Early this afternoon I came home from Peter Mac with my beloved after about 50 radiation sessions there. (For the middle 4 weeks or so I was having two sessions a day, five days a week. At the beginning, and for the last 10 days or so, only one.) On top of these I had at least 15 consults ancillary to the radiation proper, before and during the sessions. So getting up to 70 appointments all up. The main side effects of all this have been fatigue, a rather dry mouth, and some blurry vision from the left eye, especially when it is covered over with a whitish discharge. We have been assured by multiple folk that these things are quite normal, and will take a few weeks to settle down. Among these is my radiation oncologist, Dr M, who now wants to see me each week to, as she put it, keep an eye on things. (I see what you did there, Doctor!)

Dr M had originally wanted me to have 30 sessions to the eyelid as well. After 25, I had terrific pain to the eye (as well as looking as if I’d had a good hiding) and said “No more”. (I had to play the “I’m the patient” card with the registrar, who was gung-ho for me to continue. Dr M was far more amenable to my stopping; she said 30 was probably “a bit ambitious”.) Anyway, today’s was the last scheduled radiation session — just to the head and neck, by far the less intrusive of the two treatment sites. So next week, I resume the usual prostate cancer scans, treatments, and consults with the ever so slightly miffed Dr P. The latter, the last time I saw him, said (referring to the radiation treatment) “I can’t do anything with you while you’re having that!”. Well, Dr P, I’m all yours.

For most of September I had ambulance transport into Peter Mac. This was also supposed to happen this morning, but they never showed. PM Patient Transport assured me they could see that the vehicle was on its way — first 5 minutes away, then 20. So we pulled the pin on the ambulance, and my beloved drove me along the by-now familiar route to Parkville.

Being a nosy old bugger, I have found it fascinating to talk to the 20 or so ambos who drove me out and back. On this evidence, there is quite a spread of attitudes towards the job and degrees of burnout. On average, burnout is supposed to happen after seven years. However, some ambos I spoke to have been doing it for 20-30 years or even longer. Some never want to stop; a few others are counting down until retirement age. They were almost all pretty chatty, especially about the job, but many topics were ventilated — some quite personal — during our trips into and from Parkville.

There is quite a number of ambos about; one mentioned that Ambulance Victoria had around 7,000 drivers. This seems an awful lot. But ambulance vehicles come in different shapes and sizes. Mostly I was driven in the seven-seater Honda SUVs beloved of large families — these are reserved for passenger transport. Drivers of these vehicles often specialise in this. However, their numbers are also supplemented from the pool of full-size ambo drivers (those “on the stretchers”, as the jargon goes) as the need requires. Paramedics who generally drive these vehicles welcome the chance to have a more cruisy day on passenger transport. Shuttling patients around also doesn’t require them to make quick medical assessments of sick people; instead they get to chat to people unlikely to be affected by drugs or dementia, and who are thus less prone to abuse or assault them. (The latter happened to quite a few of the ambos I asked about this.)

There is also a spectrum of training competencies. At the bottom of the hierarchy are those only trained for passenger transport; they can administer oxygen and defibrillators, but no drugs. (A lot of these folk are doing this as a second career; some were made redundant, others felt like a change.) Above them are full-blown paramedics; this group subdivides into junior and senior. I asked one young woman, who had been an ambo for four years, whether she still got sent out with a senior partner. She replied that she was now sent out with the new graduates — ambo talk for the young and wet behind the ears — which she thought was crazy.

Having spent most of my library career in post-secondary and tertiary education, I was interested in how ambos are trained. Originally they did a diploma course, several months in duration. This alternated study of emergency medicine with being sent out on the stretchers with a senior ambo. That sounded like a darned good way to structure ambo training to me; most drivers I spoke to agreed. Unfortunately credentialism struck, and the diploma was “upgraded” to a degree course taking longer and involving more theory. Students had placements in which to acquire direct experience. But just how much experience they acquired depended on where they were placed. One young graduate I spoke to had served her placement in a regional centre, where the ambulance shifts were pretty quiet. It is therefore possible to emerge from a degree course without having treated many patients. Such graduates are pretty shell-shocked when they are sent on a shift to Collingwood, St Kilda, or the CBD on a Saturday night. The consensus, regardless of how individual drivers had been trained, was that the old ways were indeed better.