FESTIVAL BREEDING GROUNDS

Tens of thousands of people rolling around in each other’s masticated filth while high on every household substance that the part-time dealers can successfully powder or pill is a recipe for self-harm. The entire festival site is an adult playpen designed to facilitate the sort of debauchery that normally ends in a hospital visit. Which is why, I thought, being a festival paramedic must suck. Not only are you forced to stay sober while everyone around you descends into gurning, grinning morons, but you have to fix them when it goes wrong.

Last weekend some friends of mine were paramedics at a festival I attended. When you arrive in their hands a quivering wreck they calm you down, give you a cup of tea and a cuddle, and whatever medical attention you need. It didn’t sound nearly as bad as I had imagined. They told me the majority of people come in with cuts, bruises, some breaks and fractures, and a handful in need of reassurance that no, they have not taken too many drugs, and no, they are not going to die. The fact is when someone does too many drugs there is very little you can do to pull them out of the void apart from wait and make sure they don’t hurt themselves in the meantime. It’s not the hardcore acid-in-the-eye contingent who end up in the emergency tent, but the lightweight recreational dabblers who panic when their heart races. They get scared because they haven’t learned about the battering the body is capable of taking. These people usually just need reassurance. Just like in A&E, festival paramedics have to deal with the usual barrage of sexual hiccups. A medic friend told me of a case from last year’s V festival of a lady in her mid-thirties who found herself incapacitated in her tent and in need of medical attention. When he arrived, she was in no apparent distress, fully clothed, and alone. She furtively said, “Promise you won’t laugh!” The medic immediately preempted the type of enquiry it would be. “I’ve been playing with a vibrator, and well, I imagine you can guess the rest.”

“I see," he replied. "And which hole would that be?”

It turned out her husband and kids did not arrive until that evening, and whenever she could snatch a moment alone she enjoyed masturbating her anus with a vibrator. But she had never confessed her secret pleasure to her husband, who was about to get an eye-opener. The medic suggested that perhaps it would add a new dimension to their marriage. The Ann Summers staple was so deeply lodged in her rear end that she couldn’t walk without causing herself considerable pleasure and public distress so she was given a stretcher and escorted from the festival to a nearby hospital, where her husband was soon to learn of her proclivity to buns fun. I met my friends to keep them company for half an hour and realized that festivals deliver a much happier and slower pace of emergencies than reality does. In that time, an American dressed as some sort of stoned elf came in with his eyebrow stitched up after passing out in Amsterdam. He was told to have a few beers to anaesthetise himself before coming back to remove the stitches. There was a girl who fell on her face and split her lip. Another girl came in whose boyfriend had suspected swine flu. It was far more likely to be the combination of booze, pills, cigarettes, rain, and shouting, but if you think you have swine flu at a festival, be warned: festivals are now equipped with off-site swine flu isolation booths where you will be quarantined like a rabid dog. So instead of spending your festival frolicking through euphoria and mud, you’ll be alone, attached to a machine, and probably in the one place you’re most likely to actually catch swine flu. I saw the girl later that evening chewing her face off so I can’t imagine it was that bad. So it turns out I was wrong about being a festival paramedic. Festival emergencies represent a far more carefree cross-section of society. The majority of people are set on some sort of enjoyable holiday from reality, which means their injuries tend to be more amusing. Security deals with the ass-leaking drunks and aggressive knife-wielding maniacs; the heart-wrenching depressives tend to stay home, making festival working life far more agreeable. DR. MONA MOORE