I had a very busy weekend two weeks ago. Nine call-outs in two days. It was too much really, and a lot of it ambulance chasing. I took a few days off after that and had a rest. Fortunately since then things have been reasonably quiet.
Quiet for 2009 anyway. This time last year I was having spells of two or three weeks without a call-out. I hated that. Long periods waiting for calls that never came, was hard.
Quiet this year is two calls at the weekend and one of them just around the corner from me. Neither of the call-outs required much intervention from me. I haven’t had my oxygen out for more than a week.
I had a conversation last night with some fellow first aiders, and the subject of heart attacks came up. In particular, the frequency that we attend to patients with serious heart ailments that do not have classic chest pain symptoms. In fact, I think I’d go as far as to say that I attend as many without chest pain as those with.
For me, the combination of breathlessness and an irregular heartbeat has been a more common symptom of an underlying heart problem than a patient complaining of chest pain.
Perhaps more importantly, this is a good example that good first aid is more than just matching a set of known symptoms to a single diagnosis. You cannot just go up to a patient and diagnose heart problems because they have a certain type of chest pain. And crucially it demonstrates that you cannot rule out a condition purely on the absence of a single typical symptom.