RickInOz

Last night I had another shift with the Retrieval service. Saturday nights are characteristically busy, but I didn’t realise quite how much so.

Shortly after starting the shift we received a call from Port Pirie, a costal town 225km north of Adelaide. Our customer was a middle-aged man who thought it would be a good idea to climb onto his shed roof after drinking a awful lot of vodka. Unsurprisingly he lost a bet with gravity and wound up with rib fractures and blunt trauma to his belly. The transfer went fairly smoothly, but I can’t say the same for the flight which was extremely choppy. Fortunately we all arrived safely in Adelaide and delivered the patient safely to the Royal Adelaide.

I was just relaxing after the stress of this trip when the phone went again. The next candidate was a young lad in Strathalbyn, a small town 60km from Adelaide, who had been drinking solidly for the past 2 days (are we spotting a theme here?!), vomited and had a seizure. The local GP had done his best but they didn’t have the facilities to look after him all night. We had some hiccoughs as the helicopter wasn’t available so we had to go by road to fetch him. It’s quite hairy being driven in an ambulance at high speed on winding country roads. By the time we arrived he had another seizure so it took a little time to get him under control. In the meantime the helicopter had made it up to meet us, so we went back by air.

Yet again, we had barely got back before it was time to go out again. This time it was to pick up a 17 year-old male who had wrapped his car round a tree in a high-velocity accident near Clare, a town in the wine-growing regions 135km from Adelaide. Whilst we were in the air the emergency services had extricated him from the tangled remains of his car and took him to the local hospital. The paramedics reported a strong smell of liquor in his car (cue resigned sigh). We did the necessary and packaged him for transport back. Another safe delivery back to the Royal Adelaide and it was finally time to go home, only 3 hours after my shift was supposed to finish.

Just to put it into context here is a quick schema of how far I travelled last night, clocking up a total of 840km.