Life on the festive frontline with the paramedics
THE THIN GREEN LINE IS ALWAYS THERE FOR US IN EMERGENCIES – AND APART FROM TOUGH SITUATIONS, STAFF SOMETIMES HAVE TO FACE PHYSICAL ATTACKS
“I CAN deal with blood and vomit. My thing is snot, I can’t be dealing with it”, Amy Price says with deadpan delivery.
“I can’t do it. But then my regular crew mate can and she can’t be doing with other things, so we just like swap”, she laughs. “You just kind of get on with it.”
The paramedic, wearing her dark green uniform, is sitting in the back of an ambulance at Salford Station.
She’s friendly, with a steely resolve. It’s easy to imagine her stepping up to the plate without batting an eyelid in a life-threatening situation. The 32-year-old often glosses over what – from the outside – seem like challenging scenarios to be in, shrugging it off as part of the job.
How did she feel when she first went out on a major incident?
“I remember my first cardiac arrest, but I was with a really good technician. They are amazing, they are worth their weight in gold.
“It was a bit daunting, but you just remember training. You practise so much for it, you go on autopilot.”
She can’t remember anything about that particular job, other than that it involved an elderly person.
“It’s our bread and butter,” she said. “We can deal with cardiac arrest, we do them a lot”, she adds.
In her job she must deal with some difficult customers – when they have had too much to drink and become threatening or violent.
“Oh yeah, we get that a lot”, she says. “Pretty much everyone I know from this station will have been subjected to verbal or physical abuse.
“You’ll have people try to swing for you, screaming at you. Generally, if they are shouting at you it’s because they are scared.
“If you can calm them down it’s not too bad.”
She ‘tends to forget it,’ as ‘it happens.’
“Sometimes people can’t help it if they are unwell”, she says.
“It’s not them doing it, it’s the illness that is making them unwell.”
Paramedics get a lot of people asking them to move their ambulance as they are blocking them in, she adds. “The notes you see on Facebook are true. You just brush it off, you get used to it.”
She said they often get called to an incident but when they arrive it’s clear that it’s not as serious as people have made out.
“We leave between 30pc or 40pc of our patients at home, or they are put in a taxi or they talk to a pharmacist or walk-in centre.”
Christmas is busier than any other time of year.
“All the hospitals are under pressure, we are under pressure, everyone is under pressure.
“It’s every winter.
“It is Christmas party season, a lot of it will be people who have had a bit too much to drink.”
Amy has always wanted to be a paramedic.
She used to work as a teacher but it just ‘didn’t work out.’
She decided to change careers and worked as a healthcare assistant before training to become a paramedic five years ago.
“I like that every day is different. You meet people from every single walk of life imaginable.”
She tends to be quite good at switching off once she has left work.
But if there’s something weighing on her mind, she will ring a crew mate or ring a friend to ask what they would have done in the same situation.
If she’s sent to a stabbing or shooting, she might get an adrenaline rush – but she doesn’t feel particularly scared.
“You do toughen up. It depends if you’re in an ambulance or a car. If
I’m in a car I won’t go to certain things on my own because it would just be stupid, so we would just wait for police.
“We have panic buttons on our radios.”
Amy loves the elderly patients. “Give me a 97-year-old who will tell me about the war and I’m happy,” she says.
“I’m a World War Two history buff.”
She puts Frank Sinatra or Tom Jones on for the ‘little old dears,’ and they often have a sing-along on the way to hospital.
The end-of-life care jobs can be tough, she says, softening.
“Making a dying person comfortable is quite important.
“It’s probably one of the most important things we can do.
“No one should be dying in pain so if we can help, I would do that all day,” says Amy.