Blood, Sweat and Tea by Tom Reynolds

Author:Tom Reynolds [Reynolds, Tom]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Non-fiction, Creative Commons, Post-1930
ISBN: 9781905548231
Publisher: The Friday Project Limited
Published: 2010-08-09T14:00:00+00:00

...Cue me trying (thankfully successfully) to stop from laughing out loud. Instead, I managed to restrain myself to just some silent sniggering.

For those that aren't aware, chest pain which is related to the heart often radiates to the jaw or arm.

Bless him, I love this job.

I've just spoken to the crew, and the pain was related to his heart.

Values

I was called to a 39-year-old male, possibly dead. As I entered the house I saw his relatives crying, and sitting on a kitchen chair was my patient. He looked dead and wasn't breathing.

I felt for a pulse, didn't feel one, so I hooked up the heart monitor and there was no electrical activity at all.

I turned around to his relatives and told them that there was nothing that I could do for him, and that an ambulance crew would turn up shortly to help them out.

It took 10minutes for the crew to turn up, and I didn't recognise them at all - they must have come from outside our area.

Suddenly, one of the crew said they had felt a pulse!

The patient was also breathing. Oxygen was given and he was rushed out to the ambulance. All that was running through my head was how I had 'starved' him of oxygen, and how much trouble I was going to be in.

One of the crew told me to fake my paperwork, and say that I'd given the patient oxygen. But I knew I was going to get into trouble.

I felt sick for the patient, and sick for myself. This is the sort of mistake that can cost you your job...

...Then the postman rang my doorbell, and I woke up from the nightmare I was having.

It's funny how this job can play on your mind - the things that I've seen and dealt with on this job and as an A&E nurse. Yet, it seems that the fear of making a mistake with a patient is still the thing that scares me most.

I've dealt with murders, mutilations and miscarriages. I've seen death in the faces of 3-month-old children, 14-year-old girls and 22-year-old men. I've dealt with limbs hanging off, distraught relatives and people vomiting blood until they die.

But the only thing that haunts my dreams is the fear of doing something wrong.

Shouldn't the patient have more of a place in my mind?

Rough

Today is one of those days where I really need to be careful, otherwise the disjunction between what the public expects of us, and what we actually do will get me in trouble.

At the moment my body is feeling ready to give up, a troublesome changeover from night to day work doesn't help; neither does the sore throat or the feeling that my soul is having my holiday in Seattle and waiting for a flight back to my body in London.

This means that the chances of me having a 'sense of humour' failure are greater than normal.

I noticed it yesterday with my last job - I was called to a '60-year-old male, collapsed in park'.

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