24 Hours in A&E

60 year old bricklayer Phil is rushed to A&E in a critical condition after falling just two feet off a ladder at work and suffering multiple injuries. Paramedics took him to a local hospital but his injuries were so severe he needed to be transferred to the Major Trauma Unit at St George’s. His friend and business partner Paul was working on another site when he heard about the accident “it just goes to show how easy it is for an experienced builder to slip up, it takes a second to make a mistake and your life’s changed forever.” On shift in resus, Consultant Manny explains how falling from a relatively low height can have serious implications “It doesn’t always correlate to how high they’ve fallen. Some people, having not fallen very far, will break a lot of bones and have a lot of injuries.” Initial results show Phil has fractured his spine, wrist and ribs and doctors need to CT scan him urgently to check for any internal injuries. Fellow bricklayer Paul talks about how he first met Phil on a building site in Hammersmith over 28 years ago. But it was only when Paul took on a big job and asked Phil to help him, that they realised how compatible they were as a team “one left handed, one right handed.. you’ve got a trowel in one hand and bricks in another, so you can work towards each other and never get an awkward bit!” As doctors assess the severity of Phil’s spinal fracture, Paul talks about how it was more than just work they had in common “over the years we’ve always had more laughs than arguments… we was coming home from a job one day and he said something and we had to pull over and physically laugh for 10, 15 minutes until we’d calmed down enough to be able to drive off.” But as specialist doctors review Phil’s scans, Paul talks about how, despite the bravado of the building site, Phil one day confided in him about how he’d dealt with the death of his son before they met. “It was hard for a long, long time” but Paul supported him both on and off the building site. 93 year old Violet was getting ready to go out for lunch with friends when she fell and seriously fractured her leg at home. Her friend Bob and his wife Sylvia, were the first to arrive at her home “there was quite a lot of blood on the floor, it looked as though something was sticking out her leg….but in fact it was the shin bone poking out.” Doctors work quickly to realign the bones in an attempt to restore the blood supply to Violet’s foot. Bob talks about how important Violet’s social life is to her independence; she regularly joins them for Scrabble evenings and organises an annual Christmas lunch for Marks & Spencer retirees “I think she’d find it very difficult to come to terms with sitting in a chair watching television all day” says Bob. As she’s taken to CT to assess the damage to the nerves and blood vessels in her foot, Violet talks about how much she’s needed her friends since her husband passed away on Christmas Day several years ago “I probably wouldn’t survive if I didn’t have people like Sylvia and Bob.. you just need friends, very much so.” 18 year old dance student Shiana has come to A&E with her Mum and best friend Briony after slipping over and hurting her ankle during a rehearsal. Shiana talks about how her and Briony met by knocking into each other at nursery aged just three years old and became inseparable shortly afterwards “we basically became friends from bumping heads.” Shiana talks about how her love of the stage was cemented at an early age by performing songs from Greece for their Mums, but it was only with Briony’s encouragement that she decided to pursue it as a career.