More Blood, More Sweat and Another Cup of Tea
My back, however, was starting to hurt from the less-than-safe lifting that we needed to do to get the woman out her flat and into the ambulance. We then had a couple of ‘nothing’ jobs – coughs, colds and bellyaches. We got to around midnight when we were sent on a call for a ‘17year-old male, has a knife, cutting wrist, suicidal’. As it was in the street I thought that we’d go and have a look – if he was violent then we could soon drive off and await the arrival of the police. The young man was lying on the floor, his left hand was covered in blood and there were already two policemen there. They looked happy to see us. A quick assessment later and it turned out that the patient had nearly severed his left little finger. He was covered in blood and refusing to say anything except that he wanted to die. I managed to get a ‘quick and nasty’ bandage on his hand while the police and I wrestled with him. He wasn’t very happy with being put into the ambulance and once inside fought with us like a man possessed. Blood was everywhere, he was trying to bite us and the police had to handcuff him (which for some reason, probably paperwork, they really didn’t like doing). It took the three of us struggling with him to get him to hospital and when he reached the department there needed to be six police guarding him in the psychiatric room. He was, to use an ambulance service technical medical phrase, ‘proper mad’. I felt sorry for the fellow – he didn’t ask to go out of his gourd. I also felt pain. Pain in my back. While fighting with the patient in the back of the ambulance I had somehow wrenched my back and the whole right side of my body was in pain. So we went back to station, I filled out the required paperwork and went home. I stayed home for the next two nights, partly due to the pain and partly due to a desire on my part to avoid exacerbating the injury. 47