The course has been pretty full on and intense therefore updates have been lacking I’m afraid, but now everything has calmed down a bit I’m back-dating a few blogs and can now keep up to date with everything from now :)
So time for placement no more classroom training for the next few weeks, its time to get on the road. I met my mentor on the first day, this is the paramedic I will be doing the majority of my shifts with, and luckily we get on well.
Probably the first important and invaluable lesson that has to be learnt quickly is your chief responsibility………tea making, and lots of it!! Once you have mass tea making down at all hours of the day and night its time to start applying what we have learnt so far in the real world, easier said than done!
So my first emergency call came through, and after being thrown around in the back of the ambulance en-route, (that’s where the students live in the back of the ambulance as the front sits only two) the call was a patient with difficulty breathing, and a trip to hospital was needed. Initially my focus was on taking observations on patients; pulse rates, blood pressures, blood sugars and generally assisting where I can.
The next few weeks I began to gain confidence in the basics and became more familiar with how things work in the pre hospital setting, you never really know what call your going to get next, which is part of the appeal of working on the ambulance. One of the things we do as we approach a patient is assess their appearance and undertake a primary assessment to determine if the patient is time critical or not, up until this point we haven’t had anything too serious.
But then the call comes through, its something we have practiced a lot in training school but nothing can really prepare you for the first one, it was a cardiac arrest call, we gathered all the necessary equipment while en-route on blue lights, we pulled up and dashed to the scene, and this point I think I learnt that the colour of adrenaline is brown!!
Lots happened very quickly the patient we were called too, was in cardiac arrest when we arrived and bystander CPR was underway, we took over. I started on chest compression, while the crew was working on intubating, cannulating and giving the appropriate drugs to the patient, unfortunately the patient’s heart rhythm was in asystole (more commonly known as flat line) this rhythm remained throughout and after 20 minutes we called it on scene. It was a strange experience stopping chest compression, the coroner was contacted and police followed shortly, its routine procedure in any call like this.
As soon as it started it was over, the last six weeks working on the ambulance has been a great experience and we have seen a large number of calls, but now it’s back to uni for another term, hopefully everything we will be learning should all make a lot more sense now we are more familiar with the job.
Goodbye to a good man
8 years ago