Yeah, it’s pretty full-on stuff! We’re trained and equipped to deal with some serious issues - catastrophic haemorrhaging, cardiac arrest, breathing issues etc. In our kit we have military grade tourniquets, a defibrillator, oxygen, insertable tubes to help unconscious people breathe... we don’t have to work alone if we’d rather go in pairs, but my partner and I are planning to do our solo assessments when we have some follow-up training in January, so that we can go out alone if we want to. Most of the stuff we get called to are “amber” alerts - someone complaining of chest pain for example. They’ve not actually keeled over and are conscious, but there’s a high risk they might. Our patient last night had a history of heart attacks, so we were quite prepared for him to keel over and require the full treatment - but luckily he didn’t and was able to walk to the ambulance. I was so relieved, losing your first patient in the middle of a wake would have been quite a thing!
As for why, I’ve always wanted to be a medic of some sort - I wasn’t able to go to med school as a young’un, so went into biology and biochemistry instead. Then family and stuff loomed, my diabetes was making me very ill, and my dream got put so far on the back burner that it fell down the back of the cooker. But this year, now that all my tech has enabled me to get the T1 sorted, I feel like an actual human again, so I’ve been able to pursue my dream. A spot of thyroxine to up my thyroid has also made a world of difference. Emergency medicine suits my temperament very well - responding to a call and reacting when you get there, diagnosing and putting pieces of the puzzle together, and then fixing the problem as best I can - right up my alley. I’ve only done one real life call, obviously, and it had a positive outcome, but I loved every minute of it. And of course I’ve been given so much by the NHS, it’s saved my ar5e more times than I can count, and I really wanted to give something back, as cheesy as it sounds. The other main reason is very close to my heart - 20 years ago my lovely mum keeled over with a pulmonary embolism, the paramedics took a while to get there, and when they did it was too late. If by getting there ASAP and holding the fort, I can save another family going through the kind of pain we did, I’d be so happy.