Chopperdoc - Orange

I don’t know what I expected from the Rotary Club’s Sunday markets out here in Orange, but I’d say the term market was pretty generous in the circumstances because it was more of a car boot sale really, various country folk selling their clutter from the boots of their beat-up Toyotas in the underground car park at the big K-Mart store.

One man hung out of the driver’s side of his car wearing an anorak so dirty you’d swear he’d dragged it from the local tip; one hand on the steering wheel, one hand feeding a bottle of milk to a baby parked up in his pram. And just as it dawned on me I’d like to turn and run in the opposite direction, Ella decided she loved it and went tearing around pushing and pulling at all sorts of filthy old toys until I had to bargain with her and part with a dollar for a matchbox car from an old couple who ticked her under the chin and said “our daughter would love you”.

“You see Ella” I said as we walked off, “All this whingeing and whining you’ve been doing - you could go home with some of these people – how would you like that?”

Ella’s doing her very best to get herself listed her for auction on E-bay right now because, not content with starting the day at 5.30am, she’s also taken to waking four or five times during the night, which means Darren and I are like the living dead. Today she climbed on me for an entire four hours between 5.30am and 9.30am and barely stopped making demands long enough to draw breath. Eventually I gave up and called for back-up from The Wiggles DVD after Darren had gone to work.

This afternoon we went down to the Chopperdoc base to see the helicopter, which Ella pretended to fly. The chopper in Orange is on standby during daylight hours; the response time from taking a phone call is five minutes between the start of the call and taking off from the helipad and all of the calls are what they call primaries, which means the chopperdocs are first on the scene at the incident (and I can tell you it’s the oddest feeling when you hear the helicopter coming back into base over the hotel and you realise that’s Darren coming home from work - a bit different from hearing the key in the door).

This is all very different from the International chopperdocs, who fly in planes to retrieve patients who’ve already been assessed and stabilised by other doctors overseas, though the sort of medical kit they carry is the same.

The situation here at Orange means you’ve got a doctor, paramedic, pilot and aircrew man all sitting around the hangar between 7.50am and 6.15pm, potentially doing nothing, though they can’t leave the building, which I’m sure is frustrating for them but not half as frustrating for me dealing with Ella for 13.5 hours without even a five minute break, in this case, in a hotel room without cooking facilities.

And then there’s the grey area of what happens if a call comes at say, 5.45pm. Well, if that happens, they fly the helicopter to the scene and stabilise the patient with whatever medical equipment they’ve got, then the aircrew fly back to Orange and the doctor gets abandoned into the hands of the road ambulance service and they drive the patient to hospital. So while Darren officially works the daylight hours, in fact his shift can finish much later than this, which is exactly what happened this evening because the batphone rang at 5pm. The doctors have to accept that’s how it works, but personally I find it difficult to accept he doesn’t get paid for the hours he’s away from home because, even though it’s not the way the NHS does things, it’s exactly what happens in all other Australian hospital jobs, where the docs complete a weekly timesheet and receive penalty rates for anything over and above the hours they’re contracted to do.

Anyway, from what I’ve seen, the most important piece of kit in the hangar is the gas barbeque; a piece of equipment I’ve seen everywhere Darren’s worked (including in the hospital’s intensive care unit). As Darren pointed out today, the BBQ is so important in the aussies’ psyche that, well, it’s a case of to hell with the safety rules, the BBQ comes before all human life. Never mind all the combustible materials in the cupboard, get the steaks on, mate. Good on ya.