A Hard Night

This Blog Post was originally published on the platform "writelier" (formerly "co-writers" and "200wordsaday"). Sadly the blogging platform was discontinued. I downloaded all my blog posts and prepared them to be republish them here.

Last night was a really rough night. It started off with a few small tours around the city where our home base is located.

Just before midnight, I was just laying down to go to sleep, I was woken by the loud and awful sound of our pager. Well, not really woken as I wasn't asleep but it got me up quickly.

A quick recap of the mission report:

"Male, 16, several hit's on head, acute hearing loss on one ear. Police informed."

Basically, to teenage males did fight because of something (I know it, but I can't validate it and it is irrelevant for the story, also I would never judge a patient). One of them was the "better" fighter and the other had some serious hit's to be taken.

"Hearing loss on one ear." Sounds not only dangerous but is in my eyes also very dangerous, after all, hearing is also a very important sense for us humans.

The local youth workers were able to control the situation and the two boys were already in separate rooms. The police arrived just a few minutes after us.

As with all injuries based on the ENT (Ear, nose, and throat), in our opinion (my co-drivers and mine) it was pretty much clear that we have to take the boy as fast to a hospital as possible.

Small check if the police officers, to let them know we were driving off and to ask if they had everything noted, they needed, we took of, heading to Graz. The capital of Styria, with the largest Hospital and Medical University in Styria.

As I think I wrote before, it is about a one hour drive, even with sirens and our flashing blue light. Since it was just after midnight the roads were empty but also deers and rabbits are on the streets, so driving gets easier on the one side and more exhausting on the other side.

After about forty minutes we arrived. Another emergency did just arrive just before us, so the treatment of the young men was delayed a little bit more.

The ENT Doctor quickly checked (I don't know the exact diagnosis) and we took the boy again to the pediatric clinic on the same area but in a different building.

As, by law, in Austria, every patient below eighteen years will be treated as a child and needs to be treated by a special team.

By now it was probably two am in the morning.

What made the situation even more difficult was, that the patient wasn't located in the city I drive in, he was just on apprentice training and his family lived an almost one and a half hour drive in the other direction, where our home base is.

Since he wouldn't want to go back to the apprentice training site, we had to call his mother to authorize a drive to her home.

We were already more than an hour away from our home base, so dispatch called another vehicle to take him and bring him home so that we could return to our home base.

By the time we arrived back at our home base, it was half past three. I didn't catch a single minute of sleep.

I laid down in bed to relax my body and tried to sleep at least a few minutes. Somehow I couldn't get any. And by half past four, we were called to an emergency with our emergency doctor vehicle.

We came back at 5:30 am and I quickly changed my alarm to nine o'clock, as I had to go to work anyway. No matter how sleepy I would be.

And now I am sitting here with about three hours of sleep, working and waiting for the day to pass.