A “large number” of the alcohol-related incidents paramedic Jake Carlson, 25, responds to involve his peers. “It can be quite difficult ... I guess because they’re looking at you going, ‘Hey, you’re the same age as me!’ and you’re looking at them going, ‘What are you doing!’”
Though paramedic Jake Carlson speaks matter-of-factly about the jobs he responds to on Courtenay Place, he doesn’t like to head to the Wellington central party strip on his nights off.
“When you’re at work, doing your job, it’s just the way it is; you deal with each thing as it comes. I guess outside of work, when you want to go out for a drink with your mates, you just don’t want to go near.”
The 25-year-old sees a lot in his role with Wellington Free Ambulance, and some of it’s not pretty: glass in a toe, broken ankles, chipped teeth, pools of vomit, the birth of a baby in the basement of Betty’s Bar on Blair St.
Reminded of the incident, Carlson shakes his head. “I don’t know how that happened. I have no idea. I wasn’t working that night, but it’s a very unfortunate time to kick into labour, isn’t it?”
But the variety is part of what he loves about the job: “Every single day, every night, every job is so different from the last one.”
Paramedic Jack Carlson, of Wellington Free Ambulance: "It’s certainly changed how I drink" Photo: Elle Hunt / The Wireless
Carlson works as a dispatcher at Wellington Free’s communications centre, and volunteers as a paramedic part-time. At the end of this year, after he completes his Bachelor of Health Science, he’ll join Wellington Free full-time as a paramedic.
His experiences on the job mean he now actively avoids the centre of town on weekends he’s not working. “It’s certainly changed how I drink; I can’t remember the last time I had a drink in town itself on Courtenay Place,” he says. “It can be difficult when friends may age from school want to go out, and I’m like, ‘Oh, I don’t want to go there’… but you see a side of it that is just so unappealing.”
After he returned to New Zealand from an OE a couple of years ago, Carlson was at something of a loose end. “I didn’t really know what I wanted to do. I’d worked in hospo since I was about 14, and that certainly wasn’t something I wanted to do for the rest of my life.”
Neither police nor fire grabbed him, so he went along to an observation day at Wellington Free. “I sat with the crew and watched what they did … we went to some jobs where you could just see the impact they were having, and I thought, ‘Yeah, I’d like to do this’.”
From what I’ve seen it’s a lot more of drinking everything and anything, which obviously turns to custard
As a kid, growing up in Miramar, he’d experienced that impact first-hand whenever an ambulance was called out to his ailing mother.
“Just having somebody walk into a situation and put everybody at ease, and give you answers about what was going on, and make you feel safe again… It was an incredible experience, and I guess I’d like to think I could do that for someone else.”
Carlson can only speak for what he’s encountered in Wellington, but it seems to him that more people are “getting really wasted, more often”. And though a “large number” of the people picked up by paramedics in alcohol-related incidents are under 30, “it’s certainly not exclusive to them”.
“Every night’s different, but sometimes you’ll go out and all you’ll deal with is drunk people. There’ll be some younger than 18 and some 18; there’ll be guys my age; there’ll be guys 30-odd; and then there’ll be guys in their mid-forties, who left work, had a beer and are still going,” he says. “In terms of me coming from a 25-year-old perspective, it’s really interesting seeing it across the board.
“It can be quite difficult dealing with people in your own age bracket – I guess because they’re looking at you going, ‘Hey, you’re the same age as me!’ and you’re looking at them going, ‘What are you doing!’”
He routinely observes the results of people switching from drink to drink over the course of an evening. “They’re generally not starting on beer and finishing on beer, or starting on wine and finishing on wine. They tend to be drinking everything … and my impression is drinking that variety of drinks makes it difficult to keep an eye on how much you’re actually drinking, and 5.5 per cent can lead to 40 per cent.
You’ll get called out on a Friday or Saturday of night in the middle of winter; it’s pouring down with rain and the wind is just howling – and you’ll pick them up absolutely smashed, wearing next to nothing
“I don’t know if there have been changes over the years, but from what I’ve seen it’s a lot more of drinking everything and anything, which obviously turns to custard.”
People don’t tend to dress appropriately for the conditions before heading out, either. “You’ll get called out on a Friday or Saturday of night in the middle of winter; it’s pouring down with rain and the wind is just howling – and you’ll pick them up absolutely smashed, wearing next to nothing,” he says, obviously exasperated. “And it’s not just girls, it’s guys as well.”
I mention the so-called “alcohol blanket”.
“Yeah, keeps you warm,” he breaks in, rolling his eyes. “Well, it doesn’t. It actually does the opposite.”
Carlson is particularly concerned by people going out to town alone, which he thinks is becoming more commonplace.
“I remember going to a job not so long ago, in the middle of Courtenay Place was a young lad, completely unconscious in a pool of vomit … He was surrounded by a crowd of 20-odd people, but not one of them knew him, or who his friends were. This fella’s just out by himself, and from a professional perspective, there are so many things that can go wrong with that. He’s just lucky he was in a public place and didn’t wander down an alley and fall asleep and choke on his vomit there, you know?”
This time next week, Carlson and his colleagues at Wellington Free will be on call for the Wellington Sevens, an event that’s infamously and unabashedly as much about the party as it is the sport. Carlson says the calls – usually cuts from glass, falls, heat exhaustion, minor trauma, and, of course, too much alcohol – tend to come in waves.
“You tend to get a whole smackbang of work right at the start of the event, as everyone who’s got drunk at home just makes it to the venue and can’t go any further. Then you tend to get a whole bunch of jobs at the end … you’ve probably got a window of about 45 minutes for them to make it to town, and then it’s a free-for-all. ...
“It’s a very full-on 48 hours, that’s for sure,” he says.“I take my hats off to police. I think we get the easy deal.”