Solid Silence

The tower block looms up out of the night lit by the orange of the street lights that surprisingly still work in this part of town.

We pull up to the doorway to find 3 police with a solidly build man in the shelter of the the door way. The wind whips around the courtyard bouncing off the building and hitting us from all directions. I have to hold on to the ambulance door to stop it being retched back and breaking.

The patient has huge blood stain on his t-shirt and is holding a towel to his top lip. The police informs us he isn't very talkative and just need seeing to.

We get the patient into the back of the motor and have a look at the offending wound. A small puncture wound to his top lip oozes claret freely. I ask him to open his mouth so I can see if the wound penetrates through the lip and for any other damage. No other injuries appear to have contributed to the large red circle on his shirt.

Throughout he remains silently co-operative. The police leave us to it and I try to engage him in conversation to enable me to fill of the PRF. I get the bare minimum, name, age, date of birth.

As for details of how he came about his injury he remains defiantly silent. I explain I'm not the police and if I know how it happened it may help the treatment. This doesn't work.

I supply him with more gauze to hold firmly to his lip and we proceed to hospital.

My handover is brief and concise.

"Pretty much as you see it"

We transfer the patient to a trolley in a cubicle and he reclines with the same obeying silence that has been with us from the start.

The nurse lifts the gauze away from the patients lip and we both move rapidly to avoid being hit with the arterial spurt that greets us.

"Well that explains why there's so much blood"

Because the patient had been upright throughout his time with us the arterial spurt had appeared as a steady ooze helped by gravity to simply dribble down his chin. Now free of gravities immediate influence the blood was free to pump out of the wound in its colourful pulse.

As I move away I hear the nurse ask the series of questions I had used to try and gauge the reason for the injury.

The department is quiet and the silence becomes oppressive with the patients silent reaction. The atmosphere feels chill and the hairs stand on the back of my neck as I move away.

I'm glad the address was close to the hospital, that feeling in the confines of the ambulance is not nice for long periods of time.