A PARAMEDIC'S DIARY: Life and Death on the Streets by Stuart Gray

Author:Stuart Gray [Gray, Stuart]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, azw3
Publisher: Monday Books
Published: 2010-11-22T00:00:00+00:00

* * * * *

A few days later I took a call to a collapsed middle-aged woman outside the National Portrait Gallery in St Martin’s Place.

It was Red 1, high priority, but the details were scant. I called in. ‘Can you tell me whether this person is suspended or not?’

They came back and confirmed that it was a suspended - the lady was reportedly not breathing and had no heartbeat - so I put my foot down a bit more. We were there in a couple of minutes. She was a German tourist who had dropped down in the street in sudden cardiac arrest. It was daylight and very busy, but an FRU EMT was on scene and there were a few other helpful people around. I had a training team with me - this was their first ever resus - and while they couldn’t really do very much, they could fetch and carry and help out here and there. The EMT had started CPR; as the first and only paramedic on scene I had to take charge.

‘Right,’ I said. ‘Can everyone just stop what you’re doing for a sec while I check her out?’

Her worried husband was leaning over, watching me, and a crowd was gathering around. Other people were basically walking through the scene, which was shocking - a woman was dying here. I got the trainee crew to disperse everyone and set about trying to cannulate her. I failed - I couldn’t get the needle in properly - so I moved on to securing her airway by intubating her. Another ambulance crew showed up to help and as they parked up I looked over. Right next to me was a man apparently trying to cannulate her. He wasn’t ambulance service, and I didn’t recognise him; he was just a random bloke in shirt and trousers. I said, ‘What are you doing?’

He was a Canadian. He said, ‘I’m a doctor, I thought I’d help out.’

‘No,’ I said. ‘Can you please get away from my patient? I don’t want you touching her.’

I didn’t know whether he was a doctor or not - people claim all sorts of things - but even if he was, this was my patient, I was responsible for her and I didn’t want anyone else working on her except ambulance service people.

But he wasn’t getting the message. In a petulant voice, he said, ‘Do you want me to get a line into her or not?’

‘No,’ I replied. Apart from anything else, I could see that he wasn’t that experienced at it; he was messing around with the vein, getting nowhere.

He didn’t move.

‘I insist,’ I said. So reluctantly he sloped off.

There’s a common misconception, brought about from movies like Flatliners, that we can restart a totally inert heart with a defibrillator. You can’t shock them out of it, it’s usually too late. However, this lady’s heart was in ventricular fibrillation. A heart in VF is not dead, but it’s not pumping - it’s kind of wobbling.

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