Life of a Trainee Paramedic

Well I know that I said that I would post sometime this week, I hadn’t intended it on being as late as today but I can honestly say that I was really tired after each day of driving, and didn’t even read the books I was supposed to as I just wanted to wind down and go to bed.  I was going to bed at 10.30/11pm, and I don’t even go to bed this early when I’m on a day shift.

I was doing my C1 classification so that I will be able to drive vehicles up to 7.5 tonnes, which is the bracket into which an ambulance comes.  Without this extra category, I would not be employed by trust I work for, and most likely the other trusts in the country.  I was also doing by IHCD D1, which is not a category that would go onto your licence, but which means that I can go straight onto the D2 course (blue light driving) when I qualify (touch wood), which saves me a week, and also the trust some money.  I didn’t have to do the course until I had finished anyway but when two of the 2nd year students at my station and one from a nearby station said they were going to do it, I thought I might as well do it with some people in the same boat as me.

We all arrived at 8.30 on monday morning and saw the vehicle that we would be driving.  It was very long with a twin-wheeled axil at the back.  We all swapped round driving, and I didn’t think that it was actually the driving that was the problem, it was getting used to steering properly again, using mirrors a lot more than I normally do, and remembering that the vehicle I was driving is not as short as a car, and so I subsequently mounted a few kerbs.  The was also the problem with all of us that when we were going to change gear, we all put out feet over the brake, just in case.  We are apparently not supposed to do that, and we kept out foot over the clutch when we were changing up or down several gears, but we have to put our foot down after each change.  The engine of the vehicle is also able to take a lot more work as in my car I know what speeds I should be doing when to change gear E.g. 3rd = 20mph, 4th = 30mph, 5th = 40mph, where as on this vehicle it could easily take 30mph in 5th gear and not far off 6th.  Then engine also made that revving noise (you know, the really loud one) which when driving a car makes you think that you need to change gear when in this one you didn’t, so we got slapped for that. 

I had a bit of trouble taking into consideration the size of the vehicle and clipped the back wheel a fe times, although I think that was to be expected, and as the week went on, I, and the 3 other people, were a lot more confident when driving the vehicle.  We have picked up some bad habits while driving and I have to now focus on driving the correct way until my test a week on tuesday as it would be rather expensive if I had to retake it at £89.00 a pop, and then add on the vehicle charge, it would rapidly mount up.

We’ve drove all over the place, to as far away as Glossop and Peterborough to Sheffield.  We’ll all be taking our test’s in Peterborough as they don’t do LGV tests at our local testing station, which is rather unfortunate.  I quite liked the look of Peterborough as a place though, quite a new city and a new hotel, no doubt with plasma screens and PS2’s (aka the local prison) and the traffic didn’t seem to bad.  The roads were also really wide and so it will hopefully reduce our chances of mounting the kerb.  We travelled there to have a look at the test centre and all the test routes are on the internet so we chose 4 of them to do, and we each did a route to get the feel of the place.

We had our two test’s for the D1 today which constituted a half MCQ and half true/false paper and then a signage test.  It’s suprising how you know what the signs mean by looking at them, but when it actually comes to verbalising what they mean, yopu can actually change the meaning of the sign.  The one that we most remember is the ’speed’ camera sign:

This actually means ‘An area in which camera’s are used to enforce traffic regulations’.  Very long winded.  We had those test’s this morning before we set off and thankfully we all passed and will soon get our certificates through the post.  The week’s gone by so fast, and it all counted towards placement hours which helped to.  The 3 people I was with, I’d met a few times before but as they were in the upper year, hadn’t really seen much of them, but I actually had a really good time and had a laugh all week.  I can see how people in the trust who have been on Technician and Paramedic courses together still remain good friends and have a laugh, although we only had a week, it was still fun, and now I await my test.

TP

This article is about an attack on an ambulance in Stockport

One of my colleagues was actually involved in this incident while out on placement.  This type of behaviour is totally unacceptable and I honestly believe that if they ever catch the people that did this, both to the man and to the ambulance should be locked up.  Why should the law abiding public had to suffer the consequences of the actions of a few idiots.  Thankfully none of the crew was hurt, and I was only just telling someone this weekend that I personally have not seen any abusive patients, and it’s not as bad as I thought it would be before I started the course.  I can only hope that nothing like this will ever happen to me  

Prison will never happen though as it’s on the news today that because prison over crowding is so bad, then people with jail sentences up to 4 years will be eligible for parole, although that doesn’t include sexual offences.  In my opinion, a prison should be set up on some disused island of the scottish coast where they can be left to serve out their sentences without the possibility of escape unless they fancy a few mile swim. None of this will ever happen unfortunately, but one can live in hope.

TP

Luckily when I woke up on Friday morning (after only a few hours sleep from a night shift) it wasn’t raining so it was decided that we would go camping as the rain didn’t seem to be as bad as the torrential downpours we had on Thursday.  As I was travelling to meet them, I went on the directions that I was given and didn’t find them to difficult to follow although I did get stuck in some long wait road works, but at the point on the road I didn’t know where I was so I had to stick it out.  When I arrived, the weather was fine and stayed that way for a few hours and then the thunder rolled in.  It was like that for around 4 hours but it didn’t matter, had a chance to chat and have a game of card’s before it fined up in the evening.  Luckily I had a camp bed to sleep on as my legs were to long for the blow up bed, so my cousinn swapped with me.

On the saturday, we waited until some of our neighbours from home arrived and set up, and then went to Carsington Water in Derbyshire.  I’ve been there before cycling but this was going to be the first time that I’ve walked around it.  At the main visitor centre you can hire canoes and boats, so several of us ‘kids’ hired some canoes to go out on the lake.  There was free wet suit use, and we were lucky that we took them up it, as half way through the heaven’s opened and we were drenched, so only my boxers were drenched.  When we were going back in, we thought we might as well go for a swim, as we were already wet, and colder than the water, so we went in.  After a bit of drying under the hand dryers, since we hadn’t brought any towels with us, we set off on our walk.  This is where it seems that I got a tan as suprisingly the sun came out and it didn’t seem to take that long for my rudolph nose to kick in.  After 8.5 miles (and NOT on the flat I might add) I was knackered, and was really looking forward to some chips, which we had earned after that.  When we got back, we all sat out and chilled with a drink until bed time, and then it was back to the campbed.  The thing with camping is that you can’t have a lie in as you seem to hear all the noise around you and even if no one is up in your tent, then you can hear the people in the next tent.  After breakfast I helped to put the tents down and then set back off, on a different route to the roadworks, as I needed to get back to do some washing as I was beginning to recycle my socks!

I was glad I went, as it was a choice of having some extra shifts on the car, which I’d enquired about due to the rain or go camping and I know that if I’d stayed at home I would have regretted it.  This week I’m on a driving course to gain the DVLA C1 and the IHCD D1 which should make me employable come qualification.  I will post about this and last weeks night shift later in the week.

TP

After Tuesday’s day shift in the previous post, I worked again Wednesday day and then because I had a meeting (pointless) at uni, I worked a shift last night.  Like Tuesday I had a good time on both and laughed quite a lot.  Wednesday was a very busy day, and it was also a strain on my waist.  I ended up having from a bakery a little meringue nest with a cherry on top and a gingerbread man.  Then at station, I took in some marsh mellows that I needed help to finish off and then later on in the shift, one of my colleagues bought some orange flavoured chocolate digestives when we were filling up with petrol.  I know I could have said no to all these things but I havn’t quite got the will power yet.

On wednesday we went to another diabetic patient.  I hadn’t had any for 4 months, and 2 come along in 2 days.  This was a 70-odd year old lady who was a tablet controlled diabetic.  She had not been eating properly recently due to losing her husband but had still been taking her tablets which dropping her blood glucose levels to low so she was given some glucose gel and a can of coke to get them back up again.  She was a very pleasant lady, and her grandson and wife/gf were the ones who called us and were happy to help us out, especially when his grandma kicked the coke over while still not with it.  It also rained a lot today but we managed to avoid getting drenched.

The meeting we had to go to at Uni was one about CV’s and Interviews.  I had wondered what use that this would be to us considering that we have still got over a year left on our course and it turned out to be true.  I know I’m not going to remember half the things that were talked about, there are more important things to think about beforehand, like passing!!!

The night shift went quite well to, except our first job of the night was a transfer to a more appropriate hospital for this patient.  Guess where we took them? Back to a hospital near Uni.  I might as well have stopped over there, although it did seem to go quite quick and took up 1/3 of the shift.  We were then kept quite busy after then and had something else that I had not seen before.  We were called to a patient who had literally seemed to lose the last 4 years of his life.  I’m told the term is Clinical Regression.  The patient couldn’t remember anything of the past 4 years and wondered where the heck he was.  He was with two friends who told us his details but the patient had no idea who they were.  They were just on a night out together and this happened.  The patient said he’d only met them 1/2 hour ago even though he’d lived with one for 6 months and the other had gone to Uni with him.  The patient was quite upset and very scared as he had no idea where he was.  We took him to hospital and the last I heard was that he was going to be seen by someone more in-the-know on such things this morning.

I’m off camping now for the weekend.  Even though it’s probably going to start raining again, they chose to go.  I could have worked at the weekend on the car for the first time, but I’d said I would go and we’ll still have fun no matter what.  Nest week I’m on my driving course so I’m sure there will be tales of my driving posted on here. 

Enjoy the Weekend!

TP

I’ve had a really good day today at ‘work’.  I’m going to start calling it work from now on, as it is in virtually every sense, and typing ‘placement’ uses to much characters and time, not to mention energy.

It’s been quite chilled because the jobs we have had have been interspersed with some nice breaks, and when we have been on standby, we’ve chatted.  Mostly it’s been in the sunshine, and this uniform can get very hot.  We did have 10 minutes of rain madness, and it’s suprising how my colleagues can go from ‘normal’ work speed to ’super fast’ work speed when they feel the first few spits of rain.  We were actually attending an RTC at one of the main cross roads in the city, where 5 roads join, and this accident coupled with one on the high street, and another earlier on the bypass, created mayhem in this already traffic management challenged city.  We arrived to find the patient being attended to by a CP, and as we were lowering the trolley from the ambulance, we felt the first few spits.  So we turbo charged the bed over to the patient, I got my hood out from my hi-vis jacket, and we loaded her on and turbo charged her back.  Unfortunately the ambulance lift is not turbo charged, and this is when the spits were beginning to turn into buckets!  When we arrived at the hospital, which luckily had a cover over the entrance to A&E, there was a wall of water.  I think the ‘dry’ god won out over the ‘wet’ god who was out to get us today.

I also had my first diabetic patient today.  It’s a shame it didn’t come a few weeks ago and I could have included the job in my portfolio.  I had my first chance to use Dextrose Gel for real, and the biscuit’s that the family had on hand for the patient smelled delicious, coconut ones with chocolate on.  The three of us could have finished them off no probs, as the patient didn’t like coconut.  Whoops!

I came back home tonight thinking what a good day it’s been.  I know it’s been 2 weeks since I was last out, so I can hardly have been fed up, but I’ve laughed a lot today and it’s nice when you can go to work and do that.  I hope it lasts, at least until the end of this run of shifts.

TP

Well it’s been a week since I last posted and to be honest I haven’t really done that much.  On Wednesday it was a lads day with a game of pitch and putt, then a chippy and then onto the pub to watch the England match.  Thursday it was the usual quiz at the pub, although I no longer think of it as a quiz, it is more like Mastermind as some of the questions are that hard, although that didn’t stop us from coming 3rd (with a little help from Google).  Friday I was kicked out of the house to stop at my Aunt’s as my parent’s needed my bed for some friend’s who were coming down for their 25th.  This meant that I got out of doing any work, which I can’t say I was that upset about.  All week I’d been having about 10 hours sleep, then having a few chilled ‘wake up’ hours having breakfast and reading the paper, and by this time it was 1pm.  My dad says he’s never met anyone who sleeps as much, although I think most student’s can vouch for the fact that we do need our sleep.  The party went off well, and along with the obligatory mingling, it wasn’t to bad.  The desserts I have to say were exceptional, and all deserved a taste and I was happy to oblige!

I came back on Sunday as I had my LGV theory test today, and a friend from Uni sent me their CD that had all the questions on, and you could make up your own tests.  This was great help, as you got to answer the actual questions that would be on the test, and if you got them wrong, it gave you an explanation for them, so it was really good.  I would have thought there were around 1000 questions, so it took a while to get through them.  The theory test took the form of 60 MCQ, and then a hazard perception exam where there was 14 clips and you had to click when you identified a hazard. getting scored on your times.  You had to get 51/60 for the MCQ, and 50/70 for hazard perception.  I got 56 and 51 respectively.  Although the hazard perception was a close shave, it didn’t bother me in the slightest, I’d passed.  I had to do this because I’m taking the LGV course next week, and you have to have done your theory to take the practical test.  If your lucky enough to have had your driving licence before 1997, then your able to drive the vehicles everyone after has to take a test for.  The good thing with doing the test was that it gave me a chance for some revision.  How many people can honestly say they know the difference between a pelican, puffin and toucan pedestrian crossing?

I’m on placement for the next few days and it seems like ages since I’ve been out.  I have however made some vegetable soup to take with me which will be healthier than the other food I usually take although I can see it producing a copious amount of gases, but we shall see.  After these shifts, I’m off camping for the weekend with the family, aunt, uncle, cousin, neighbours across the road and some from another street.  A proper little gathering.  Should be fun!

TP

Well, in the early evening we spent quite a lot of time in this one bar, and they even gave us free shots to say thank you I presume, although you wouldn’t actually consider them alcoholic.  Now the stag, who was quite alright when we came into this bar, was after a few more potent shots a little worse for wear.  We were already beginning to get some disapproving looks from the locals and I was directly in their line of eye scorn.  I’m not really a drinker, I’m more happy having a coke rather than a pint, and it took a while for the people on the stag who didn’t know me to get used to that fact.  We were all getting tired at this point as we had virtually been awake not for 40 hours straight, and with no prospect of stopping anywhere, it was onto the Red Bulls.  Now the stag ended up needing to be sick as he had drunk a little to much, so we elected to go for a walk towards a park area of Hamburg.  While we were walking, there was this wall, at an angle of about 50-60 degrees, and some kids were running up it.  Now me and several others thought that if the kids can do it, we can do it.  We went up the small wall fine, but I chose not to try the big wall after seeing someone attempt it.  Now when I was turning round, I just happened to see one of the guys fall and crash to back to Earth with a wallop.  I asked him is he was alright, and he said he was fine, although as it turned out that must have been the alcohol talking.  A little further down the road as we stopped to wait for some people, I noticed that he looked like he was in pain, so I asked him again where he said his arm was hurting him a little.  Now I have only seen a broken wrist while on placement, not a broken arm, and with all the layers he had on, I checked his wrist and couldn’t feel any fractures, so my friend who is a fully qualified physio did a more thorough check.  When he did some arm movements, he could tell that the arm was broken, past the area where I had felt.

So we all had to turn around and head back to the locker’s so we could get the insurance information out to take to the hospital.  In Hamburg they have cycle lanes like in Britain but they are far less obvious.  In the UK, they are a distinctly different colour to the rest of the path so the signs are obvious, but in Hamburg, even though the path was a different colour, it just looked like it was part of the pattern and there was virtually no signs to speak of.  Without our german friend, we would all undoubtedly have been run over by the cyclists as he said they will just run into you.  I got the same impression from most of the german people as well, with quite a few not looking where they are going, and then not apologising when they bump into someone.  Where I got a little annoyed by this, the German’s took it as normal.  After we had got the injured man off to hospital with 3 others in tow, the rest of us, including the stag, went for something to eat and then another drink.  The stag was at the stage now where he needed to go and sleep somewhere and we managed to find him a hotel with just one room available, so off he went.  The rest of us when on a treck to see if there actually was any hotel that could fit us all in, and after a while, and some bargain hunting, we managed to find a hotel.  Some much for German Information.  We all then had a good nights sleep and a breakfast to set us up for the day.

Due to us not having visited a certain area of Hamburg, which seems to be universal on stag party’s, we went by the tube to see what it was actually like.  Now this was an area which was not as clean as the city centre which is probably because not that many tourists would visit this particular area.  After a walk up and down, and a few more drink’s, we went for some lunch and then went on to an Irish bar to waste a few hours before we headed back to catch the flight.

Overall I had a good time in Germany.  It was like the UK in many ways and reminded me the most of home compared to any other country that I’ve been to.  The only thing was the language.  The fields looked the same, the shops were the same, the people dressed the same.  Germany has gone from a country that I never thought I would visit, to one that I would like to go back to and explore a little more.

TP

Well the Stag Do officially started at 2am on Saturday the 2nd of June as this was the time that we were setting off for Stansted airport. There was 7 of us in total travelling from home, with 2 other people meeting us there, and someone else already in Germany (who is German) would meet us when we got to Hamburg. Now, I was expecting to get some sleep during the drive down, how wrong I was. We ended up talking about some complete rubbish, and even some riddles! Now I used to put some riddles on this blog, and like those, I had no clue how to do them, and it was far to early in the morning to think about how to do them.  We arrived at the Airport at around 5am, and after following my mates dad around the car park, past loads of free spaces I might add, we finally parked up and headed on our way.  The outside of Stansted is all really new, or so it looks, but inside, the amount of time it takes to get through the security checks in terrible.  We queued for around 20-30 minutes just to go through the first lot.  Lynx deodorant and hair gel was considered a security risk, so off they went into airport oblivion.  If though they were in bottles of less than 100ml, they were acceptable, so in effect you could just get a few bottles and fill them up seperately.  They don’t actually look at what they are, just the volume.  Even toothpaste and aftershave that was in my bag, was picked up by the people watching the screen’s, so my bag was searched.  I advise anyone who is going to fly, to put all that stuff in your suitcase, as it will get taken off you.  No one in our group got through with anything greater than 100 ml.  We had only got hand luggage anyway, so the baggage check in idea was mute.

We boarded the plane easily enough and because we had no check in baggage, we got priority boarding tickets.  This was beneficial because the airline that we were travelling with allows people to sit wherever they like, every man for himself type thing, so we were lucky to be all able to sit together.  The flight was uneventful, except for the fact that I had a wet finger in my ear when I nodded off, and we landed at Lubeck around 1 hour 15 minutes later.  It takes me longer to drive from placement to uni than it does to fly to Germany! We had a coach ride then into the city, which was about 1.5 hours, but again it gave me time for a little nod.  We got into Hamburg around 10.30am.  Due to having no accomodation arranged, we set about trying to find somewhere to stop for the night.  Several hotels proved fruitless or to expensive for what we willing to pay, so the next step was a bar.  I can honestly say that 12 noon is the earliest that I have ever had a drink, but all the others seemed to be used to it.  We made our way through the centre of Hamburg to a Irish bar that we had been told about and had a few drinks there while we waited for the guy that was already in Germany, and who was travelling by train to meet us, arrived.  This was around the time where 75% of the phones we had, died, as we had all forgot to even look at the charge on them.  When we went to meet him, we had some food along the way.  My friend and I elected for a good old fashioned McDonalds and I was able to sit eating this on the fountain in the centre watching people go by.  It seemed to me that people seemed far less rushed than they do here.  They take their time walking and enjoy their lazy day out.  Hamburg also seemed to be far cleaner than a lot of UK cities that I know, although it could just be the area we were in.  One thing that I noticed was how there was seperate bins for paper, glass, plastic and just normal rubbish.  In the UK it seems, one size fits all, and our Government wonders why were not meeting our recycling targets!

After our German translator enquired about available hotel’s at the local informatin desk, only to be told there was no spare rooms available, we all resigned ourselves to being awake (minus a few cat naps) for 72 hours straight.  This was not a prospect that I personally looked forward to.  At the train station, they have lockers which for can hire for a few hours or a day, and they are really big so we were all able to fit our bags into them so we were not carrying them round all day long.  We then checked out a few more bars and tried a CurryWurst, which is a sausage that has curry powder and some sauce over it I think.  The thing with the German language is that, to me, it was total gibberish.  Some words you could get the jist of but others left me completely flumoxed.  After this we went to another bar/restaurant where things really started to kick off, which included a trip to the local A & E. 

TP