Three ~ Evelyn

My inconsiderate alarm awakens me from my luscious sleep.

Picking up my phone, I put an end to the intolerable noise with a groan. Ugh. Can't I just stay cocooned here forever.

I choose to delay my departure from the bed and FaceTime Heidi. As to most people it was four in the afternoon and not the morning, my best friend picked up on the second ring.

"Hey b*tch! What's up?" She hollers down the phone sending her brunette curls bouncing.

"Hey! I had a really cool job last night!" I fail to match her boundless energy, "A gunshot injury to the head."

"No way! You're joking! I had non-emergency calls all shift." She grumbles. Heidi was my flatmate in first year and we've been close friends since. "So, what happened?"

"Nothing too exciting actually, he was surprisingly okay. Like GCS 15 and everything!" I spend the next quarter of an hour trading stories with Heidi and catching up.

"Hey Adam!" I call as Heidi's boyfriend takes his position next to her, threading his arm around her tattooed shoulders.

A few moments later, I wrap up the call needing to get ready for my night shift.

I head into my open plan kitchen/living room and make myself a bowl of cereal.

I bought this flat just before Christmas. I've been working every spare hour since sixteen to save up.

Don't get me wrong, I had a good childhood but my mum snuck out of the hospital after having me, so my dad had to work long hours to provide until he worked himself into the hospital.

I then upped my hours and started looking after us, but dad never fully recovered and passed away three years ago.

My world shattered for me to piece back together in the form of my new future. Now I'm settled in my own home, I want to take a step back and relax for a while. Do what other twenty-one year olds do. Whatever that is.

At the sound of my thirty-minute warning alarm I engulfed my cereal and finished getting ready. Triple checking I have everything, I head out for another night shift.

We unload the patient off of the truck into a wheelchair.

The waiting room is in the usual state of chaos. Several crews are waiting to handover their patients.

"Good evening, what do you have for me?" The receptionist chirps, her welcoming smile firmly in place.

"Hi, I have a query sprained ankle." I hand over our paperwork for her to take the patient's details from.

"Did you hear what happened with that shooting yesterday?" A paramedic asks Rob, who is now standing at my side.

"Yeah, we attended actually." Rob cheerfully engages with our colleague, "Surprisingly, nothing too serious apart from some blood"

"Aaah really?" The paramedic deflates.

It's not that we want bad things to happen to people, but it's inevitable that they will and we'd like to be there to help when something goes wrong. We wouldn't work on an emergency ambulance if we didn't like the adrenaline rushes.

But it's not all action. A lot of the job is making a cup of tea and talking to people. Every job is unique and important in its own way.

Our currently intoxicated patient tried running after a friend in six inch heels. It didn't go very well.

An hour later, we've handed over to the nurse and clamber back into the truck. It's Rob's turn to drive, so Sharon's using the opportunity to take a nap on the bed.

Our fourteen minutes of freedom fly by as we munch.

The next job brings the console singing to life.

Unless there's something to note, we only get a generic one sentence to tell us what we're walking into.

"Faint, slurred speech, stroke." Is the given description.

Upon arrival to a bar, we find our nineteen year old patient has been celebrating his birthday. He has vomited and is now slurring his sentences.

Just to be sure, we complete a FAST test to clarify that he is not having a stroke.

With our full assessment done and nothing out of the ordinary, we manage to obtain a home address after numerous attempts. For peace of mind, we drop him home to sleep it off.

The next few shifts seem to jump on board the trend of intoxicated patients and vomit dodging.

In desperate need of a break, I book a shift with the private ambulance company I work for. I'll be covering a high end party in the Shard.

Hopefully the clientele will be more tame and I won't need to intervene too much.

With respite three weeks away, I settle into the rocking chair on my balcony.

I pull up my literature review. It's the last assignment left before I finish the theory part of my degree.

I dig through tedious statistics and attempt to find supporting evidence from other research to strengthen an argument.

An article rabbit-hole leads me to one on gun crime in London.

I wonder how he's doing. Disappointingly, I haven't revisited that hospital since. Giving me no opportunity to ask the emergency department nurse for an update.

I haven't heard anything about the shooter whilst on the road either. No news is good news?