"21 year old male, thinks he has gone blind"
It's wrong to judge on call details alone but there were only two words on my mind when this job popped up on the screen. 'Yeah' and 'Right'. I could be wrong, but I strongly doubted it. I imagine it is extremely rare for a healthy young male to just suddenly go blind! Anyway, with 7 minutes and 59 seconds to turn this job into what the government consider a success, we 'made progress' through the early morning rush hour traffic. We pulled up outside to notice that unfortunately, this job was already a failure. 8 minutes and 42 seconds had elapsed since the call began. Oh well!
We were greeted at the door by the patient, eyes shut and covered with his hands. He had a towel wrapped around his waist, and was dripping wet.
"Good morning sir, what's been happening this morning?"
"I can't see"
"Ok, so what happened?"
"I was washing my hair, and my eyes really started stinging, now I can't see anything"
"So do you think that you could have got shampoo in your eyes?"
"Maybe"
"Have you tried to open your eyes?"
"Not yet, I didn't want to do any damage"
"Ok then, shall we try to open them and I'll have a look?"
He tentatively opened his eyes, and to his and my amazement he was able to see. Shocker! It was far too early in the morning for me to sum up the energy to lecture him about the inappropriate use of an EMERGENCY service so I did the relevant paperwork and made a swift exit back to my lukewarm coffee. The stupidity and lack of common sense in the youth of today never ceases to amaze me! I certainly felt vindicated for my pre-judgement!