Medical student Anne Grace discovered patience and professionalism among the paramedics that took her out around Limerick on one busy Saturday night.
Up until then I hadn’t had much experience of medicine in the ‘real’ world. So far I was only really familiar with the text books, and wasn’t sure what to expect.
Once I arrived, I was introduced to my crew and given a tour of the station and ambulance. Everyone was very welcoming and friendly; people wished me a busy and eventful night and it seemed a bit strange to be hoping for calamity. But, all the same, I didn’t want to spend the night watching telly.
First call
After the initial excitement, we went back in to the station to sit and wait. I think this part of being a paramedic must be the hardest. They never know what’s coming next: if it will be a disaster or something minor, if they will be out all night or able to catch some sleep. They don’t even know if they will be able to finish their cup of tea.
As it happened, my crew was called out first that evening. We were going to a man with chest pain in the medical centre in Killaloe. When we arrived at the medical centre there was no panic; the man was standing up and walking around and he seemed calm, although pale.
Patient was afraid
The paramedic brought the patient into the ambulance and did an ECG. The patient wasn’t really paying attention to what was going on — he was distracted — and I could see that he was afraid. When the ECG was done, the paramedics handed it to me.
In that one moment I fully understood why I was studying medicine. I’ve always known that my studies would be relevant at some far distant point in the future, but with an ECG in my hand, a blank slate in my mind and a patient beside me, all of a sudden I really appreciated the point of my training.
The paramedics, on the other hand, knew what they were looking for and decided his ECG was normal. However, we brought him in to the hospital all the same.
Kidney troubles
The next call came right in the middle of a cup of tea. This time we went to a man’s house. He had a kidney stone and was in quite a lot of pain. one of the paramedics examined him. His pain was quite bad so it was decided to bring him in to the hospital.
When we got back to the station it was around midnight and I was really starting to get tired. The paramedics made some more tea and told me some of their stories.
They recounted tales about a man being stabbed in the back with an axe, drunk people refusing to get in to the ambulance, a woman having a baby who didn’t even know she was pregnant, a wandering drunken man saying he had been raped and a woman pulling her hair out because she was so distressed at what had been done to her.
Listening to them, I was amazed how the paramedics could have any faith in people whatsoever, how they could continue to help people and how they could be so cheerful and pleasant when they see so much of the unhappiness and cruelty of humanity. |
|
Working as a paramedic cannot be easy and I have huge respect and admiration for how well they do their job
The next call that came in was a shooting: a proper emergency. We arrived at the estate where the shooting had been reported.
There were lots of police cars and the Armed Garda Response unit, but no one seemed to know where the shots had come from.
We looked around for a while but there was nothing to see, and the police figured it was hoax. As it turned out, someone had been shot, and once the body was found a different ambulance was called to the scene.
Moyross
My last call of the evening was to a house in Moyross. We met a Garda car patrolling around and they directed us to the house we were looking for, which, they told us, was not dangerous.
As we walked up the path to the house, one of the paramedics pointed out a corner down the road where the last murder in Moyross happened. The man we had come to see this time had taken a couple of packets of paracetemol. despite the paramedics’ efforts, the man absolutely refused to go to hospital.
I thought about the case of paracetemol overdose that we had covered in PBL (problem-based learning) last year and I knew that this man might go to sleep and not wake up.
He was young and good looking and there was a child somewhere in the house, but neither he nor his wife would accept how worried the paramedics were.
He was sitting up and talking and they both seemed to think he would be fine. He wasn’t that drunk that he didn’t know what he was doing. We told them both to call immediately if anything else happened. They promised they would.
I got back to the station and watched the end of Angela’s Ashes with the paramedics. At 4am I decided to go home, I left with some small understanding of how demanding a paramedic’s job can be.
They see some of the worst sides of human nature and yet they themselves display some of humanity’s best attributes: they are cheerful, caring and friendly in the face of violence, misery, pain and drunkenness.
I only hope that when I come to clinical practice I can do it with as much patience and professionalism as they do.
Article reproduced with the kind permission of Irish Medical Times where it originally appeared. |