The Lighter Side: An NHS Paramedic's Selection of Humorous Mess Room Tales (Unabridged)
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4.3 • 4 Ratings
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- £3.99
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- £3.99
Publisher Description
From the paramedic pondering a dignified solution as he surveys his previously digested Pot Noodle adorning the naked genitalia of a recently deceased lady, to the man who rang the doctor Out of Hours service with an audibly severe case of excess flatulence, with hilarious consequences, and the old lady's wig that caused one chuckling paramedic to struggle to keep a hold of the carry-chair, The Lighter Side - An NHS Paramedic's Selection of Humorous Mess Room Tales will have you laughing out loud then looking around furtively, wondering if you should!
In his The Dark Side series, Andy Thompson gives us a taste of the dark sense of humor paramedics use as a coping mechanism; here he packs laugh-out-loud moments into every word as he recalls health care professionals' encounters with the weirdest of behavior, hilarious misunderstandings, and cringingly embarrassing episodes. You'll soon be relating to the sense of humor that moves an ambulance driver to respond to his friend and fellow paramedic's predicament on a hot summer's day, as a powerful smell engulfs the saloon of the vehicle. What would you do? Open the cab windows and the hatch through to the saloon to provide some extra ventilation? Of course not! You switch the heating on, causing the already intolerable pong to become even more unbearable, making for a bangin' mess room tale on your later return!
This book is an eye-watering insight into the Lighter Side of working on the Dark Side, straight from the mess rooms of ambulance stations up and down the UK. There's also a heartening reminder of the power of a flamin' good belly laugh and its analgesic effect even in situations of severe pain. This is a book that laughs in the face of extreme emotion and stress. Outrageous? Perhaps. Distasteful? Probably. Humorous? Absolutely!
Customer Reviews
Hilarious!
As someone who has worked in the health and social care sector for 8 years and about to start paramedic training, this book was a hilarious read (listen) to in the car! I must of looked questionable to some driving past laughing away to myself! The chapter including his colleague with the pot noodle situation was a particular favourite!😂😂
Needs to choose whether it’s PC or not and stick to it
I was a bit disappointed by this book to be honest. As a Paramedic myself, I was expecting great anecdotes (of which we all have plenty). I listened to this with my partner who is a teacher who has told me her thoughts for this too.
Sadly, neither of us could really recommend this book. I think the problem is identifying what audience you want to appeal to. If you’re appealing to the non-clinical audience, then don’t bother with some of the clinical stuff, if you’re appealing to the clinical audience, the long winded explanations get very tiresome very quickly. It is a difficult balance to get right, I read Adam Kay’s This is going to hurt and watched BBC’s Ambulance before joining the service and really enjoyed them. Now as a Paramedic myself, I find them both a bit cringe!
The humour was a bit off too. If you work in healthcare, you develop a very dark sense of humour and the stuff in this book frankly wasn’t funny enough to make me or my colleagues laugh at all. We all have much much worse stories and I put money on it that this author has left 80% of his best stories out. Conversely, my partner didn’t really find it funny either because she couldn’t get past how bad some of the stories were.
The pacing of this book is all wrong. A good story should build to a punchline whereas the author spends so long including convoluted explanations that it just isn’t funny by the time you get to the punchline. For example, the infamous pot noodle story could have been hilarious, but the tangent about the patient’s bowels opening and why this happens made me suddenly think about patient dignity and I couldn’t find it funny anymore. If a corpse is soiled, it isn’t right to top and tail and just lob it onto a bed for some poor relative to clean up. I have no trouble with the vomit because that’s an accident and that’s why it’s hilarious, but actual accounts of paramedics not doing their job properly I don’t find that funny and neither did my mates.
Lastly, the narrator. The poor guy clearly doesn’t understand half of what he’s reading. When he said “the patient told me he was on aspirin and Simvah-stitin” I thought that was part of the joke, as we all find it funny when patients say things like “cloppy dog roll”, but no, this was the actual author’s mistake.
Can’t recommend unfortunately, sorry
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