My Tag-Along With a Paramedic was Uneventful but Reassuring

Australia Day is often synonymous with drinking, and therefore fights and accidents. In fact the Australia Day weekend is statistically the busiest period of the year for ambulance call-outs. This is why I headed out with a Paramedic named Greg Gibson on Australia Day eve. Spoiler alert, not a single thing happened. Not one. But I was still given a backstage look at Australian ER.

This is Greg. He began his career in Geelong in 1978 at a time when ambulances administered a one-size-fits-all remedy known as trichloroethylene. This was an industrial solvent used for both dry cleaning and, weirdly, pain relief. Before it was banned, a big part of working in ambulances was giving it to patients to inhale on the way to hospital.

Today we're a bit more advanced. Apart from your traditional ambulances, there are also those 4WD things called Mobile Intensive Care Ambulances (MICA). They're a first response vehicle delivering hospital techniques (such as paralysing trauma patients and inserting breathing tubes into lungs) before patients get to hospital.

At the front is a GPS system similar to that of a cab. Paramedic vehicles are directed across Melbourne from their operations centre, based on their proximity to the caller. There's also a radio offering real-time chatter between the operations centre and paramedics across the city. A quick listen illuminates how often elderly people need medical attention. All night elderly patients are being chaperoned between nursing homes and medical clinics. The jobs are all code 2 — no need for lights or sirens.

We cruise around waiting for call-outs that don't eventuate and Greg remembers the first time he saved someone's life. It was 1986 and ambulances were only just equipped with mobile heart defibrillators. "We had a guy with chest pains," he says. "I was sitting in the back when he went into cardiac arrest, right in front of me." Greg was the only one in the van who'd been trained to use a defibrillator, and he describes nervously uncoiling the paddles and lowering them, humming, over the guy's chest. "I gave him one shock and he came back straight away, eyes open. I couldn't believe it." Later when they arrived at the hospital the nurses and hospital staff praised Greg as a miracle worker. "I was chuffed," he says grinning. "But these days anyone can do it."

These days it's not heart attacks or even drugs that are their biggest problem though. It's drinking. "You hear about all these sexy drugs like ice and heroin," says Greg, "but drunk teenagers are by far the worst." Interestingly within that group, he insists it's teenage girls who go the hardest. "We hear that it's even become fashionable for these girls to drink until they need an ambulance and can sober up in hospital. Apparently this has become a cool thing to do." Greg shakes his head like a person who doesn't understand teenage girls.

Apparently, it's jobs like these involving young people that make being a career paramedic hard. Greg sees drug overdoses, car accidents, fights, and suicides every week of the year. He recalls visiting a family home in an affluent area to find a 17 year-old who'd overdosed on heroin. "The parents didn't even know their child was interested in drugs," he recalls. "They were inconsolable." Then there're the stories of teenagers who commit suicide in their bedrooms. "I don't know what takes young people to such dark places like that," says Greg. "And often they're young and so messed up they do it on their birthdays or on a parent's birthday. I don't understand why, but that's not unusual."

On that downer we stop for coffee. The streets are full but there are still no call-outs. "It's really unusual," says Greg. Our media liaison, Paul, fiddles with his radio which is set to intercept calls for the Southern region, including the city. Melbourne is divided into the four regions of the compass. The south and west are the busiest, so we're streaming those for activity. Someone has fallen five metres onto the ground. Someone else has been bottled in West Melbourne. We get back in the car.

When we arrive in West Melbourne no one is about. The call-out is cancelled. It's to be our one possible avenue of the night. Greg changes the subject to something positive. "I think the resilience of people never ceases to amaze me. Of all the things I see, there's no standard response, but generally people are just good. You hear the media and think everything is going wrong, but if you look at the big picture you realise how well we're doing."

So what would he change about people if he could? Greg pauses, smiles. "I think society is a bit a-copic. That means that a lot of society just can't cope and I wish they could." He regales us with a few stories of people who called 000 as a first response, when maybe they should have just got Band Aid. They once got a call from a person who cut their upper lip with a crusty bread roll and wanted an ambulance. Another was a woman who was doing home acupuncture and noticed some blood on a needle, then called an ambulance. My favourite was a person who ate a box of Jaffas, threw up, thought the red colour was blood, and called an ambulance. As Greg summarises, "self-resilience is decreasing a bit these days."

We finish about 2:30am. It's been a quiet night, the quietest Australia Day night anyone can remember. But it's reassuring guys like Greg were there just in case.

Follow Julian on Twitter: @MorgansJulian