AFTER SEVEN hours, two standby calls aid three cups of

coffee a code three call is made to the two paramedics waiting at station 56 in North Vancouver.

The dispatcher tells unit chief Tim Jones that an 81-year-old woman is suffering heart palpita- tions at an apartment address on East 2nd Street.

The time is 12:35 a.m.

Less than a minute after receiv- ing the call Jones, 30, and his partner Dave Ledgerwood, 37, are buckled in ready to leave the garage at Lions Gate liospital.

But the ambulance will not start.

“Try it again,’’ says Ledger- wood.

After four, quick tries Jones replies it looks: like the engine has flooded.

BACK-UP

Their conversation hints at no signs of panic, as they next rush to a second ambulance, parked out- side the hospital’s emergency door. From the stalled ambulance, Ledgerwood grabs a small, suit- case-size piece of equipment used on cardiac victims and a drug case, resembling a fish-tackle box. Jones is long gone to start the back-up.

“Tnis car runs lik> a charm,’’ he says, as it pulls out into the road.

There’s no more mention of the incident as the ambulance, with its red lights circling the road, speeds downhill towards lower Lonsdale.

A fire truck is already on scene, and a man in his forties is standing on the curb waiting to guide the paramedics to the woman.

“Her name is Mary,’’ says the man, who pushes the elevator’s se- cond floor button once the stret- cher is manoeuvred in olace.

TO THE RESCUE

Mary’s apartment door is open. She is sitting upright talking with two firefighters dressed in gum boots and blackened slickers.

‘Do you have any pain?’’ asks Ledgerwood.

“No, it just came on suddenly when I went to bed,’’ she answers.

“I'm going to take your biood pressure...have you been doing anything unusual?

“Same as always.”

‘‘Have you been upset?’’

“I heard this week my brother is not going to live, so I did get upset about that.’’ :

“Your heart rate is a little bit faster than what it should be...we’ll run you up to the hospi-

Weather:

Sunday through Tuesday, mostly cloudy with periods of rain. Highs near 10°C.

INDEX

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‘installed carburetor

tal to be checked over.”

“Pll need my purse.””

With the help of the firefighters, the paramedics bundle Mary and her purse onto the stretcher.

Driving back to the hospital, Jones talks about the relationship between themselves and the North Vancouver fire departments.

“When the fire department is assisting ug on a call, we have to work c'cse. The bottom line is we all want to make sure patient care is a priority,’’ he says.

At the hospital Ledgerwood ac- companies Mary to a curtained cubicle in the emergency ward, while Jones calls the Vancouver dispatch office to ask about getting another back-up ambulance.

MECHANICAL BREAKDOWN

On every shift there should be three ambulances in service — the 24-hour car, a regular ambulance and an ambulance for the part- time crew. The station’s back-up ambulance had been taken two days earlier by a Vancouver sta- tion, because one of its am- bulances also .experienced a mechanical breakdown.

“It’s not usually this bad,’’ said Jones. ‘‘We face that (mechanical problems) but not in this magnitude.””

The ambulance which flooded had just returned from a mechanic’s shop, but the newly- was later found to be defective.

Remaining calm despite unfore- seen problems comes easy for Jones and Ledgerwood.

“You have to be different to work in this outfit,’’ says Ledger- wood, who has been a paramedic for 11 years.

“You go to a traffic accident where everyone is losing their head, but you have to be able to

bleck everything out. Ignore the -

blood.

“If you get panicking you could ,

do the wrong thing.’’

The ex-auto mechanic says it is «-

the old cliche why he applied to the B.C. Ambulance Service, operated under the Emergency Health Ser- vices Commission. ;

“I wanted to help people,’’ he says.

“Before | was fixing cars, now I'm fixing people.”

Jones and Ledgerwood are among 17 full-time paramedics and 16 part-time ambulance — atten- dants, who staff the North Van- couver station.

The government-run ambulance service was formed in 1974 in order to standardize service that until then had been in the hands of

the private sector or local fire departments.

All paramedics receive their training at the B.C. Justice In- stitute in Vancouver.

QUALIFICATIONS

Jones has his emergency medical

assistance, level two, which qualifies him to treat trauma pa- tients, and has unit chief training. Ledgerwood has his EMA, level three which qualifies him to treat trauma, respiratory, and cardiac arrest victims. (A level one takes between 80 and 100 hours of train-

ing for the basic ambulance course.) Not surprisingly, Ledgerwood

NEWS photo Nell Lucente

AMBULANCE TEAM partners Tim Jones and Dave Ledgerwood, two paramedics based at station 56 in North Vancouver, pose with a selection of some of the paraphernalia which accompanies them during a regular working shift.

says his greatest accomplishments are when cardiac victims he has helped have been able to walk out of the hospital.

Dr. Bruce Long, who oversees the paramedics at Lions Gate Hospital, says the statistics prove today’s paramedics are instrumen- tal in saving lives,

SENIORS, SMALL BUSINESS HIT Critics slam B.C.

THE BAD outweighs the good according to local critics of

‘Thursday’s provincial budget.

North Vancouver-Seymour NDP candidate David Schreck said Fri- day, ‘‘It’s better than the Bennett

-restraint budget, but not much. I’d

give ita ‘D’, one knotch below ac- ceptable.”

Schreck said the reduction of provincial sales tax from seven to six per cent effective Friday and the five per cent increases in welfare rates June | and Dec. 1 were (wo good aspects of the $10.22 billion budget, ‘‘but the good news stops there.” ;

He said, with tax to small business increased from eight to 11 per cent and Pharmacare users now to pay an average $5 user fee to-annual, maximum of $125, small

By TIMOTHY RENSHAW News Reporter

businesses and sick seniors would be among the hardest hit by the new budget.

But North Vancouver-Capilano MLA and chief government whip Angus Ree, while agreeing the budget was good and bad, said ail budgets were traditionally good and bad.

He said the reduction in provin- cial sales tax, which will drap to five per cent within a year, and the removal of the seven per cent tax on restaurant meals, ‘twill give a great boost to our tourist in- dustry." ane

One negative aspect of property-transfer tax, which will take one per cent of the first $200,000 and two per cent on anything above that on the selling price of homes.

The new tax replaces the old land title fee, which was $1 for every $1,000 of property value, plus $35.

Asked if there was any money in the budget for the proposed $30 million Lonsdale Avenue and Westview Drive interchanges at the Upper Levels Highway, Ree said he had been informed that the pro- jects were still to go ahead, “but | don’t have anything new to report.””

Full details of the budget were included in Friday’s edition of the News. ne

3 ~ Sunday, March 22, 1987 - North Shore News

Despite often horrific _seenes, a paramedic’s job is rewarding

the “ budget, Ree said, was the new

“Before paramedics were like taxi drivers — grab and run. Now we're finding the sooner treatment starts the better the outcome,”’ says Long.

But for immediate action to be taken, he says the skills of para- medics had to be improved.

‘“*We now have paramedics that use intravenous drugs at the scene, and the retrieval of patients has gone up quite profoundly,’’ Long says.

Still some patients are lost, despite all of the advances in med- ical health services.

DEAL WITH IT

Says Jones: ‘‘We don’t like it, and we never want {to see it hap- pen, but we have to deal with it.’”

“I’ve seen some horrifying things, but you can’t take all of these things home to your family. You have to live some sort of normal life: outside of this en- vironment,” he says.

When he chooses staff, Jones says he tries to weed out the ‘‘ace paramedics.”’

“We pick people willing to take criticism and learn. They've got to be able to go from a tragic situa- tion to something humorous and take it all in stride.”

On average the North Van- couver station gets six calls a day, and many of these are to elderly residents experiencing health pro- blems.

Later on that shift the two res- pond to a routine call, which won’t require lights and siren.

It’s 1:30 a.m. and the call is a possible food poisoning of a woman in her 20s.

On scene the woman is found | slouched over a toilet bowl at a:

basement suite address. Her boyfriend, looking pale and tired, stands nearby. j

The paramedics learn both had eaten at a local restaurant earlier that evening. The woman says the meat was not cooked properly.

At the hospital, the pair will be checked over by the . attending physician. Once Ledgerwood ‘goes over the possible food poisoning cases with a nurse he checks to see how Mary is feeling.

At 3 a.m. he and Jones will drive her back to her residence.

In terms of medical emergencies it has been a relatively quiet night for the station. But when the new shift starts at 8 a.m. there is a lot to talk about — the mechanical failure and Murphey’s law.

NORTH WANCOUVER-Seymour

NDP candidate David Schreck...°‘ i'd give (the budget) a ‘po