Four years ago I had a bit of a rough time of life. In retrospect, it was for the better, as it allowed me to really and truly reevaluate what I was doing with my life and make several adjustments. In a fit of fluff, I actually even created my own mission statement for myself – something which actually helped and continues to help me focus on what I do in life and where I focus my limited energies. Before I go on, I know that in the technical field I’m in, there’s a resistance against fluffy shit – it’s seen as marketing/sales/management bullshit – which to be fair, a lot of the time it is. However, a mission statement is something I’ve found incredibly worth while – I do a lot of things both in work and out of work. I do, however, have a limited amount of time/energy to share between all of the things I love doing and so this mission statement helps keep me on track – instead of wasting energy all over the place, I focus my energies and time on things that match my core mission. Anyone who’s run a business will appreciate this approach. It’s now come around to that time of year again where I take out the mission statement, look at it, pull it apart and make sure it does reflect what I want from life. Quite surprisingly, although this is the fourth spring that I’ve done this, I’ve yet to change it one bit. So, yeah, there is a section that says “I will stop looking for love, but when it finds me…” – which doesn’t quite fit now that that side of my life is sorted. But the sentiments echoed in that paragraph for me still apply today. It also amuses me throughout how specific some of the wording is in terms of highlighting what’s more important to me. So that’s that for this year. Print it out and sign it now – a hint someone once gave me. You mentally treat things that you sign more seriously. Give it a shot – you might be surprised what an exercise like this brings up.
Tags: London, mission statement, personal
I’ve been rather apathetic about my blogging recently, sorry about that. I had a pretty busy week last week, including a search for a misper in Mountain Ash on Thursday which left me exhausted for Friday. Friday night was on shift with the first responders right through until Saturday night and what a busy shift that turned out to be – 11 calls in total according to my notes. At least I had a bit of a lie in on Saturday.
Tonight was agaKin out with the ambulance service – something I’m really enjoying though it is frustrating at times. It’s frustrating because the knowledge that I have in terms of diagnosing and treating some conditions through mountain rescue could be applied here – giving Hypostop to diabetic patients having a hypo; giving Entonox to patients suffering from painful trauma; giving aspirin to a patient suffering from a possible heart attack – just three examples where we could make even more of a difference to the community.
Take the last few calls for example. We had a two hour battle with a lovely old guy who was having a very bad hypo – only the second of his life and he’d had diabetes for some 20 years. When we turned up, the wife was able to take a blood glucose measurement for us and between us we managed to get him to take some sugar and some jam. We can’t perform blood glucose measurements ourselves and we don’t carry Hypostop (actually I do for mountain rescue but can’t use it for ambulance service calls). I’ve had a call to an elderly lady who fell – a “nan down”. She’d broken her femur, that much was obvious from the swelling and deformity, but she might also have done some damage to her knee. I had no analgesia – we don’t carry Entonox – and so I could do nothing for her other than monitor her and keep her company. The last 20 minutes of the hour-and-a-bit I spent with here were very worrying – she was starting to deteriorate and I had nothing I could do or give her to treat her. If the crew hadn’t arrived as I was getting my phone out, I would have been on the phone to control to ask for an RRV to back me up – I was concerned at that point about her slipping into hypovolaemic shock. Finally, a few weeks ago, I saw a gent who was complaining of classic heart attack symptoms, and all we could do was watch and wait. I did call for an RRV on that one because I was worried, possibly not necessary, but I’d rather be dragging an ambulance officer out of bed to come and slap on a 12-lead ECG for nothing than having my patient die.
So a frustrating time at the moment. If the ambulance service insist on sending us to these calls where we are currently achieving nothing but stopping the clock, then at least give us that tiny bit more in terms of skills and equipment that could make such a huge difference to someone’s life.
Tags: Ambulance, diabetes, First Responders, medical, Mountain Rescue, nan down, search, shift
I’m dragged out of my warm, comfortable dream by the phone. I grab it and answer as chirpily as I can, blinking the sleep from my eyes. The lava lamp I leave on when I’m on shift is casting a gentle red glow over everything. It’s a red call – “Nan down“. An old lady’s fallen out of bed at the nearby nursing home. In seconds, I’m on my feet throwing my uniform on. I glance at the clock – 0358. I groan inwardly and grab my mobile, heading downstairs grabbing my fleece and shoes as I go. I’m starting the car and driving off in under a minute.
It’s quiet at the nursing home. We’re led to a room somewhere in the building- the place is a rabbit warren. “She’s very violent.” someone says. Joy. I head in and start talking to her. She looks confused and doesn’t register my questions. I’m just starting to gather the details when the crew arrive. Her right leg is obviously shorter than the left and rotated outwards – classic symptoms of a broken femur.
While we’re helping, the phone rings. It’s control – are we available? We take the details of another call – 6 year old child with breathing difficulties.
I’m more awake for this one and head across town. I get there as the ambulance is pulling up and jump out to assist. When we get inside it’s painfully obvious that this poor boy is having a severe asthma attack. The crew get some Salbutamol going with a nebuliser mask with oxygen. His respiratory rate is at 32 breaths per minute, and his oxygen saturation is down to 83% – both indicators that this kid is very ill. Packing their kit up quickly, the boy is swept up into the arms of a paramedic and taken out to the ambulance. Minutes later, we watch as the ambulance heads off to hospital, blue lights flashing.
I head back to my car and toddle off home, knowing that by the morning, these calls will seem like dreams to me. I just hope I get a decent lie in after this.
I’ve had a livejournal account for some time now and although I post all my articles to my blog, I have a WordPress plugin that automagically syncronises the two accounts. This is ideal.
I’m also part of a community known as UKNOT. UKNOT has an RSS aggregator that grabs a bunch of blogs and presents them nice and neatly. Only problem is that since my blog’s been on there, the text in the titles has not been parsed correctly – if I have a character in the title that turns into an HTML entity, then it goes all pear-shaped.
Today I tracked down why (which will probably make a bunch of UKNOTters very happy). When my post gets sent to LJ, it has the special characters in the title. Take my last blog entry as an example:
“Therrre’s been a Murrrrrderrrrrâ€
Fine. Nothing wrong with that. Comes up in the RSS feed as:
<title>“Therrre’s been a Murrrrrderrrrr”</title>
For those of you who aren’t technical, that’s how those special characters are embedded within the RSS feed. They’re parsed as HTML entities and converted by your browser to something pretty. Obviously this means that if I want to put an ampersand into my document, it has to be encoded as &.
Problem is this – look what LJ’s RSS feed does:
<title>&#8220;Therrre&#8217;s been a Murrrrrderrrrr&#8221;</title>
Yup, its converted the ampersands into HTML entities. I’ve checked what I can – everything seems fine apart from LJ’s RSS generator. So, LJ, you’re broken. I don’t know why I expected anything different…
[Sidenote: Thanks to Joel for updating the planet link to my blog so quickly. It’s all fixed on Planet now]
Now that it’s all over the news, I can say a bit more.
The search down near Bridgend was for a missing woman reported on the news. She was missing since Saturday and it was clear from the start that we were looking for a body – the police were already holding someone in connecting with her disappearance. The South Wales police Specialist Search Unit were searching along with us, and it looks as though the body has indeed been found on some waste ground in Pontyclun, some distance from where we were searching. This has now publicly become a full murder inquiry.
I did not get a break.
So yesterday as I started winding up and preparing to go home, the pager went off. An area standby for a rescue on Hay’s Bluff near Hay on Wye. So I headed up to base and caught the first response vehicle about to leave. Jumping on board, we headed off for what is a bit of a trek. We finally got to the pass just as the hill party was within 500m of the road and we pulled up to the incident as the pagers announced that “no further personnel required.” We jumped out and chatted for a while before deciding it was time to head home. Waiting in the Landrover, our deputy team leader’s phone rang – it was Dyfed Powys police asking us to attend an incident in the waterfalls – a missing couple, one with a leg injury.
We quickly got things arranged and headed off down the road for a mostly uneventful blue light drive back to the waterfalls – on the other side of our area. We did have one rather exciting moment thanks to a patch of ice but it wasn’t until we got to Brecon that things started getting really interesting. As we were approaching Brecon, Huw, the deputy team leader’s pager went off. There was what looked like a third incident ongoing. Palming that one onto our team leader for a moment, we continued our journey down to the waterfalls. With hill parties heading into the area from four directions it wasn’t long before we found the casualties. We brought them back to base and had time to relax with a cup of coffee. This third incident was looking like a washout as we packed up to head home to re-pack the kit and refuel the vehicles.
Unfortunately, on the way home, the message came over the radios – our presence was required and so once again we were off. We all went via base to regroup – some people had to head off and we refuelled and put one vehicle back in the garage before driving off. The RV was near Bridgend and the Western Beacons team had already been called so we headed down. We then spent the rest of the night searching – I can’t really go into detail at the moment, but we didn’t get back to base until around 01hrs. We packed the vehicles up and I headed home to a nice comfortable bed.
Works seems like a break after all this…
[Originally written but not posted yesterday]
Wow.
On Saturday I was prepared. Not wanting to get caught out again, I got all my kit ready, ironed my uniform and got everything ready for my ambulance shift which started back up at 08hrs. I started pottering around the house and everything was going to plan until the pager went off. So I logged off, jumped in the car and headed up to base. As it turns out it was a dog rescue, which we completed quickly enough with the fire service before heading back to base. I headed back home and settled down for the afternoon to clean up the house a bit and watch the rugby. A great game, I was most surprised to be able to watch it all when the phone rang – red call to a gentleman with difficulty breathing. So I headed off across Caerphilly to find this poor gentleman in the later stages of heart failure, with COPD, multiple pulmonary embolisms – he was already very ill, and an illness in the family was not helping. A little confusion and once the crew arrived, a few things became clearer – this was actually a blue call – a scheduled ambulance pick up into hospital. However, it transpires that in the discussions between the doctor and the control room, it had been categorised as a red call – effectively a 999 emergency call. Given his condition, this wasn’t surprising and we were just saying goodbye to the crew when my phone rang.
I’d left my pager at home and this was Les, one of our team members who was coming with me on Sunday to a Scenes of Crime training course at Police HQ. As we were on the phone, he said to me “Get up to base quick then. Gwent police have just called.” So I headed back to the car, handed the shift over to Linda and headed up the A470 sharpish. Straight back to New Tredegar where we’d rescued the dog, this time we had an 11 year old girl with a broken leg. We turned up and once again the fire service were there. After a brief assist, we happily headed home for some food.
I was enjoying the rest of my night and determined to go to bed early when the phone rang. Red call to a patient complaining of chest pains in Penyrheol. We took ages to find it – if you’re anything to do with the layout of roads and names of roads, please think about the poor people trying to find houses in an emergency. Equally, folks, please put your house number clearly on the outside. Anyway, we headed in to find a middle aged chap gripping his chest and groaning with pain every time he breathed. He described the pain as a crushing, gripping pain that spread from his chest to his back and up into his jaw. We couldn’t get a pulse – his arms were so tense from the pain. Linda and I shared a glance and suddenly the chap stopped breathing. He pitched forwards and I threw my hands up to catch him, and as he hit my hands, he drew a breath and carried on. I was worried.
I called control – we had nothing en route to back us up. No RRVs in the area and there wasn’t anything available. I gave them an update and an enormous thanks to the controller for his efforts. He found us an ambulance and gave me an ETA of 30 minutes. He then found me a paramedic in an RRV who turned up very quickly. In the meantime, some more history came out – the gentleman had fallen twice that day, once on his back and once on his front. I considered that his pain was related to the injury for a moment, but even if it was, the pain spreading into his jaw was inconsistent with the injury he described, so we carried on assuming it was cardiac-related. When we finally got the RRV’s ECG out and got a 12-lead readout, his heart looked fine, though because of his pain, it was difficult to tell. A quick shot of morphine and his pain was history. We then had another readout which didn’t concern the paramedic – a good thing. We could finally talk to this chap properly and it transpired that the pain in his back was worst. The crew quickly turned up after that and they took him in to get checked out. Were we right? Well, tough call – the paramedic on the RRV acknowledged that the back and chest pain was most likely related to his injury, but his neck pain was inconsistent. It’s possible he’d had a cardiac incident as well.
We headed home and as I was getting into the house the phone rang again – head injury. Off we went, this time it was an elderly lady. She was on Wharfarin and had a nose bleed – a potentially dangerous condition for someone whose on drugs to stop the blood from clotting. We sat with her until the ambulance came to take her in. I then stood down from my shift and went home to get a much needed 3 hours’ sleep.
The course on Sunday was cracking – very valuable and while it didn’t teach us everything about scenes of crime (or as someone kept saying – signs of cream), it gave us a basic introduction to the concepts. Certainly useful when we come across cases where it’s too dangerous for a SOCO to get to the scene and we have to collect evidence on their behalf. I was home by 17hrs and I lay down for a nap at 18hrs, sleeping most of the way through the night.
Time for a break.
Tonight was supposed to be a night of working with the Ambulance service, but that plan went straight out the window when the pager went off at around 1700.
Leaving work, I headed off to base where I jumped in the first response Landrover and headed off. We’d been requested by the Cave Rescue team who had been rescuing a young woman with a dislocated knee from Porth yr Ogof. Fearing a carry out from the cave entrance and having been involved in a rescue for several hours already, they wanted some assistance to carry the lady out. As it turned out, she was of a strong mettle and hobbled herself out with some assistance. With that done, we packed our kit away and headed back.
By the time I’d gone home to change it was gone 2000 and I headed out to pick up the first responder kit. Meeting up with Nigel and Alison we chatted for a while before suddenly the phone rang – we had a red call in Abertridwr. Off we went to a lady with breathing difficulties. As we turned up it was apparent that she had chronic emphysema and as I was getting out a 100% mask to replace the 28% one she was wearing, the crew arrived. Alison and Nigel had accompanied me and I’d called Dilwyn and Rachel who were on shift with me. As the crew came in, things kicked off – a member of the public approached from outside saying that someone had been knocked down. Leaving the crew to the lady, we headed outside to check him out.
A young man was lying on the floor apparently unconscious. Eliciting a response from him wasn’t too difficult though he vaguely mumbled. It transpired he’d drunk half a litre of vodka and had been assaulted. I’d asked for a police presence and a second truck. There was no ambulance available so we kept an eye on the casualty while the police worked out what had happened. Eventually we managed to get him to respond – fairly explosively as it turns out and we backed off suddenly as the police stepped in. Dad was there by that point and as I pointed out to the police that now he was walking around there was nothing wrong with Dad taking him down to A&E as he was more drunk than anything else. The police agreed and Dad gladly put him in the back of the car as I stood down the ambulance.
Rachel and I went to fill in our paperwork and just as we were finishing my phone rang. Looking confused I answered to hear the dulcet tones of Gav, manning the RRV desk in Control. But I’d diverted the phone already…? He gave me the details of a call with a suspended patient.
Rachel and I headed off and got to Bedwas where we rushed in to help. The crew wasn’t far behind us and together we worked on the man for some time before the crew finally called a stop. Sadly we’d not been able to revive the man and a large family came to grieve for his loss. After our work we cleared up and gently moved the man onto the bed where we covered him in a blanket – he’d vomited quite a lot and we had a fair amount of cleaning up to do. Eventually, with the police on scene, we headed off home. For me, to wash my jacket and trousers which both had vomitus on them…and I’m on duty tomorrow again. For now, I need something to eat, put my clothes to dry and some sleep.
We’re testing a DSL ordering system at the moment by trying to order a new DSL circuit into our London Datacenter. This involves talking to BT Openreach, albeit via our third party. This is where it gets interesting.
BT Openreach, the part of BT responsible for the exchanges and the physical copper that comes to your door, has an address matching system. You get a bronze, silver or gold match depending on whether BT Openreach already knows about the address (gold), whether Openreach doesn’t but it can find it in the Post Office database (silver) or not at all (bronze). Problem is that unless you have a gold match, you can’t book an engineer and since it’s a datacenter and there’s special site instructions for access and location, we want a match.
So, in goes the address for Redbus Sovereign House. Excellent – 3 Gold match addresses. We chose the top one and Simon and I stop for a second and blink. The address is <some ISP>, Floor 8, Telecity Redbus, Sovereign House, Marsh Wall, London. Problem with that is that Sovereign House only has 5 floors.
But it’s a gold match. So we booked it. Now we wait for the Engineer to call us when he arrives on site. “Er, hi, this order. Um, I can’t find the location listed…”
It’s been a very, very strange day.
It started badly at midnight as I was babysitting the replacement of a switch in our London datacenter and it was running over. I didn’t get to sleep until 0300. I did at least have the presence of mind to turn off the alarm clock before I finally went to sleep.
I got up around 1100 and pottered around the house – I was on duty with the first responders this weekend – which started badly. The first call was to a cardiac arrest in the pub about 300yds away. On scene within minutes, the patient looked bad but since CPR was ongoing I had to carry on. Rich arrived on the RRV shortly afterwards and was able to get a definite reading using his defib – asystole. The blood had started pooling and we stopped resuscitation at that point. Strangely, the overriding memories of that incident are that it felt like I was handling a chicken – loose skin over flesh over bone. The other one was the mistakes I made, but that comes with experience.
So after that I had to get some replacement parts – though the defib itself is fine, the pads are single-use, so I had to get some more. Also the defib stores information about each incident which needs downloading. Fortunately there was a training session on for new recruits so I popped over and had a quick chat with the Ambulance officer running the training. He quickly replaced the pads, but didn’t have a cable to download the information – not a problem, since the defib has sufficient memory for several incidents. More paperwork – and I suddenly found myself in front of the class talking about the incident I’d just been to. Following that, I found myself teaching a session on hypothermia – apparently, I’m the expert on this. News to me.
While we were there, we had a call, but then got stood down with no information. Not uncommon – but a few minutes later, we were called again – the RRV had requested our assistance. As it turned out it was a possible CVA that he wanted a hand with and knew that I was on duty. The call was just down the road from my house…but I was over on the wrong side of Caerphilly, so by the time we got there, the crew was already there and loading the patient on board. Back to pick up my car and then I headed home to meet up with Jon who wanted some driving experience in his new car. Before we could head off, we had a call to a lady feeling dizzy and nauseous. I got back just in time to catch the last 15 minutes of the England – Wales rugby match…and to my amazement saw us beat England in Twickenham. First time in 20 years…
Jon and I headed out for a while and on the way back we decided to grab a takeaway. Just as we got out of the car, the phone went – call to the nursing home not half a mile away. I got there just as the RRV was arriving with the other Richard in it and we got that patient ready for the truck before heading back to the Indian to try again. This time we not only managed to buy food but headed home and almost got in the house before a neighbour asked me for help – there was a child with breathing difficulties. After a quick look at him, I suggested they pop him in to see the GP and headed back to the house to eat. Jon headed off then and I managed a few hours of relaxation before our next call – gentleman with chest pains. We headed down and spent some time looking after this chap until the RRV arrived.
I’ve not long got back from that and it looks as though things have calmed down for now. Five more hours to go….