22 Nov 2010

Purple +

This is a job I did in the first couple of weeks in the Service

Red 1 Allocated ?Suspended ?Purple

I'm driving because I'm on my Blue Light Experience Placement. So I am really fresh at this and I could feel the excitement and adrenalin rushing through my body. We arrive at this small flat in North West London and rush up the stairs, there was already a Fast Responder on scene and it soon became clear that our life saving skills were not required and only the "recognition of death" skill from the senior clinician on scene was needed.

The person who found our patient was a young lady who had an appointment to perform a pedicure on the poor old girl. She was crying saying that she had only seen her last week and that she pops around every week to do her nails. The old lady did have family but typically in this country they hadn't been in contact with her for years. The flat (apartment) was messy and under-maintained with minimal home comforts and absolutely zero heating.

The saddest thing for me was that you could actually picture the route she had taken from the kitchen to her living room and I could almost see her ghost replaying out the whole incident for us and the police to get a solid picture of what path she took to her fate. Here goes!

From what I could see she made herself some dinner and started walking towards her living room, at some point between leaving the kitchen and before entering the living room she had suffered a catastrophic acute attack, possibly a stroke or heart attack. I followed the trail of food on the floor through the hallway into the living room where the plate was broken with more mouldy food on the floor. There was a broken table in the middle of the room and I gather she stumbled on this just before landing in her final (4 day) resting place which was between the armchair and small side table where her careline alarm pendant was sitting, instead of it being around her neck where it should have been. I cant help but wonder that maybe if she had that pendant around her neck and pressed it at the time she fell, would the ambulance crew who would have been there within 8 minutes have been able to save her life. In a way I hope not, that way it would have been fate and not a tragic mistake.

To add a twist to this story, the people who lived below her did say that they heard a loud thump and crash on their ceiling 4 days ago and didn't think to knock on her door to see if she was ok. She was 89 years of age. REST IN PEACE

PS Purple means DEAD and Purple + means long DEAD

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