Blue lights and bloody stretchers

Last night I was lucky enough to spend some time riding along with a Paramedic from Caerphilly in the Rapid Response Vehicle (RRV) answering calls in Caerphilly.

The RRV is basically a Paramedic on his own in a car with some lifesaving equipment. They’re sent to only the most urgent of calls and their purpose is to get there quick and provide life-saving treatment early on. Caerphilly ambulance station is all but closed now and the Ambulance guys are mostly based out of the fire station next door. As a result I saw a friend whom I hadn’t seen in quite some time when he left the team to become a fireman.

We had about six calls during the evening. At least two of them were calls that I, without the benefit of the extra kit the RRV carries, would have assumed them to be heart attacks. It was a fascinating insight into critical care at the sharp end including some excellent tuition on ECG analysis.

After a late finish last night, I was looking forward to a relaxing day today. My central heating boiler’s died – the pilot light won’t stay lit, so after boiling some water to clean dishes, we headed upstairs to build the wardrobes that I recently acquired. It was about that point that the pager went off. *sigh*

We were placed on standby for a callout in the Neuadd valley, so I quickly got changed and as I headed up to base, the pager messages came out indicating that we were on. As I approached base, I saw Alpha heading off down the road, but the main doors were still open. I headed down to base to find Huw there who indicated I should take Echo, the second Landrover in case we needed more vehicles. I headed off up the road and as I approached control at the pumphouse, I was quickly tasked to take a crew up to the gap. We had an adult and four children on the slopes of Pen Y Fan, one of the children had an injured leg.

On our way up the Roman Road we could hear the first hill party as they approached the casualty. With the initial assessment of the casualty came a request for a helicopter – obviously all was not right here. After dropping the first crew off at the gap, I headed back down to pick up another. By the time I got back up, my Landrover was lovely and warm and as 169 came in to pick up the one lad, the other three had been walked back to our location. We piled them into our Landrover and gave them some hot Ribena to warm them up. Eventually I took them down to control where an ambulance was waiting for them. Their group leader joined them shortly after and they were taken off to Prince Charles to get checked over. We did get a “well done” back from the hospital via the Ambulance services, which was nice. From my limited information I understand there was an open fracture of the leg involved and since the young man had spent some time being carried out on our stretcher, we had quite a lot of cleaning to do once we got back to base where we had to disinfect anything that had blood on it.

I just hope tomorrow’s going to be quieter…