What a bizarre night.
With my leg almost back to 100%, I headed out tonight for a shift with Rich on the RRV in Caerphilly again. The shift started well even though Rich prophesied a quiet shift based on others this week. Tonight’s weather is horrendous – classic Welsh weather – horizontal and torrential drizzle. If you’ve never experienced torrential drizzle, it’s weird. You look out and think “Oh, it’s fine, it’s just a touch of drizzle.” but by the time you’ve taken 5 paces, you’re drenched. Add in the “horizontal” qualifier, and what you end up with is being drenched on one side only. Trust Wales to specialise in rain.
So we started well – no sooner had we finished checking the vehicle than we had a call – 72 year old female, chest pain. We hurried up there to find that she’d been diagnosed with angina recently and had used her GTN spray several times already. ECG was clear, she was rather bradycardic, but that could be attributed to the beta blockers she was taking. She definately felt unwell, so she headed in to A&E in the truck – a quick call.
That’s where we ground to a halt. The shift started at 1700 and we’d headed back to the fire station. We had several false starts and one actual call before we decided around 2130 to head out for dinner – Chinese tonight. The night was slow, I’d read all of today’s newspapers and sorted Sean’s CV out. So we came back to the fire station and I sat down while Rich started getting his onto a plate ….and the phone rang. “Respond red to a female, fallen, ?head injury?”. All I’ll say on this one is that it was alcohol related. We had a spate of calls after that and it was all silly stuff until suddenly “Red call to a male who’s cut the end of his finger off. Police on scene.” That sounded impressive, and we headed across Caerphilly to find a guy and his female partner who’d had some kind of tiff. It wasn’t impressive, he got a plaster, she got a special plaster to hold the laceration closed. He was arrested, we left.
That was the start of the madness. We ended up looking for a man who had apparently cut his own throat – we ended up at that call twice. The police dog caught him in the end. Lucky for him since there was a full firearms team deployed as well. We had a 5 year old with a “?dislocated eblow?” which wasn’t. We finished off with a male in his 40’s with chest pains which turned out not to be cardiac related.
So it’s been a strange night. I still haven’t seen my big RTC/trauma despite there being a few minor traumas tonight, I’ve also realised I need to work on my children skills. It seems Sean had just as weird a night but hey. A few medical points picked up this evening, nothing exciting. Oh, and the reason why the guy with the chopped-off-fingertip and missus were in the area? They’d travelled across the country to go climb Pen Y Fan tomorrow. If I get called to see them tomorrow…