Wherever I go, the pager goes. It goes on vibrate sometimes, other times it even goes on silent. But it stays on, ready to receive its little message.

At night, it sits next to the front door, where it has reception. It’s piercing tone set to beep continuously until I get to it and hit a button – it’s the only way it will wake me up. It’s very loud, especially in the early hours of the morning.

Three nights ago, it went off and interrupted my sleep. Meh, it happens. I can’t respond during nights this week – I’ve got a big project to finish off at work and sadly, Mountain Rescue doesn’t pay the bills. So, when the pager woke me at 0631 on Tuesday morning, I wordlessly padded downstairs, turned it off, set it to silent – because I knew there’d be more messages – and went back to sleep. It was a search in Carmarthenshire – no way I was going to get there and do anything useful before work.

Wednesday morning, it was about 0145 when it went off. This time, it was followed rapidly by a “555″ message – stand down. Fine, back to sleep, grumbling lightly.

This morning it was 0146 when the initial alert came through. Frustrated and tired, I shut it up and went back to sleep. 0200 the message came through – missing person in Caerphilly, all of a 3 minute drive away. Ten minutes later – stand down.

Can I get a decent night’s sleep tonight please?

Our quarry is in this valley somewhere. We start searching – it’s already dark and the snow is falling hard. The snowcover makes it worse as it covers the grass between the tussocks and the tops of the tussocks themselves evenly, meaning that with every step you’ve no idea if you’re going to be standing on a tussock or sinking knee deep in snow. For a moment, the snow slows and I get a view of a line of headtorches and search lamps stretching from ridge to ridge, sweeping down through the valley, a line of searchers led by dogs and handlers searching for the two of them.

Two and a half hours in and I’m tired, wet and steaming lightly in the cold. My skiing jacket isn’t coping with the hard tromping we’re doing and I’m overheating inside it. There’s a call over the radio, one of the dogs has a strike. Adrenaline pumps around my body and as one the line stops, instructed by control to hold position. It’s confirmed, the man and woman we’ve been looking for, alive, cold but very happy to see us. We sweep forward and crowd around, our lights turning that small patch of mountain to daylight. A find! Alive!

We turn and start walking them off, grinning, glad that we’ve found them alive.

A message over the radio: The man’s wife has reported him missing as well, but not to worry, the police told her that we’d found him safe and well.

He blanches.

Did they tell her who I was with, he asks.

A sudden realisation hits us and we try to hide our smiles at his misfortune. We shrug and walk them off.

It’s only later, back in base tucking into tepid pie and chips the police provided that we hear the reaction of his wife to finding out who he’d been with. I left base with visions of his clothes on the snow-covered lawn when he got home.

Truth really is stranger than fiction.

Sorry about the gap recently, I’ve been mad busy sorting Mal’s wedding and other things. This one obviously did not take place recently.

Of course, being away over the weekend and spent much of the end of last week tied up in the evenings, so when I came home tonight, I had a stack of things to watch on TV, notably two episodes of the Bill. It’s quite interesting to watch – a double episode covering an 8 year old girl who goes missing. They eventually find her body and so far, the killer looks like it might be a 10 year old boy. What’s really interesting from my perspective, quite apart from the storyline, is watching the initial process of someone being reported missing. Eventually there’s a big search in an area of undergrowth – very reminiscent of what we do when we search for a missing person. Eventually they find a body and the programme then follows on where we stop – the investigation and arrest. It’s quite interesting – one of the areas of police work I’m most interested in is search management and dealing with missing persons, so with my application to the police progressing, I do hope at some point that I get to be involved in this kind of work.

Anyway, back to the Bill…

Some of the things in that article are quite rough to have to read. The violence with which he beat her seems unbelievable given that while we were searching it rapidly became apparent that she was a warm and friendly woman who was generally a happy and bouncy person. While that sounds a little stereotypical of what someone says after this kind of event, I’m sincere in this case – when you search for a missing person you have to find out a lot about them, facets of their life that may not be apparent to their nearest and dearest. The police will collect information from a variety of sources to build up a complete picture about a person so that we can more accurately predict where they are.

In this case however what stuck in my mind was just how friendly and warm people said she was. A very sad outcome, but gratifying to see that the police managed to get enough evidence to arrest him.

So, with the Met Office promising gales of up to 50mph, we headed off in the glorious sunshine on Sunday morning, with the remnants of last night’s torrential rain still making it’s presence felt on the heads of the valleys road. Down on the Gower, the wind was gusting uncomfortably high, so the pneumatic aerial mast was only raised a little and control was set up. Tasked with leading a party in an area of fields the police needed covered, we headed off and spent the next few hours making our way through fields of …well knee-high (or occasionally higher) meadow grass – that is, grass with a random spattering of wild flowers and grasses in it. In other words, hayfever hell.

Nevertheless, onwards we plodded working our way through the fields and hedgerows. In searches like this, where there’s a real possibility that the person you’re looking for is dead, you have to look under hedges and in undergrowth in case they’ve crawled in there to seek shelter and died. It’s not a particularly joyful kind of searching and, heartless though it may seem to onlookers, we joke and laugh amongst ourselves, sometimes with exceedingly black humour to try and keep our spirits high.

By 1400 I was slowly collapsing in a sneezing lump of streaming mucous and with everyone’s stomachs grumbling we headed back to the pub for a lunch of sausage and chips. It’s amazing just how good simple food tastes after hard work. With the masses fed and watered, the afternoon’s plans were outlined and with a few changes of plan as more information about the morning’s searches was acted upon, I ended up staying around the control vehicle – good for my hayfever at least!

By 1700 it was decided that we’d done enough and the long job of packing up and making the vehicles ready for the next job, whenever that may be, was started. No sooner had I taken the cap off the generator to check the fuel levels than the pagers went off – area call in the Swansea area. What luck – we were already in the Swansea area. So, hurriedly repacking everything, mobiles, radios and police radios blaring all around us as more information rapidly came in, we jumped into Alpha and headed off – our destination was north of Swansea, in Glais.

The journey through Swansea was rapid – combination of sirens and two-tone air horn works well to clear traffic on what had been a very busy day in Swansea with the Race for Life on. It didn’t take us long to clear the traffic and as we arrived on scene the full details were apparent. Two men had fallen 25m down a cliff face – ambulance and fire brigade on scene, 169 en route in.

A complete contrast to the gentle start to that morning’s activities, helmets and harnesses were thrown on and within minutes the area was empty of personnel as people headed up to the casualty site. I stayed behind to man the radios and start the paperwork. It soon became apparent however that they desperately needed more personnel up on scene. Leaving the incident in the hands of a senior member who couldn’t go onto the hill, I headed off.

169 had already winched the first casualty out as I arrived on scene to help with the second casualty. Helimed was providing some medical assistance along with the paramedic winchman from 169; the fire brigade was helping us with the technical equipment and they’d already cleared a few trees to allow 169 to winch clearly. It didn’t take long for the chap to be packaged properly and his stretcher was soon being passed the 20m up to the winching point hand-over-hand, his IV bag following him. The usual clatter of rotors overhead soon drowned out any conversation and within minutes, the casualty and winchman were on board and rapidly making their way to Morriston hospital which was only a few minutes away, leaving us to clear up and get everyone out safely. Reversing down the track was interesting, and we passed Pete our team leader giving a TV interview at the bottom of the hill on our way out.

It was a good job for what was a long and fruitless search – always nice to end the day on a high note.

We’re up to our forty-something-th callout already this year – we’re well on track to be amongst the busiest teams in the country and this weekend’s contributing heavily to that number. Last night, just after midnight, while Sean and I were just winding up a long-needed clearout of the enormous piles of crap I have in my office the pager went off. With my hayfever going mad this year it’s triggering asthma which isn’t a good thing – especially when I’m going to be heading out with the team!

On the way to base we heard the details – we had a search for a misper down on the Gower – an elderly gentleman with dementia. He’d gone wandering and though we spent quite some time searching, we couldn’t find a trace. With the sun rising, the police stood down for a few hours for a shift handover and we headed back to base with the pagers announcing that the search was continuing. I was heading for bed.

This afternoon we’ve had a request from South Wales police to help recover a body. That’s going on at the moment and on top of that the search is continuing in the Gower. Another busy weekend for us. I’ve been catching up on sleep and preparing for tonight – a first responder meeting to go over any clinical issues we’ve had recently.

Anyway, more office to clean…

After doing my Ambulance shift on Saturday, I headed up to Aberystwyth. Sean and I headed out to a Greek restaurant in town, where I think I surprised the waitress by actually knowing what I was ordering and pronouncing it fairly accurately too. It was a cracking meal and as Sean and I were relaxing in his room later on, the pager went off for the first time in a while. This one was for a search in Penarth for a missing elderly gentleman. Weighing up the options, I decided to not attend – it would be a 100-mile journey to base, 2 hours minimum. Not really worth it – a decision that’s becoming harder to make with rising fuel prices, since I have to pay for my own diesel for going to callouts.

The search continued into the early hours when it was stood down – the team had an ex on Sunday which was supposed to go ahead until the pager went off again at 1000 – a continuation of the previous nights’ callout. Whilst my colleagues were scouring scrubland in South Wales, I was eating ice cream and relaxing on the beach in Mid Wales (sorry guys!). The afternoon peace was broken by another pager message – this time for an area call in the waterfalls which finished fairly quickly. With the afternoon dying away, the search was finally stood down and I enjoyed a peaceful night.

Until last night when, as I was pulling away from Tesco’s, the pager went off. I headed up to base, vaguely concerned about my frozen pizza in the boot. Once there, I found that we had a sighting of a flare in or around the Ystradfellte Reservoir and so we headed up to Storey Arms to meet the Brecon team. With people approaching the valley from all directions, it wasn’t long before we stumbled across some people who had been setting off flares for no good reason and should have known better. I can’t go into detail, but suffice to say, they’re probably not having a good day today.

As I was about to pull out of the layby after packing up, the pager went off again, this time for a possible downed hanglider north of Cardiff. By the time I got to base, we’d been stood down since no actual evidence of the crash had been found. We packed up and headed home where, at 2300, I finally managed to cook my now-deformed and defrosted pizza. I finally collapsed into bed around 0100 and fell deep asleep…

…until about 0145 when the pager woke me – search for a misper in Porth. With feet of lead, I dragged my reluctant self downstairs and headed off to base again. Not much to say about this one, there wasn’t a huge amount of information, it was a horrendously shitty area to search and he was found outside of our search area. By the time I’d packed up the vehicle in base and reached home it was 0600 and I managed a few hours’ sleep before I had to get up for work.

I just hope that this isn’t the trend for the week.

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Tonight was agaKin out with the ambulance service – something I’m really enjoying though it is frustrating at times. It’s frustrating because the knowledge that I have in terms of diagnosing and treating some conditions through mountain rescue could be applied here – giving Hypostop to diabetic patients having a hypo; giving Entonox to patients suffering from painful trauma; giving aspirin to a patient suffering from a possible heart attack - just three examples where we could make even more of a difference to the community.

Take the last few calls for example. We had a two hour battle with a lovely old guy who was having a very bad hypo – only the second of his life and he’d had diabetes for some 20 years. When we turned up, the wife was able to take a blood glucose measurement for us and between us we managed to get him to take some sugar and some jam. We can’t perform blood glucose measurements ourselves and we don’t carry Hypostop (actually I do for mountain rescue but can’t use it for ambulance service calls). I’ve had a call to an elderly lady who fell – a “nan down”. She’d broken her femur, that much was obvious from the swelling and deformity, but she might also have done some damage to her knee. I had no analgesia – we don’t carry Entonox – and so I could do nothing for her other than monitor her and keep her company. The last 20 minutes of the hour-and-a-bit I spent with here were very worrying – she was starting to deteriorate and I had nothing I could do or give her to treat her. If the crew hadn’t arrived as I was getting my phone out, I would have been on the phone to control to ask for an RRV to back me up – I was concerned at that point about her slipping into hypovolaemic shock. Finally, a few weeks ago, I saw a gent who was complaining of classic heart attack symptoms, and all we could do was watch and wait. I did call for an RRV on that one because I was worried, possibly not necessary, but I’d rather be dragging an ambulance officer out of bed to come and slap on a 12-lead ECG for nothing than having my patient die.

So a frustrating time at the moment. If the ambulance service insist on sending us to these calls where we are currently achieving nothing but stopping the clock, then at least give us that tiny bit more in terms of skills and equipment that could make such a huge difference to someone’s life.