What is We’ll Just Go and Have a Look about?

Title: We’ll Just Go and Have a Look Subtitle: Twenty Years on the Sharp End of Emergency Medicine, From Roadside to Rescue Chopper This memoir follows two decades of one paramedic’s life as it bends, jolts, and occasionally belly‑flops its way from a first green uniform on the road in the UK to flying critical care missions off the coast of New Zealand. It is not a neat career ladder. It is a series of sideways steps, bad coffee, clipped helmets, near misses, small wins, and the odd day where everything somehow works. Told in short, vivid chapters that jump back and forth through time, the book reads like a conversation after a long night shift: honest, darkly funny, and more vulnerable than you planned to be. Each chapter drops into a moment that stuck, then pulls back just far enough to ask what it really did to the person wearing the uniform. There is no grand plan, no tidy narrative arc where everything makes sense. There is just the next job, and the choice to keep turning up. **Chapter 1: We’ll Just Go and Have a Look** The book opens in the water, not in a classroom. It is supposed to be a training day on the coast, the sort of carefully managed exercise designed to look good on someone else’s clipboard. Then a fisherman shouts, and suddenly the drills are over and the real thing has arrived thirty metres offshore. This first chapter sets the tone for everything that follows. What starts as a box‑ticking afternoon quietly turns into a genuine rescue. The gear that was being practiced with ten minutes earlier is now the only thing between a panicking swimmer and a body recovery. There is no cinematic heroism, just cold water, controlled movements, and a very human mix of “this is what we trained for” and “please don’t let me mess this up.” Out of the water, in the shivering aftermath, the narrator introduces the core rhythm of the job: you turn up, try to work out what is going on, and do what you can. Sometimes the outcome is good. Sometimes it very much is not. What matters, at least at this stage of his career, is that you still want to go and have a look. **Chapter 2: Starting Lines** The story then jumps back to the early road‑ambulance years. The first shifts as a student, the awkwardness of not quite knowing where anything is, the way you cling to protocols until you realise real people do not fit the flow chart. Here we see the foundations of the later specialist roles: basic calls that are not basic at all if you are the one on the floor, the first cardiac arrests, the strange intimacy of being in other people’s living rooms at the worst moments of their lives. This chapter strips away the TV version of the job. There is more waiting than sirens, more uncertainty than drama. The narrator learns how to talk to frightened relatives, how to keep a straight face in the presence of terrible DIY injuries, and how quickly “routine” can become “this is actually quite bad.” The tone is dry, self‑deprecating, and already leaning into the gallows humour that will later become a survival tool. **Chapter 3: Yesterday** “Yesterday” is the story that quietly indicts the wider system. Called to an elderly man who has fallen and cannot get up, the crew check their system and notice the time of the original call. Yesterday. Not an hour ago. Not even earlier that morning. A full day on the floor. The job itself is clinically straightforward: warmth, fluids, careful handling, hospital. The emotional weight sits in everything that did not happen before they arrived. One man needed nothing more high‑tech than someone turning up, making him a hot drink, helping him stand, and deciding if he was safe. Instead he lay there for twenty‑four hours because the queue ahead of him was longer, louder, or luckier. This chapter widens the lens. It is not written as a political manifesto, but the anger is there between the lines. The narrator starts to see not just patients, but gaps — the spaces where the system simply fails to appear. It changes how he looks at “good care.” Doing the best you can on scene is not always enough when the call should never have waited that long. **Chapter 4: Professional Behaviour** If “Yesterday” shows the cracks, “Professional Behaviour” shows how people who work in those cracks stay sane. This is the HART chapter about the team culture that no brochure would ever print. Officially, Hazardous Area Response is about specialist training and operating in dangerous environments. Unofficially, it is about people you trust enough to let them ride the industrial floor cleaner like a rodeo bull while you film it on your phone. Here we get the behind‑the‑scenes life of a high‑risk team: lockers moved to unreachable places, improvised indoor sledging with kit boxes, serious conversations cut across by relentless banter. Privacy is theoretical at best. Showers are opportunities for commentary. Mistakes become running jokes long after they stop stinging. Underneath the nonsense, though, is the point. These are the people you clip onto a rope system with on a wet cliff face. These are the colleagues you follow into collapsed buildings or onto bridges with someone sitting on the wrong side of the railings. The chapter gently threads in the idea that all this apparent immaturity is doing something important: pressure‑testing relationships before they are needed under load. If you have already seen someone fall off a floor cleaner at speed, you know how they cope when gravity and risk are not theoretical. **Chapter 5: Tea and Medals** From the station to the cliff edge. This chapter takes us onto a rope rescue for a young man who has thrown himself from height and somehow survived the fall. The pager, the drive, the quick on‑scene briefing, then the drop over the edge with a harness and a plan. The practical details of the rescue are described with matter‑of‑fact focus: anchoring systems, packaging the patient on unstable ground, the slow controlled lift back up. Around that, the narrator’s internal monologue flickers between technical checks and the quiet knowledge that this person had tried to end their life and now has to be brought back into one. At the top, once the patient is handed over, the job is suddenly over for HART. No medals, definitely no ceremony. Just kit to clean, ropes to repack, and a return to station. A colleague’s favourite phrase floats through the air: “back for tea and medals,” which only underlines how little ritual there really is. The chapter captures the dissonance between the intensity of a job and the flatness of what comes after. **Chapter 6: Ryan (or Lauren)** Not all repeat callers are caricatures. Some are just lonely. Ryan is one of the “regulars” every ambulance service has: predictable address, familiar pattern of apparent seizures in public places that reliably resolve once the crew appears. The first half of the chapter plays with the absurdity. A flat decorated wall‑to‑wall with adult DVDs that everyone politely pretends not to see. The phase where Ryan prefers to be called Lauren, beard and all, and crews adapt without missing a beat. The night the crew ends up watching most of The Blair Witch Project with him, waiting for him to drift off before quietly leaving. Then, later, the narrator pulls up in the rapid response car to yet another “male fitting in the street” at the usual location. He does not even get out. Window down, one line: “Ryan… come on mate, I’ll give you a lift home.” The seizure stops mid‑performance, Ryan brushes himself off, climbs into the passenger seat, and the watching crowd is left stunned at this apparent miracle cure. Beneath the humour is a quieter commentary on what counts as “ill” and what counts as “in need.” Ryan’s problem is not his neurology. It is his life. The chapter lets that sit there without sentimentality. **Chapter 7: Nothing Prepares You** Here the memoir drops into one of the hardest jobs of all: a paediatric dog attack. The narrator is still a student in a children’s hospital, technically in a safe, supervised environment. Then two siblings arrive. The older boy is conscious, sitting upright, but his arms are torn apart in a way that simply does not fit with the normal scenery of a paediatric ward. The baby arrives next, in cardiac arrest, carried in by the HEMS team. The story of what happened is simple and unbearable: the family dog picked the baby up by the head and shook. Resuscitation is attempted because it has to be, but the outcome feels written from the moment the child crosses the threshold. The chapter does not lean into graphic description for its own sake. Instead, it sits with the contrast: one child alive but deeply injured, another newly still, parents caught between those two realities. This is a turning point, not because it is framed as a big “lesson,” but precisely because it resists tidy meaning. Some jobs sit outside any tolerance you thought you were building. Years later, a throwaway comment from someone about their dog being “friendly” can snap you straight back into that room. **Chapter 8: After** Violence comes in human form in this chapter, where a night shift on the HEMS rapid response vehicle turns into a scene involving multiple stabbings in a house. Two patients in cardiac arrest. One clearly beyond any intervention, the room itself painted with the story of what took place before the crew arrived. The team focus on the second patient. Chest decompressions, airway management, all the invasive procedures that sit at the far end of pre‑hospital care. For a while the motions of resuscitation provide a kind of shelter. Then the extent of the injuries becomes clear, and the purpose of all that effort evaporates. The decision is made to stop. It is only then that the narrative pulls back enough to register the presence of the perpetrator, already handcuffed, and the other children in the house who will have to live with the aftermath. The chapter is not really about the gore. It is about what you cannot fix, and what you carry out to the car with you when you leave. **Chapter 9: It Was Coming** When a global pandemic arrives, HART is already the team with “Category 4 infectious disease” laminated on a training slide somewhere. The narrator remembers the moment COVID shifted from something happening “over there” to something that was about to reshape every shift. A call on the radio, a discussion in the cab, a mix of curiosity and unease. The reality is slower and stranger than any disaster film. Level 4 PPE for transfers, the kind of suits more suited to a lab than a living room. Every movement thought through, every job taking twice as long. Road shifts on overtime that are weirdly quiet because the public are terrified of hospitals. Crews spend more time persuading clearly unwell patients to accept treatment than they do actually treating them. On HART, COVID means responding to almost every “shortness of breath” as a potential exposure. Full kit, fogged visors, communication hampered at exactly the moment nuance matters. Younger patients in respiratory arrest, frequent cardiac arrests that feel different and carry a different moral weight when you are deciding who to take in and who to leave at home. Station life becomes an exercise in forced distance for people whose job depends on closeness. Masks, spaced chairs, a complete re‑engineering of the casual physical proximity that normally anchors a crew. The chapter captures the odd combination of quiet and constant pressure that defined that first wave: no single defining job, just one very long shift that never quite ends. **Chapter 10: Two Patients** This chapter explores the strange arithmetic of outcomes. Two HART jobs from the same world, separated only by luck and timing. In one, the crew talk a man down from the wrong side of a bridge railing, then sit with him awkwardly while fire prepares an aerial ladder, his legs numb, his embarrassment tangible. They chat about relationships and life and bad days, careful not to overcomplicate the moment. Eventually he is lifted off, alive, with a story he probably won’t tell truthfully to anyone. In the other, a man falls or jumps from height in front of emergency services. The response is textbook, the injuries catastrophic. Despite everything, there is no path back. The scene shifts from attempted salvage to quiet respect. Same system, similar teams, very different endings. The narrator is left turning over the randomness of it all and the uncomfortable truth that you never really know which version you are driving towards when the pager goes. **Chapter 11: Reading the Water** Coastguard work takes the story back to the sea. Here the focus is on searches that stretch not for hours but for days: children missing off a pier, families waiting onshore with nothing to hold onto except probabilities and a cruel kind of hope. The chapter leans into the technical and the emotional at the same time: tides, drift models, shoreline patterns, the logic behind every search sector. Against that, the knowledge that the water does not negotiate. You are not just searching a patch of sea; you are searching back through time, trying to intersect with where someone was hours ago. When you do find someone, it is never neat “closure,” but it is at least something solid in a world of expanding unknowns. This section also shows how that kind of work rewires you. Long after specific jobs fade, you still find yourself reading waterlines and currents on days off, noticing movement where other people see stillness. The sea becomes less a backdrop and more a character with its own rules. **Chapter 12: Different Altitude** The first proper day on HEMS abandons any idea of a gentle introduction. The narrator moves from road and HART into the helicopter with all the imposter syndrome you would expect, then is immediately dropped into a cardiac arrest from a house fire, followed by a child trapped under a lorry. The chapter tracks the shift from being part of the blur to being the person whose decisions shape it. There is the surreal calm of sitting in the back of the aircraft, the world small beneath you, then the switch to crowded, messy scenes where everyone is doing something and you have to decide what matters. Tubes, drugs, sedation, the cold clarity of making a child’s pain bearable while you quietly absorb the fact that their future has just been bent in a way nobody planned. There is also the quieter humiliation of discovering that even after years in emergency care, you can still feel miserably sick in the back of an ambulance if you are not used to it anymore. Professionalism on the outside, clenched jaw on the inside. **Chapter 13: Not Another Cardiac Arrest** By the time HEMS has become familiar, cardiac arrests are almost routine. That does not make them easy, just predictable. This chapter centres on one that breaks the pattern. The crew arrive after a successful resuscitation by the road team. The patient is alive, agitated, confused. Sedation is given to make transport safe. Then he arrests again. What follows is a long, grinding effort: multiple shocks, advanced interventions, transport with ongoing resuscitation. It is the sort of job where, if you are honest, you expect the story to end the way most of them do. Except it does not. Months later, the man walks into the station with his family. The crew see the living version of the body they had worked on. Kids, grandkids, smiles. The chapter captures the dissonance of that moment: the way one success does not erase the many losses, but it does change the mental ledger a little. It proves that sometimes, all the training and repetition can land on something that looks like a miracle from the outside and like simple persistence from the inside. **Chapter 14: Same Job, Different Place** The book crosses hemispheres. The narrator moves to New Zealand, swapping “RTC” for “MVA” and dual carriageways for vast stretches of open coastline. The early days are technically supernumerary, officially there to observe and learn a new system. Reality cuts that short with a serious head‑on collision that demands full involvement from the first shift. The work itself is familiar: airway, extrication, trauma management. What is different is everything around it. The distances, the resource profile, the way the landscape decides which options are even on the table. This chapter starts to sketch the contrast that the ending will lean on: same skill set, different map. **Chapter 15: Offshore** One of the defining New Zealand jobs comes far from land. A cardiac arrest on a fishing vessel more than a hundred miles offshore exposes the extreme version of the work. In the UK, concerns are access, traffic, and hospital capacity. Here, the first question is whether you can even get there before fuel and range box you in. The team wait on the ground while the vessel sails into aircraft range, a bizarre inversion of the usual rush. When they finally launch, the helicopter has been stripped to the minimum to save weight. There is nothing below them but sea. A top‑cover aircraft shadows them in case the worst‑case scenario becomes real. By the time they reach the boat, the patient has a return of spontaneous circulation. The actual hands‑on medicine is familiar. What is not is the sense of how far from backup they really are. The chapter makes tangible what “critical care” means when the nearest alternative is hours away over empty water. **Chapter 16: Day Off** Not every “day off” stays that way. In this chapter, a casual Coastguard flight turns into a full rescue when a small vessel is found drifting, its solo occupant exhausted and powerless after days at sea. Attempts to winch onto the violently moving boat fail twice. The narrator is swung around under the aircraft like an unwilling stunt double, then eventually drops into the water instead and clambers on board from the stern. The rescue is successful, but the moment that lingers is quieter. Back in the aircraft, the rescued man watches his boat drift away with a kind of numb grief. It was not much, as boats go, but it was his. In a single job, his relationship with it ends. The crew fly back to base, the narrator once again half laughing, half wondering how many times you can be taken from your own plans in a single career before something permanent shifts. **Chapter 17: Between Jobs** Threaded through the operational stories is a recurring theme: what all of this does to a life that is not on shift. This chapter pulls those threads together. Relationships that never quite get the best of him because the job has already taken that, nights missed, milestones watched from a different timezone, and the creeping normalisation of conversations that would horrify people outside the job. Career progression is framed honestly as both opportunity and addiction. Another course, another qualification, another specialist role. It is how you move forward, but it also means a lot of your “time off” is not really off at all. You are always either at work or thinking about the next version of it. The chapter does not offer solutions. It is more a recognition that something has been traded, and not always consciously. **Chapter 18: Where I Am Now** The book closes in the air over New Zealand, with the narrator working as a Critical Care Flight Paramedic on a rescue helicopter. It is, by his own admission, probably the best version of the job he has done so far. It combines everything that came before: critical care medicine, search and rescue, complex logistics, and environments that are just hazardous enough to keep things interesting without tipping all the way into foolish. He reflects on how every previous step — coast, road, HART, HEMS, Coastguard, COVID — seems to have fed into the skills he uses now. In that sense, it feels like a culmination. At the same time, the cost sits close to the surface. The move to the other side of the world brought better work and a lifestyle that suits him, but also distance from family, lost relationships, and a kind of background loneliness that is harder to talk about than the gore. The ending does not pretend everything is resolved. There is no final epiphany about balance or healing. There is just an honest accounting: this work has shaped him, for better and worse. He is proud of what he does. He knows it has taken things from him. And for now, he still wants to keep turning up. The last line loops back to the beginning, to the mindset that quietly runs beneath every pager bleep and cabin briefing: we will just go and have a look. **What Holds It All Together** Across five broad sections, the memoir moves through roles rather than dates: early road work, specialist HART, helicopter medicine in the UK, Coastguard and pandemic, then the critical care flight role in New Zealand. Each job story is chosen not because it is the biggest or most dramatic, but because it left a mark. Together they build a mosaic of a life lived on the threshold between ordinary days and worst days. The voice is dry, understated, and often very funny, even when the subject matter is not. Humour and horror sit side by side without cancelling each other out. There is no glamouring of trauma, but there is no performative solemnity either. The book is comfortable admitting that some of the most intense jobs are also the most mundane by the time you are cleaning the kit afterwards. At its heart, this is a story about showing up in imperfect systems, with imperfect tools, as an imperfect human being, and still trying to do right by people whose names you will probably never know. It is about the weight of what you see, the weirdness of what you laugh at, the relationships that bend under the strain, and the strange privilege of getting to be there on the worst day of someone else’s life. It is not a story of heroics. It is a story of attendance. Of twenty years of just going to have a look, again and again, and what that does to you along the way.

This memoir follows two decades of one paramedic’s life as it bends, jolts, and occasionally belly‑flops its way from a first green uniform on the road in the UK to flying critical care missions off the coast of New Zealand. It is not a neat career ladder. It is a series of sideways steps, bad coffee, clipped helmets, near misses, small wins, and the odd day where everything somehow works.

Told in short, vivid chapters that jump back and forth through time, the book reads like a conversation after a long night shift: honest, darkly funny, and more vulnerable than you planned to be. Each chapter drops into a moment that stuck, then pulls back just far enough to ask what it really did to the person wearing the uniform. There is no grand plan, no tidy narrative arc where everything makes sense. There is just the next job, and the choice to keep turning up.

Chapter 1: We’ll Just Go and Have a Look

The book opens in the water, not in a classroom. It is supposed to be a training day on the coast, the sort of carefully managed exercise designed to look good on someone else’s clipboard. Then a fisherman shouts, and suddenly the drills are over and the real thing has arrived thirty metres offshore.

This first chapter sets the tone for everything that follows. What starts as a box‑ticking afternoon quietly turns into a genuine rescue. The gear that was being practiced with ten minutes earlier is now the only thing between a panicking swimmer and a body recovery. There is no cinematic heroism, just cold water, controlled movements, and a very human mix of “this is what we trained for” and “please don’t let me mess this up.”

Out of the water, in the shivering aftermath, the narrator introduces the core rhythm of the job: you turn up, try to work out what is going on, and do what you can. Sometimes the outcome is good. Sometimes it very much is not. What matters, at least at this stage of his career, is that you still want to go and have a look.

Chapter 2: Starting Lines

The story then jumps back to the early road‑ambulance years. The first shifts as a student, the awkwardness of not quite knowing where anything is, the way you cling to protocols until you realise real people do not fit the flow chart. Here we see the foundations of the later specialist roles: basic calls that are not basic at all if you are the one on the floor, the first cardiac arrests, the strange intimacy of being in other people’s living rooms at the worst moments of their lives.

This chapter strips away the TV version of the job. There is more waiting than sirens, more uncertainty than drama. The narrator learns how to talk to frightened relatives, how to keep a straight face in the presence of terrible DIY injuries, and how quickly “routine” can become “this is actually quite bad.” The tone is dry, self‑deprecating, and already leaning into the gallows humour that will later become a survival tool.

Chapter 3: Yesterday

“Yesterday” is the story that quietly indicts the wider system. Called to an elderly man who has fallen and cannot get up, the crew check their system and notice the time of the original call. Yesterday. Not an hour ago. Not even earlier that morning. A full day on the floor.

The job itself is clinically straightforward: warmth, fluids, careful handling, hospital. The emotional weight sits in everything that did not happen before they arrived. One man needed nothing more high‑tech than someone turning up, making him a hot drink, helping him stand, and deciding if he was safe. Instead he lay there for twenty‑four hours because the queue ahead of him was longer, louder, or luckier.

This chapter widens the lens. It is not written as a political manifesto, but the anger is there between the lines. The narrator starts to see not just patients, but gaps — the spaces where the system simply fails to appear. It changes how he looks at “good care.” Doing the best you can on scene is not always enough when the call should never have waited that long.

Chapter 4: Professional Behaviour

If “Yesterday” shows the cracks, “Professional Behaviour” shows how people who work in those cracks stay sane. This is the HART chapter about the team culture that no brochure would ever print. Officially, Hazardous Area Response is about specialist training and operating in dangerous environments. Unofficially, it is about people you trust enough to let them ride the industrial floor cleaner like a rodeo bull while you film it on your phone.

Here we get the behind‑the‑scenes life of a high‑risk team: lockers moved to unreachable places, improvised indoor sledging with kit boxes, serious conversations cut across by relentless banter. Privacy is theoretical at best. Showers are opportunities for commentary. Mistakes become running jokes long after they stop stinging.

Underneath the nonsense, though, is the point. These are the people you clip onto a rope system with on a wet cliff face. These are the colleagues you follow into collapsed buildings or onto bridges with someone sitting on the wrong side of the railings. The chapter gently threads in the idea that all this apparent immaturity is doing something important: pressure‑testing relationships before they are needed under load. If you have already seen someone fall off a floor cleaner at speed, you know how they cope when gravity and risk are not theoretical.

Chapter 5: Tea and Medals

From the station to the cliff edge. This chapter takes us onto a rope rescue for a young man who has thrown himself from height and somehow survived the fall. The pager, the drive, the quick on‑scene briefing, then the drop over the edge with a harness and a plan.

The practical details of the rescue are described with matter‑of‑fact focus: anchoring systems, packaging the patient on unstable ground, the slow controlled lift back up. Around that, the narrator’s internal monologue flickers between technical checks and the quiet knowledge that this person had tried to end their life and now has to be brought back into one.

At the top, once the patient is handed over, the job is suddenly over for HART. No medals, definitely no ceremony. Just kit to clean, ropes to repack, and a return to station. A colleague’s favourite phrase floats through the air: “back for tea and medals,” which only underlines how little ritual there really is. The chapter captures the dissonance between the intensity of a job and the flatness of what comes after.

Chapter 6: Ryan (or Lauren)

Not all repeat callers are caricatures. Some are just lonely. Ryan is one of the “regulars” every ambulance service has: predictable address, familiar pattern of apparent seizures in public places that reliably resolve once the crew appears.

The first half of the chapter plays with the absurdity. A flat decorated wall‑to‑wall with adult DVDs that everyone politely pretends not to see. The phase where Ryan prefers to be called Lauren, beard and all, and crews adapt without missing a beat. The night the crew ends up watching most of The Blair Witch Project with him, waiting for him to drift off before quietly leaving.

Then, later, the narrator pulls up in the rapid response car to yet another “male fitting in the street” at the usual location. He does not even get out. Window down, one line: “Ryan… come on mate, I’ll give you a lift home.” The seizure stops mid‑performance, Ryan brushes himself off, climbs into the passenger seat, and the watching crowd is left stunned at this apparent miracle cure.

Beneath the humour is a quieter commentary on what counts as “ill” and what counts as “in need.” Ryan’s problem is not his neurology. It is his life. The chapter lets that sit there without sentimentality.

Chapter 7: Nothing Prepares You

Here the memoir drops into one of the hardest jobs of all: a paediatric dog attack. The narrator is still a student in a children’s hospital, technically in a safe, supervised environment. Then two siblings arrive. The older boy is conscious, sitting upright, but his arms are torn apart in a way that simply does not fit with the normal scenery of a paediatric ward.

The baby arrives next, in cardiac arrest, carried in by the HEMS team. The story of what happened is simple and unbearable: the family dog picked the baby up by the head and shook. Resuscitation is attempted because it has to be, but the outcome feels written from the moment the child crosses the threshold.

The chapter does not lean into graphic description for its own sake. Instead, it sits with the contrast: one child alive but deeply injured, another newly still, parents caught between those two realities. This is a turning point, not because it is framed as a big “lesson,” but precisely because it resists tidy meaning. Some jobs sit outside any tolerance you thought you were building. Years later, a throwaway comment from someone about their dog being “friendly” can snap you straight back into that room.

Chapter 8: After

Violence comes in human form in this chapter, where a night shift on the HEMS rapid response vehicle turns into a scene involving multiple stabbings in a house. Two patients in cardiac arrest. One clearly beyond any intervention, the room itself painted with the story of what took place before the crew arrived.

The team focus on the second patient. Chest decompressions, airway management, all the invasive procedures that sit at the far end of pre‑hospital care. For a while the motions of resuscitation provide a kind of shelter. Then the extent of the injuries becomes clear, and the purpose of all that effort evaporates. The decision is made to stop.

It is only then that the narrative pulls back enough to register the presence of the perpetrator, already handcuffed, and the other children in the house who will have to live with the aftermath. The chapter is not really about the gore. It is about what you cannot fix, and what you carry out to the car with you when you leave.

Chapter 9: It Was Coming

When a global pandemic arrives, HART is already the team with “Category 4 infectious disease” laminated on a training slide somewhere. The narrator remembers the moment COVID shifted from something happening “over there” to something that was about to reshape every shift. A call on the radio, a discussion in the cab, a mix of curiosity and unease.

The reality is slower and stranger than any disaster film. Level 4 PPE for transfers, the kind of suits more suited to a lab than a living room. Every movement thought through, every job taking twice as long. Road shifts on overtime that are weirdly quiet because the public are terrified of hospitals. Crews spend more time persuading clearly unwell patients to accept treatment than they do actually treating them.

On HART, COVID means responding to almost every “shortness of breath” as a potential exposure. Full kit, fogged visors, communication hampered at exactly the moment nuance matters. Younger patients in respiratory arrest, frequent cardiac arrests that feel different and carry a different moral weight when you are deciding who to take in and who to leave at home.

Station life becomes an exercise in forced distance for people whose job depends on closeness. Masks, spaced chairs, a complete re‑engineering of the casual physical proximity that normally anchors a crew. The chapter captures the odd combination of quiet and constant pressure that defined that first wave: no single defining job, just one very long shift that never quite ends.

Chapter 10: Two Patients

This chapter explores the strange arithmetic of outcomes. Two HART jobs from the same world, separated only by luck and timing. In one, the crew talk a man down from the wrong side of a bridge railing, then sit with him awkwardly while fire prepares an aerial ladder, his legs numb, his embarrassment tangible. They chat about relationships and life and bad days, careful not to overcomplicate the moment. Eventually he is lifted off, alive, with a story he probably won’t tell truthfully to anyone.

In the other, a man falls or jumps from height in front of emergency services. The response is textbook, the injuries catastrophic. Despite everything, there is no path back. The scene shifts from attempted salvage to quiet respect. Same system, similar teams, very different endings. The narrator is left turning over the randomness of it all and the uncomfortable truth that you never really know which version you are driving towards when the pager goes.

Chapter 11: Reading the Water

Coastguard work takes the story back to the sea. Here the focus is on searches that stretch not for hours but for days: children missing off a pier, families waiting onshore with nothing to hold onto except probabilities and a cruel kind of hope.

The chapter leans into the technical and the emotional at the same time: tides, drift models, shoreline patterns, the logic behind every search sector. Against that, the knowledge that the water does not negotiate. You are not just searching a patch of sea; you are searching back through time, trying to intersect with where someone was hours ago. When you do find someone, it is never neat “closure,” but it is at least something solid in a world of expanding unknowns.

This section also shows how that kind of work rewires you. Long after specific jobs fade, you still find yourself reading waterlines and currents on days off, noticing movement where other people see stillness. The sea becomes less a backdrop and more a character with its own rules.

Chapter 12: Different Altitude

The first proper day on HEMS abandons any idea of a gentle introduction. The narrator moves from road and HART into the helicopter with all the imposter syndrome you would expect, then is immediately dropped into a cardiac arrest from a house fire, followed by a child trapped under a lorry.

The chapter tracks the shift from being part of the blur to being the person whose decisions shape it. There is the surreal calm of sitting in the back of the aircraft, the world small beneath you, then the switch to crowded, messy scenes where everyone is doing something and you have to decide what matters. Tubes, drugs, sedation, the cold clarity of making a child’s pain bearable while you quietly absorb the fact that their future has just been bent in a way nobody planned.

There is also the quieter humiliation of discovering that even after years in emergency care, you can still feel miserably sick in the back of an ambulance if you are not used to it anymore. Professionalism on the outside, clenched jaw on the inside.

Chapter 13: Not Another Cardiac Arrest

By the time HEMS has become familiar, cardiac arrests are almost routine. That does not make them easy, just predictable. This chapter centres on one that breaks the pattern. The crew arrive after a successful resuscitation by the road team. The patient is alive, agitated, confused. Sedation is given to make transport safe. Then he arrests again.

What follows is a long, grinding effort: multiple shocks, advanced interventions, transport with ongoing resuscitation. It is the sort of job where, if you are honest, you expect the story to end the way most of them do. Except it does not. Months later, the man walks into the station with his family. The crew see the living version of the body they had worked on. Kids, grandkids, smiles. The chapter captures the dissonance of that moment: the way one success does not erase the many losses, but it does change the mental ledger a little. It proves that sometimes, all the training and repetition can land on something that looks like a miracle from the outside and like simple persistence from the inside.

Chapter 14: Same Job, Different Place

The book crosses hemispheres. The narrator moves to New Zealand, swapping “RTC” for “MVA” and dual carriageways for vast stretches of open coastline. The early days are technically supernumerary, officially there to observe and learn a new system. Reality cuts that short with a serious head‑on collision that demands full involvement from the first shift.

The work itself is familiar: airway, extrication, trauma management. What is different is everything around it. The distances, the resource profile, the way the landscape decides which options are even on the table. This chapter starts to sketch the contrast that the ending will lean on: same skill set, different map.

Chapter 15: Offshore

One of the defining New Zealand jobs comes far from land. A cardiac arrest on a fishing vessel more than a hundred miles offshore exposes the extreme version of the work. In the UK, concerns are access, traffic, and hospital capacity. Here, the first question is whether you can even get there before fuel and range box you in.

The team wait on the ground while the vessel sails into aircraft range, a bizarre inversion of the usual rush. When they finally launch, the helicopter has been stripped to the minimum to save weight. There is nothing below them but sea. A top‑cover aircraft shadows them in case the worst‑case scenario becomes real.

By the time they reach the boat, the patient has a return of spontaneous circulation. The actual hands‑on medicine is familiar. What is not is the sense of how far from backup they really are. The chapter makes tangible what “critical care” means when the nearest alternative is hours away over empty water.

Chapter 16: Day Off

Not every “day off” stays that way. In this chapter, a casual Coastguard flight turns into a full rescue when a small vessel is found drifting, its solo occupant exhausted and powerless after days at sea. Attempts to winch onto the violently moving boat fail twice. The narrator is swung around under the aircraft like an unwilling stunt double, then eventually drops into the water instead and clambers on board from the stern.

The rescue is successful, but the moment that lingers is quieter. Back in the aircraft, the rescued man watches his boat drift away with a kind of numb grief. It was not much, as boats go, but it was his. In a single job, his relationship with it ends. The crew fly back to base, the narrator once again half laughing, half wondering how many times you can be taken from your own plans in a single career before something permanent shifts.

Chapter 17: Between Jobs

Threaded through the operational stories is a recurring theme: what all of this does to a life that is not on shift. This chapter pulls those threads together. Relationships that never quite get the best of him because the job has already taken that, nights missed, milestones watched from a different timezone, and the creeping normalisation of conversations that would horrify people outside the job.

Career progression is framed honestly as both opportunity and addiction. Another course, another qualification, another specialist role. It is how you move forward, but it also means a lot of your “time off” is not really off at all. You are always either at work or thinking about the next version of it. The chapter does not offer solutions. It is more a recognition that something has been traded, and not always consciously.

Chapter 18: Where I Am Now

The book closes in the air over New Zealand, with the narrator working as a Critical Care Flight Paramedic on a rescue helicopter. It is, by his own admission, probably the best version of the job he has done so far. It combines everything that came before: critical care medicine, search and rescue, complex logistics, and environments that are just hazardous enough to keep things interesting without tipping all the way into foolish.

He reflects on how every previous step — coast, road, HART, HEMS, Coastguard, COVID — seems to have fed into the skills he uses now. In that sense, it feels like a culmination. At the same time, the cost sits close to the surface. The move to the other side of the world brought better work and a lifestyle that suits him, but also distance from family, lost relationships, and a kind of background loneliness that is harder to talk about than the gore.

The ending does not pretend everything is resolved. There is no final epiphany about balance or healing. There is just an honest accounting: this work has shaped him, for better and worse. He is proud of what he does. He knows it has taken things from him. And for now, he still wants to keep turning up. The last line loops back to the beginning, to the mindset that quietly runs beneath every pager bleep and cabin briefing: we will just go and have a look.

What Holds It All Together

Across five broad sections, the memoir moves through roles rather than dates: early road work, specialist HART, helicopter medicine in the UK, Coastguard and pandemic, then the critical care flight role in New Zealand. Each job story is chosen not because it is the biggest or most dramatic, but because it left a mark. Together they build a mosaic of a life lived on the threshold between ordinary days and worst days.

The voice is dry, understated, and often very funny, even when the subject matter is not. Humour and horror sit side by side without cancelling each other out. There is no glamouring of trauma, but there is no performative solemnity either. The book is comfortable admitting that some of the most intense jobs are also the most mundane by the time you are cleaning the kit afterwards.

At its heart, this is a story about showing up in imperfect systems, with imperfect tools, as an imperfect human being, and still trying to do right by people whose names you will probably never know. It is about the weight of what you see, the weirdness of what you laugh at, the relationships that bend under the strain, and the strange privilege of getting to be there on the worst day of someone else’s life.

It is not a story of heroics. It is a story of attendance. Of twenty years of just going to have a look, again and again, and what that does to you along the way.