Tuesday 16 September 2008

Last night

After a bit of confusion as to where I was supposed to be working I ended up at my base station. I was on overtime so it didn't really matter.
The first job of the night was for a haemorrhage/lacerations call. The patient was a lady in her fifties who had an illeostomy bag and it was filling with blood. This had started at 11 am and a slow trickle continued all day. Between 6 pm and 7 pm she emptied the bag 5 times, the bag's capacity was around 250 ml. If you consider the average circulating blood volume for an adult is around 5 litres, that's a lot of blood to be loosing! We got her on to the truck pretty quick. Her pulse was rapid and she felt thirsty, some of the signs of shock. I got a line in and set up some fluid. Her BP was intially 177/86 which I found hard to believe and her pulse was 130. After a recheck of her BP it came out at a more realistic 72/48.
At hospital a Dr tried to get another IV and messed it up twice. Eventually she managed to get one in. Oh well, a bit like me the night before where I missed twice. I don't usually miss and when I do I get annoyed with myself, but as my crewmate reminded me 'It's swings and roundabouts mate, swings and roundabouts!'
The rest of the night was pretty uneventful.

I've now got a few days off before yet another set of weekend nights!

5 comments:

epocalypse said...

You and me both mate, you and me both.

And it's the start of Freshers' up here too.

Michael Morse said...

What's "Freshers?"

epocalypse said...

Freshers' Week at the various universities. Lots of fresh faced young things, away from home for the first time, in the big city and usually very drunk and very emotional.

Recipe for all kinds of wonderful call outs.

Dave Poulton said...

Here in the East Mids too... I hate it! Have bunged a link on my blog for yours. Keep up the good work!

mac said...

Nice one dave, I've added your blog to my list. I didn't even know about your's! There is so many.