Wow, it's been a long time!!

Oops! It's been over a month since I last posted.

Well, we're nearly a whole month into 2008, and I hope it's going well for you! It's certainly going well for me. I finished my training, and I went solo on 30th December 2007. My final training shift couldn't have gone better, if I'm honest. I took a call from a young mother whose 2-year-old son was having a fit. He'd been fitting for 5 minutes straight, which was incredibly worrying. I arranged the ambulance and stayed on the line with the mother until help arrived. I tried to keep her calm, because needless to say she was a bit panicky. The paramedics arrived, I left her with them and got on with the rest of my shift, which went fairly uneventfully. Later on, however, my DDM (Duty Dispatch Manager - my boss) sat me down and told me to get the job back on the screen. I was a bit confused, until he showed me the comments section. The mother had been so impressed with the way that I'd kept her calm and focusing on her son that when they arrived in A&E she asked the crew to thank me! I felt really proud of myself, because I hadn't tried any harder than I usually did, but that in itself must be a good thing because I must just be a calming influence on callers! It was certainly a very positive way to end my training, and also to end 2007.

So, I've now been solo for 3 weeks, and it's great. I'm trusted to take 999 calls, and I'm so proud of myself. This time in 2007 I was a kitchen assistant in a care home, doing 12 and a half hours a week - and in 2008 I'm a full-time EMD doing 12 hours in a day!

I hope you all had a peaceful Christmas and New Year, and that 2008 has started as well as mine has!