aware of what had happened (GCS13 for those in the know), my colleague quickly handed me a large dressing to control the bleeding and went to get the chair, whilst she was away I carried out a quick head to toe survey and found no other injuries, speaking to the patient I noticed that he was still dazed and confused, having gotten him into the ambulance I was able to assess him further and found that he was showing a weakness to his right arm and leg. When we arrived at hospital, I handed him over to the staff and explained my findings and gave a provisional diagnosis...Male head injury? Bleed or injury to brain... 2 hours later he was transferred to a Neurological unit for surgery as his CT scan had shown that he had a fractured skull with small air pockets forming around his brain, I was tempted to go back to the bar and let the barman know that he needed more than stitches!
The second call was for a male, once again who was in his 30's and was feeling suicidal, when we arrived he was sitting in a bus shelter swallowing tablets by the handful, when speaking to him he said that he wanted to die, but couldn't manage to get to an area quite enough to hang himself. He was conscious and orientated, but just wanted to be left alone to die. Both my colleague and the two police officers who had turned up with us to find him were explaining that we were not going to just leave him in the street to die and that he was either going to hospital with us in out nice warm clean ambulance or he could travel in a police van, but one way or another he WAS going! Whilst all this was happening I was outside picking up the various packets of tablets and making a mental note of the quantities so that when I called ahead to the hospital they could run the tablets through the toxicology database and see what treatment he would need.
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