Tag: #allthesame

Keep the Faith

Recently I was sitting outside a café with some other people. We noticed a bit of a commotion across the other side of the road. Some large seagulls were attacking a young pigeon, quite savagely.

I stood up and walked over to the scene scaring the seagulls away but, as soon as I turned away they were back. The pigeon was in a bad way but alive so I picked it up and walked back towards the café.

As I walked past the café and the others joined me, the pigeon passed away in my hands.

The people in that café must have thought I was a bit nuts, maybe I was, but I wasn’t going to do nothing. It may have been “nature in action” but my instinct was to try.

It reminded me why I joined the ambulance service in the first place – because I’m a rubbish onlooker and I wanted to help. It also reminded me of the many jobs we did that didn’t have the outcome we wanted. Even when we knew the situation was hopeless, we still tried.

Early in my career an older paramedic told me: “If it’s someone’s time to go, there’s nothing and no-one can change that, but we don’t make that decision!”. At that time the figures showed CPR jobs were around 5-8% successful, but everyone we were called to was in the 92-95% group until we had done our job.

Sometimes that was difficult, especially when you knew the relatives were watching. It would have been so easy to do nothing and tell the family it was over, rather than letting them hold onto some hope as we worked, but there was hope in us too, hope that this patient was one of the 5-8%, and we would never give up until
protocols said we had to.

We never beat nature, the lost ones were always lost but, to shake the hand of the survivor, the one who would not be there if we’d lost our faith – there are no words.

It doesn’t matter if you’re black or white.

Whatever you’re views on Michael Jackson, he had a point. It really doesn’t matter the colour of your skin or, for that matter, your gender orientation, religion, belief in unicorns….. We are who we are, and that’s an amazing thing.

Nowhere is this more important than in the back of an ambulance. Every person will bleed the same colour, no matter what the colour of their skin. Everyones’ heart works the same, beats the same, no matter what their religious beliefs. To an ambulance crew, you are first and very foremost, a patient, and all the same rules apply.

Granted, people with certain sexual orientation and drug users sometimes require extra infection control measures, but not because of who they are. People with certain religious beliefs require certain parts of their beliefs to be respected in their treatment too.

The bottom line is that there is, and there will never be, any place or time for racism, homophobia or any other form of bias in an ambulance!

It was a Friday or Saturday night, an alcohol fueled altercation in the city centre. My partner that night was a veteran paramedic, quite large, not to be argued with. We arrived to find two males had been involved. One was in a police car being interviewed, the other in a shop doorway also being interviewed by the police. I went to the police car to check on the person in there, my partner went to the person in the doorway. My “patient” had red knuckles, from the impact with the other person’s face, but no other injuries. My partner’s “patient” had a cut lip, also a result of the fist/face impact. This person also had darker skin……

The police were surprised when we appeared, but it transpired the victim had called us. We examined both people and determined no loss of consciousness, blurred vision, broken bones etc, therefore no requirement for hospitalisation. This didn’t go down well with the victim. As we walked away the victim shouted “You’re all just ****ing racists!”.

My partner stopped in their tracks. It felt like the whole world stopped for a moment, everything went silent. The police officers tensed up.

They slowly turned, walked back to the patient, looked him in the eye and slowly and clearly said “Don’t ever repeat that in my hearing! Man up, sort yourself out and get on with your life. I am following ambulance service protocols, protocols that apply to everyone. Now if you wish to discuss racism, let’s get one of these police officers across.”. The patient, now speechless, raised his hands by way of a stunned apology. My partner turned and walked back to the ambulance. I too was speechless as I drove away from the scene.

Then my partner turned to me “Coffee?”. We refuelled the ambulance and picked up a couple of strong brews. “That went surprisingly well” they said, and we both let out a sigh of relief.

I already wrote about affluent types, now colour, country of origin, religion, sexual persuasion….there is nothing in this world, other than your attitude, that will cause you to be treated differently to anyone else when you are a patient in an ambulance. Please bear this in mind should you be unfortunate enough to find yourself there. Ambulance crews are very unbiased, they have to be. Their job is to save or maintain “life”, not “certain lives”.

And they don’t appreciate malicious accusations.