Dinner Party

"If we'd have known how nice real ambulance people were, we'd have invited you earlier"!

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I was working away from my normal part of London, and was beginning to think that the only thing that happens around here was 50+ women falling over. I think in total we had 5 of them in the shift. Faller number 1 (I'm going to call her Hyacinth because, well... just because) was at the dinner party, and luckily for her, was a little drunk. She'd been helping her friend, the hostess of the party, to carry food to the masses upstairs, and had slipped in the kitchen whilst holding a tray. There was blood mixed with salad all over the floor. Hyacinth had landed face down in the mess, was talking to us, could move, but yelled every time she did.

"I think I've broken my arm!"

"I think you have too..."

Hyacinth's arm just looked wrong. The angles were wrong. The shape was wrong. It was almost back to front. She seemed to have two elbows. One of them was nearer her shoulder. Told you it was wrong. We were going to have immobilise the arm before moving her. I checked her pulse in the broken arm to make sure that there was still blood supply past the break in the bone. We decided the best course of action would be Entonox, or Gas and Air. The sort of stuff they give to women in labour for pain relief. Also known as laughing gas. And for good reason.

Hyacinth took deep breaths on the Entonox, and, combined with the alcohol, was soon carefree and giggling enough to allow us to move her arm, put it in a splint and carry her back up a flight of stairs to street level and into the ambulance. Hyacinth's friend came with us.

Once in the ambulance we rechecked that Hyacinth still had a pulse in the broken arm, readjusted her arm in the splint, tried to put some traction on it to reduce pain, and travelled to hospital.

Hyacinth kept asking if I thought it might just be dislocated. I was brutally honest. The X-ray showed 3 fractures of the humerus. And they call it the funny bone...

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"Even though you're just ambulance people, you can come to my dinner party anytime, daaahling..."