A Purple Patch

You'll probably appreciate that not all calls to the ambulance service are treated with the same level of priority. Surprise, surprise, you may well have to wait that little bit longer for an ambulance to arrive if your problem is not immediately life threatening. But we will get to you just as soon as we can. Honest.

The very nice people in Control (sat in their relaxing armchairs being kept at a pleasent room temperature by air conditioning), prioritise calls in to descending order from Purple to Red to Amber to Green. The Purple and Red jobs are the most time critical.

Now, I'm not going to go into how how Control arrive at the required response time (and matching colour) for each job , they have very expensive computer software to do that. One thing I and all my colleagues find though is that the Despatcher's question, "Does the patient have any central chest pain?" is often answered incorrectly by the caller - resulting in numerous Red jobs to folk with mild indigestion in their tummies. A quick hint to all my readers - Central Chest Pain is self explanatory. If you are ever asked by one of our Despatchers if you/the patient has any central chest pain, try to think if there is any pain coming from the middle of the chest, just where the two sides of ribs meet in the middle. Anything else is NOT central chest pain!

Back to the colour coding. Purple calls are the REALLY serious calls. The data screen in our ambulances usually gives a brief description of the job as something like, 'Respiratory/Cardiac Arrest/Death' for example. And we all know that death can be fatal.

In our job we can go through many shifts without any Purple jobs - just loads of Red, Amber and occasional Green ones. Yesterday, we had two Purple jobs back to back.

Arriving at the first job we were greeted by a patient who was looking remarkably alive. The fact that he was busy chatting to his daughter was the giveaway. Somehow the job had been passed to us as one involving respiratory compromise. Point taken that the chap was short of breath and breathing with the aid of oxygen but he was not about to meet his maker. A quick check of his lungs with my stethoscope confirmed that there was no wheezing, rasping or gurgling coming from any of the five lung lobes. He was taken to hospital for further investigations.

The next job was to a drug overdose with Heroin. Now, here's another quick tutorial. Heroin deaths are usually caused by respiratory arrest. The drug affects the nerves that control important bodily functions such as breathing. We were met at the door by a rather hysterical woman who quickly showed me into the lounge whilst my colleague got the necessary drugs from the drawer in the ambulance. Again, I was greeted by a patient who was looking remarkably alive, if not living on the same planet as the rest of us.

The lounge looked like a typical room where the owner had lost the desire/will to maintain what most people would consider reasonable habitation. Clutter and detritus littered the floor and every surface. Even the wall was being used as a giant memo board and had scribbled jottings all over the wallpaper.

The patient was just coming to after a bad fix. Apparently her friend, whose house we were in had been giving her mouth-to-mouth before our arrival. The patient's friend was not happy that she had almost died a few minutes earlier in her lounge. As the patient slowly regained consciousness we could begin to engage in conversation. She did not wish to go to hospital to receive any further treatment. On the way out of the property my colleague accidentally stood on an ashtry overflowing with ash. The owner apologised and said that she'd clean it up after we'd gone. I took one look at the rest of the carpet (what I could actually see of it) and thought that she was being a bit optimistic.

Two purple calls and two live patients at the end of it - not a bad result really, considering that the last purple job I'd done involved a dead child.

The day came to a not altogether unexpected climax when our vehicle broke down at the hospital after clearing from a job. The starter motor had gone. An hour's wait for the recovery vehicle went, followed by a tow around the carpark to jumpstart the ambulance. After a journey back to base praying that the engine didn't stall, we informed Control that there were no spare vehicles in the garage. Forty Five minutes to go until the end of the shift...

Another shift had ended with another broken ambulance. And nobody had died.