Episode 18 Real Rescues

On Real Rescues, a paraglider crash-lands high in a tree canopy.

He may be seriously injured, but finding him is a real problem.

The emergency doctors are called to a teenager fighting for his life after being stabbed with a sword.

Zak, just relax. We'll just try and stop the bleeding, Zak.

Welcome to Real Rescues from the police headquarters in Lewes.

Today, we'll see the work of all the emergency services across the UK.

And the first rescue today involves three of those emergency services.

A trainee paraglider loses contact with his instructor

and crashes into a tree. This is the 999 call that launched a highly specialised rescue in West Sussex.

After some careful map-reading, rescuers made it to the stranded paraglider

and this is the scene that greeted them - the paraglider's canopy draped over the tree

and a man dangling 60 feet up.

He's only a couple of inches up now. He's here. It's Bjorn and the man who helped get him down, Neil.

First, I've got to take you a step back. You'd been doing a bit of training to be a paraglider.

So, sixth, seventh time you'd been up in the air?

Yeah, about seven days, I mean, roughly seven days.

OK, so you go off and you lose contact with the instructor.

When did the moment strike you that you thought, "I've lost radio and I'm going in the wrong direction"?

I was kind of making my way to the right and then seeing the trees, ultimately,

I kind of knew I was losing speed and losing speed means that you're going to stall, ultimately.

Seeing the trees and then obviously thinking, "OK, well, I can try and make it over the trees

"or I can try and collapse myself into the trees and then hopefully, it snags,

"and I'll be able to walk away from it."

For someone who's relatively inexperienced, this is a big decision to make.

-You either hit the floor hard or you use the tree to help you. Were you petrified?

-Yeah.

Obviously, saying that, yes, I was.

It's a decision that you've got to make.

It's something that you take in when you start the course.

You know that it's not the safest sport in the world.

Luckily, I was able to make that decision. I didn't freeze.

I just didn't do anything. I made the decision to collapse myself into the trees.

And that, ultimately, maybe saved my life.

So you went into the tree. You're now wedged in.

You start screaming and shouting. Did you see anybody around?

I heard a lady. She was saying she was calling the rescue services.

That was trying to pinpoint where I was because nobody could really see where I was at that stage.

So you're stuck in the tree, you're in a bit of pain. You turn up.

-You're the right man for the job because before your present job, what were you?

-I was a tree surgeon.

The perfect man to turn up and you see him wedged in.

I'm thinking, "Can't you just cut him out?"

Cut all the branches down and let him drop down to the earth - was that not an option?

Not at all. First, we have to make sure that Bjorn is uninjured

and safe where he is. We'd never think about cutting him down from there

because although he's got a canopy on and theoretically a reserve chute,

we couldn't guarantee that would keep him safe on the way down,

so we're then looking at rope-based methods of getting him down.

A coastguard helicopter was on stand-by. They had already had a look at the situation

and said that if we absolutely needed them to, they may be able to come in and get him,

but there were good reasons why they'd prefer not to.

We then have Plan A, Plan B. Always have a Plan B.

-And Plan A was quite complicated because of the type of tree? Was it an ash tree?

-It was.

Where they're growing in the forest, they grow very quickly, very tall and very thin,

so Bjorn had managed to pick one of the tallest, thinnest trees

and ashwood is very snappy indeed when it's that thin,

so we had to think through how we were going to wriggle the ropes to get him down safely.

-But you did it successfully.

-Yeah.

The big question is, Bjorn, have you been back up in the air?

No, I have not, but I do have plans to get back into the air, yes.

OK. What does the wife think?

Not really happy. She wasn't happy on the day and I'm not sure she's not happy still.

It's a tough situation, but we'll get through it.

-Neil, thank you very much for coming in.

-A pleasure.

-And Bjorn, stay safe.

-Thank you.

The emergency services have to deal with all sorts of incidents.

Unfortunately, some of them can be violent and life-threatening and not just for the victims.

Emergency volunteer doctors Rob Dawes and Phil Hyde are heading

into one of Portsmouth's more deprived areas.

Well, we're off to an address in Portsmouth

where somebody has allegedly been stabbed in the neck.

There's a guy still at scene wielding a sword,

so we'll make sure that the police are well in attendance before we get there.

If someone's been hit in the neck with a sword,

then they can bleed and, in addition, it can hurt their windpipe.

So those are the two first things we'll be interested in.

They find the wounded 18-year-old man Zak lying in a driveway.

Ambulance medics are frantically working on him and update Rob.

-Where's the knife?

-Over there, mate, by the police.

There's been a fight. Zak's attacker has fled the scene.

In the background, police have moved to one side a throng of residents, friends and family.

-Shall we just have a look at it?

-Yeah.

-If we hold his neck...

-If I hold his neck, can you just undo that?

The blade used on Zak is lying in the street.

The force of the blow into his neck caused it to break away from the handle. He pulled the knife out

and then realised he was in serious trouble.

He's got quite a high heart rate.

-Nice and still.

-Well done.

The wound is deep and continues to bleed.

I'm sorry. It's because it's bleeding. I'm just pushing on it.

The effect of the alcohol combined with pain, shock and adrenaline is making Zak extremely agitated.

I think it's still leaking out the side. I don't think you can see down there.

-Bottom left corner.

-I'll just get a bit of gauze.

To stem the bleeding, Rob grabs from his bag a special gauze dressing used by the military

in battlefield medicine.

Coated with special granules that speed up the blood-clotting process, he hopes it will plug the wound.

You've got two doctors here and half the ambulance service.

-All right?

-That's good.

They pack the dressing several centimetres deep into the cut.

All right, Zak, just relax, all right?

SCREAMS

Though the wound has been bleeding a lot, Zak is lucky the blade has gone through veins,

rather than a major artery, otherwise his blood loss could have been catastrophic.

But there's another worry.

-He's got a deficit here.

-Has he?

He's got reduced grip, left hand, weird sensations in his fingers.

-Can you move that arm for me, mate?

-He is struggling.

-Can you move your right arm?

-Left leg is fine.

-Squeeze my fingers for me, Zak. There you go.

Squeeze me. Try and hurt me. Do that for me. Go on. Try and hurt...

-Squeeze as hard as you can. Definite reduction.

-Fair enough.

ZAK SCREAMS

Rob and Phil fear the knife has pierced Zak's brachial plexus,

a cluster of nerves that control movement of the arm and hand.

So he's got quite a nasty stab wound to zone one of his neck.

And what we need to do is, um...

He's got a neurological deficit on the left. Probably hit his brachial plexus.

He's bleeding a lot, so we had to pack that with that haemostatic dressing.

Even though there's a major hospital in Portsmouth,

Phil and Rob know there's a specialist cardiothoracic unit in neighbouring Southampton.

Ambulance crew member Keith explains to Zak's anxious mum Carol.

A 30-minute journey later, they're at Southampton General Hospital's emergency department.

Zak is taken straight into the resus department where a team of doctors await him.

He's been stabbed on the left-hand side of his neck with about a six-inch blade.

Rob's got a picture on his phone.

-He pulled it out.

-He did?

-Yeah.

Phil carefully runs through every aspect of Zak's condition,

-so the hospital doctors can treat him efficiently.

-Brilliant.

- It's gone about four inches. - Of penetration.

-Four inches of penetration?

-Yeah.

OK, stay with us.

Loads of people all looking after you. Is that OK?

They're just going to do a chest X-ray now

and he'll be taken up to Theatre for an exploratory operation just to see where the tract is.

In Theatre, surgeons will clean out Zak's wound

and assess the full extent of any nerve damage he may have suffered.

Zak's wound had to be packed and he was treated as an out-patient for several weeks.

Four men were arrested after the attack, but were later released.

I want to talk about that type of incident to Deirdre Dunbar, a BASICS doctor.

You've been involved in those type of incidents. How important in that extremely volatile situation

is how the patient is and how calm they are?

As you can see from the footage, there are a lot of the residents,

it's out in the open

and Zak himself is quite agitated.

He's angry, he's already pulled the blade out.

It's important that he's kept calm and he's kept relatively pain-free

because his symptoms will impact upon those round about him -

his friends, his family, if they're still present.

And what you would hope to do as a doctor

is to ensure that the patient was kept reassured, calm and his pain relieved.

-And that really can have an impact on the whole crowd?

-Exactly, yes.

If he's very agitated, he's angry, if he's screaming in pain,

you can imagine what effect that's going to have on perhaps friends, his relatives

who are witnessing his suffering.

-And more pressure on you because they'll say, "Can you do something?"

-That's right.

Talk about the fact that he pulled the blade out. That's not the best thing to do at all, is it?

It's not, but understandable if you've got a knife in your neck.

This was a six-inch blade. Ideally, Zak should have left it in place,

so that it can then be removed in a very controlled environment in the hospital.

The potential for damage from that blade in the neck is enormous.

There's very critical structures, arteries, veins, nerves,

not to mention the lungs,

so it was difficult for Phil and Rob to be able to assess at what angle the blade had gone in,

so the take-home message is if you do get a penetrating wound, leave it...

If you're impaled, a knife or whatever it is, leave it in place,

because they can X-ray it and see where it is.

They can identify the tract and it can be removed with...control.

-Very good advice. Thank you very much.

-Thank you.

Still to come on Real Rescues, the terrifying ordeal of 12-year-old Kye.

And I'm going to be thrown into the deep end

as I take part in a search and rescue exercise on the Solent.

It's a sunny day. You're having a great time with your mates and you try a little rock-climbing.

It's all fine until you get stuck and the tide is coming in.

That happened to 12-year-old Kye. Luckily, his friend Lewis knew what to do. He called the coastguard.

I'm delighted to say that we have everybody involved in that here.

We've got Kye, Lewis, Justin as well who was on the end of the phone.

Lewis, you did a fabulous job. Well done. Describe what you could see

from the top of the cliff, the position that Kye was in.

He was stuck in some rocks and he needed help.

Kye, what was it like for you? Was the sea coming up?

It was coming up a bit and the current was kind of strong.

-You couldn't go up or down?

-No.

-I couldn't go up or down because my foot was stuck as well.

-OK.

Lewis, how did you know to call the coastguard?

Because we were on the coast of Devon,

so it was pretty hard to get a fire engine out to you, so the coastguard was the easiest option.

Absolutely brilliant, you are. Also, you were really clever.

Were you tempted to try and rescue him yourself? What did you think?

No, it's better one person gets stuck than putting someone else in danger.

I wish everybody knew this! Wouldn't you? He was fantastic, wasn't he?

It would make our job a lot easier if everybody kept as calm

and cool-thinking as Lewis was.

But potentially a really dangerous situation. They followed procedure and did everything right?

It was fantastic. It was textbook. He kept calm, he communicated very well.

He relayed the information and the instructions that we gave very succinctly

and as the tape showed, it was good thinking and good control.

In that phone call, you were repeating everything. Why do you do that?

To confirm that the information is correct with the person on the end of the phone,

so my colleagues in the operations room can also get the information.

-They are sending out resources while the phone call is going on?

-Yeah.

While the casualty is on the phone, my colleagues task helicopters, lifeboats and the coastguard teams.

The helicopter came in and rescued you. How did the helicopter find where you were, Lewis?

How did you manage to do that?

I got another person that was on the cliff to wave my jacket that I had.

He actually tried putting it on, but I told him to wave it instead.

-So I got him to wave it, then I pointed to Kye who was stuck down in the...

-OK.

Kye, were you scared when you were on the cliff or when the helicopter came?

The most scary part was when the helicopter came because it was getting more and more windy.

And I lost my grip.

-Did you? For one of your hands?

-Yeah.

-You nearly slipped then?

-Yeah.

-What about you when the helicopter came? There's a big down-draught.

Yeah, I started slipping, but I managed to get to the top, so when he was winched, I could meet him there.

-What was that like? Quite glad to be back on the ground?

-Yeah.

- Your legs felt like jelly. - Yeah, kind of.

Did they? What did you do? Did you have to sit down?

As soon as I got home, I sat down, yeah.

There were the coastguard's people there taking our name and information and stuff like that.

Were you a bit shaky? It must have been frightening for you.

Yeah, it was a bit scary. I've never done anything like that before.

You did the most fantastic job. You've returned the favour, Kye.

-You've helped Lewis as well since then, have you?

-Yeah.

-What did you do?

We were playing around. Usually, on the path, the water, when the tide is in a little, it splashes up.

We were playing around and the tide was in quite a bit and Lewis was playing around in this boat bit

where the boats come up, and he slipped and he said, "Kye, grab my hand," so I got his hand.

-So is it all equal now?

-Yeah.

-Fantastic. Well done. Thank you.

And a good job done by all, really. Lewis, fantastic. Well done.

-Thanks for coming to see us.

-Thank you.

Kye's ordeal ended in a winch and a chopper ride. It's all high octane stuff as Chris has been finding out.

'It's a chilly day in the Solent and I'm acting as guinea pig in a coastguard exercise.

'Last year, coastguard helicopters responded to just short of 700 calls for help,

'often in the most severe weather, so it's vital they carry out exercises like this

'to keep their considerable skills sharp.'

If I was in ordinary clothes and I'd just fallen off the side of a boat and I'd been left there on my own,

how long would I survive?

Hypothermia kicks in after about 20 or 30 minutes.

The core temperature has to drop quite substantially

for you to get hypothermia,

but if you fall into cold water, there's a natural gasp reaction when you go in and you swallow water

and that can set panic in and you can last minutes.

So the thing is, if you do get yourself in that situation, just calm down, relax

and get yourself into a nice, tight ball to conserve all your body heat.

-Today, you've got a helmet on where you lose a lot of heat, especially in windy, wet conditions.

-Yeah.

I'll be all right.

-The helicopter will be on its way soon, won't it?

-No problems.

It's freezing.

'Your position is good.

-'You can put Chris in the water when you're ready. Over.'

-Roger.

-Do you want to go over the stern, Chris?

-Yeah, I'll go in the water then.

-It's been nice knowing you(!)

-Yeah!

Here we go. I'm just about to get into the Solent.

I've got my flare.

See you later.

Yeah.

Right, OK.

So I'm now going to...

Right.

And hopefully, they'll be able to see me.

I have to say...

I'm pretty relieved to be seeing this right now because I am freezing.

Wow, look at that!

I can't believe I'm going in there. Whoo!

Get hold of me here.

Hand on my hat. Stand by my side.

OK, here we go.

Oh, my goodness!

Aaagh!

Wow!

Out of the water. Thank goodness for that!

I'm being pulled into the helicopter now.

The wind is so strong!

I'm in.

I didn't sound very brave, did I?

The crew checked me out once I was on board and took me back to their helicopter base on the south coast.

I am down on terra firma, so I'm very, very pleased.

How was that for a rescue? Pretty straightforward?

Yeah, about as straightforward as it could be. You climbed in the strop.

-That was good news for me.

-Let's go through it again.

The first thing that struck me, I felt very lonely in the water, and you seemed for ever to get to me.

I saw you and thought, "I'm going to be out of the water in a minute," then you stopped and hovered.

-What was going on?

-Well, there's a few things for us to organise.

We've got to hover and make sure that everything is right in the aircraft.

We can't rush in and winch you out. You would be in the downwash. It would be awful.

And the other feeling which I got, which you'll probably understand,

is he turned from being a really friendly person into this scary face as soon as he arrived.

-There was no messing. You just grabbed hold of me. People must panic when you finally arrive.

-Yes.

You have to just take charge. They don't know what's expected of them.

They don't know I'm going to throw a strop over their shoulders.

I can't explain it because of the noise and the rotors,

so it's just a case of grabbing hold of them, get them out of the water and get them into safety.

Oh, my goodness! Aaagh!

You've got to make sure they don't pull you under with them, so a firm grip of them, get them stropped

and get up to the aircraft.

Come over here, Don. This is the man who was in charge of the cable.

There must be a very trusting relationship between you two, right?

-I think so. We need that, don't we?

-Yeah, it's got to be there.

My life's in Don's hands when I'm down there,

so I'm trusting Don to get it right, with the crew at the front as well.

But yeah, Don's got the difficult job.

Then as soon as the man or the woman is thrown in here, made safe,

then you're a paramedic, you kick into action?

-Simon's a paramedic.

-Right.

-I have medical skills.

Together we can work on a casualty

if any medical intervention is required.

On today's exercise, my job is to guide the aircraft over the top

and get Simon or the winchman safely to the person in the water or on a boat or on a cliff or anywhere.

What are the worst conditions for your role? Is it windy conditions, choppy conditions?

What makes your job so difficult?

Picking people out of the water like today, today's a good day.

Wind is OK because the downwash that Simon mentioned earlier on

is blown behind where you're being winched from, so you're not getting blasted by the water.

-So, wind is good.

-But if you're out in the middle of the sea and it's very choppy and windy,

it can be very difficult because he'll go 50 feet under, then 50 feet up in the air?

If you've got big waves, one minute he's up in the air, the next minute, he's in the waves,

so there is the optimum amount of wind where it becomes more difficult.

It was lovely to see you in the chopper and I did want to give you both a cuddle when I got up here,

but you thrust me in that chair and belted me in as professionally as you normally do.

-Thank you for rescuing me.

-No problem. Thank you.

-Thank you.

We saw earlier how a paraglider crashed into trees at a remote location.

A helpful family tried to guide the call handler to the exact place where the casualty was stuck,

but pinpointing the spot proved harder than expected.

If you're trying to find a casualty, mobile phones can be extremely useful.

James can tell me all about that. This is an example you've got from today. Somebody called on a mobile.

-You can tell where she is?

-We use the mobile phone they call in from

and using the system we have available to us,

we click on their mobile number which is linked in.

It gives us a rough location of where their mobile is.

It gives us a circle and in the centre of that is a mast

and somewhere within that circle, their mobile phone is located.

That's pretty useful and you can find out if there are any police officers in the vicinity, can you?

Yeah, we also have built into the mapping system our resources.

-All the cars have GPS in them and that shows...

-There is one there.

-..within the circle at the moment.

That's quite a wide area. If it's a high-scale emergency, you can do something else using three mobiles?

We can use triangulation. Our force command unit would do that.

-They isolate three phone masts...

-Yes.

And using the mobile phone signal,

they can bring the area that the mobile phone's within very close

and we used that, for example, when we traced a wanted man. We used his mobile phone signal.

So his actual, own mobile phone and you were able to catch him because of that?

We brought the area he could have been in right down, made it very small to a couple of streets

and we found him in the location.

-That's very clever.

-Yeah.

-Thank you.

In a farmer's field in the grounds of a country house,

a very elderly Welsh cob has collapsed on top of the fallen branch of a tree.

With Maya is her anxious owner, Jane Price.

Well, Maya is 31

and in human terms,

that's probably about 90 years old, so she's a very, very old lady.

We've had her for a long time, nearly 25 years. We go back a long way.

We've had a lot of fun with her over the years, so you've got to remember those moments

when you see them like that and you think that that's the end for your horse,

so you hold on to those memories.

Vet Lucy Stamp's first job is to give Maya a pain-killing injection.

She and animal rescue specialist Buster Brown are confident the horse will survive a rescue attempt.

Buster's helmet camera is filming their work.

My concern was the horse was laying on wood that was sticking into it, so we weren't able

to move the horse straight away. We had to clear the debris

and ascertain that the animal wasn't injured before starting to move her.

Using a saw, Buster cuts away the other branches, so they can pull Maya clear.

Extra muscle has arrived in the shape of Eastleigh fire crew.

Good timing, fellas.

I just want to pull this horse off this stump if we can. Ready, one, two, three...

-That's it.

-That's fine.

The only way to see if Maya has suffered serious injuries is to turn her over on to her other side.

One, two, three, go.

Keep going, keep going.

Just keep going.

Let go. OK.

When we first turned her over,

we were worried that she'd been impaled on the branch that she was lying across

and the first thing we saw was the skin hadn't broken.

They're taking it very slowly.

A horse of this age has to be allowed to rest between each stage of the rescue.

I stroked her a lot because I thought that this was my last time that I was going to be with her.

And she was responding very well to me being around which was comforting for both of us at that time.

-Do you want to pull her forward or just roll her as she is?

-Yeah. They get very tired.

Now the painkillers have kicked in, the hope is Maya will power herself up

if the fire crews can get her on to her stomach.

It was very upsetting to see because she soon crashed back down again.

And at that moment, I was beginning to think...

Well, I was thinking again that she wasn't going to make it.

We allowed it to rest and hoped that it would power up on its own.

Unfortunately, it was too exhausted and with the sedation, it wasn't able to do so.

But they're not giving up on Maya.

Buster has called in the animal rescue team from Lyndhurst with their specialist sling.

Local farmer Joe Phillips is going to use his tractor as a crane.

Go on, let's pull. Two of you on that strop there.

-Using a brace, the sling is pulled under the stricken horse...

-A little bit more. That'll do you.

And the tractor is brought into position.

Up you go.

With the sling in place, gradually, they lift Maya and she's responding.

If she couldn't stand up following that, then she would have been put down,

so that was her chance to carry on.

They lower the horse. The test now is whether this ageing cob can take her own weight.

With her legs straightened and hooves touching the ground, all the signs are good.

Once we got it on its feet, it perked up, its head came up, its ears got more alert.

It started looking about itself which is a good sign that it's coming into recovery.

It's standing up, which is what it's normally able to do and we knew it would make it.

Eventually, she managed to take her weight,

so she just stood there for a while

while all her circulation got back to normal again and she felt more confident that she could stand.

After 15 minutes of standing, Maya does start to move,

but Jane knows there's a long recovery ahead for her beloved horse.

It becomes a case of animal welfare

and what's best for her.

She's a large animal and if she's in extreme amounts of pain, then it would be cruel to keep her going,

but at the moment, she's OK and I'm very carefully monitoring it with the vet,

so fingers crossed, she'll make it now.

I want to talk to Elizabeth about a call that she took from a distressed old lady.

-You didn't quite understand what was going on at first.

-That's right.

Essentially, I got a call from the operator with a "no request".

That means they haven't requested a particular service.

-You didn't know what it was about?

-No. She sounded quite distressed.

I could hear an alarm going off in the background.

I was trying to establish why she was ringing, about the alarm, what the alarm was,

whether it was a burglar alarm or a smoke alarm.

It turned out that she was calling because the alarm was going off and she couldn't get out of her door.

-The smoke alarm?

-Yeah.

I was trying to establish whether the smoke was coming from within her room,

whether there was a fire within her house or the flat,

and she was just not being able to give me very much information.

-She said she was close to collapsing?

-She was, yeah.

-Aw!

So it turned out that there was a smoke alarm going off,

so I managed to understand what was going on and just reassure her that we could get her some help.

-You could tell her because you could see on CCTV where the fire brigade were?

-Yeah.

With my system, I could tell her when the police were en route and where they were

and then managed to let her know that the fire brigade were literally en route to her to help her

and I was just reassuring her and trying to keep her calm.

-You could see on CCTV the fire engines?

-I could see all the lights and hear the sirens during the call.

-Then they managed to get her out? They had to get her out of the window?

-That's right.

Because her door wouldn't open, purely because of the smoke,

they managed to extract her through the window.

You've been given this departmental congratulations. "There's no doubt

"that Elizabeth's actions assisted in the successful rescue of this elderly lady." Lovely.

Yes, a nice end to the story, really,

and I was glad that she was able to get out the...

-Absolutely. Thanks to you.

-Yeah.

-Thanks, Elizabeth.

-That's OK.

And we'd give her a Real Rescues badge, if we had one.

When Bunty made her usual call to her brother Eddie, she realised something was wrong.

His speech was slurred and he was difficult to understand. She then called 999.

SIREN WAILS

We're going to a 69-year-old. They're querying a stroke.

Paramedic Annaliese Beard knows this could be a time-critical call-out.

-The quicker stroke victims are treated, the better their chances of a good recovery.

-Hello.

-We'll check you over and see what's going on, shall we? What's your name?

-Eddie.

-Eddie. I'm Annaliese.

What's been going on then?

I don't know. I was all right yesterday. I went shopping in the morning.

-Hello.

-Hello.

-Do you notice anything different about Eddie?

-Well, his mouth seems to have gone up on the side.

-OK.

And he isn't him.

-OK. What's his speech like?

-Very bad.

-It's not normal?

-I had a job to understand him on the phone.

Eddie's sister Bunty raised the alarm after becoming concerned

about her brother's slurred speech and lopsided features.

Let's just do a couple of tests on you.

-Can you feel me touching you here? You can't feel that?

-Yeah.

-You can.

Eddie is checking positive for all the main categories of the FAST Test for strokes -

F for facial changes...

Hold my hands. Can you squeeze them?

-A for arm and leg weakness...

-Pull me towards you.

And S for slurred or unusual speech.

T stands for time. Prompt attention is vital.

Bunty's emergency call has ensured that her brother is quickly in the best hands.

Eddie suffers from high blood pressure, a significant trigger for strokes, as is smoking.

-You've stopped smoking?

-Yeah...

-How long has that been?

-I haven't stopped.

-Oh, you haven't stopped?

No. They told me it would help if I stopped smoking.

Yes. Everything gets better if you stop smoking, so they say.

Right, let's take your blood pressure.

Strokes are caused when the blood supply to the brain is cut off either by a clot or haemorrhage.

I rang my girl this morning.

Eddie's blood pressure is worryingly high - 200 over 100.

A healthy reading is below 140 over 80.

I think it's going to be a little trip to the hospital because you've still got these symptoms going on.

All right? It's possible that you're having a little TIA - a mini stroke.

A TIA, or transient ischaemic attack,

is caused by a temporary cut in the blood circulation to the brain.

Patients usually recover within 24 hours,

but it can be a warning sign that a major stroke is on its way.

-I'm just wondering if you've got any back-up for me. Over.

-'It's on its way, about five or six minutes.'

That's very good news. Thank you very much.

Have you got a dressing gown we can just pop over you?

-The ambulance has arrived.

-Eddie is 69 years of age.

He's phoned his sister up this morning, feeling a bit funny. She noticed his speech was not normal.

He's actually saying that three days ago, he had a tingling sensation down his left-hand side.

He does have a right-sided facial palsy with slurred speech and he's drooling a bit, aren't we?

A slight weakness on the right-hand side as well, but nothing too major.

It's slight, so it's FAST positive, really.

-So you've won yourself a first prize into the hospital then?

-Yes.

-You're quite safe.

-Cheerio!

See you later.

Eddie will need a scan and a blood test

to identify what kind of stroke he's had and how best to treat it.

Whatever the result, his sister Bunty's prompt action

has certainly ensured his best chance of a good recovery.

Our cameras have been out and about with the police here in Sussex where there are notoriously tricky roads.

One of the worst is the A27.

It's belting down. After weeks of dry weather,

the heavens have finally opened and there's torrential rain.

Visibility is poor and driving conditions extremely difficult.

Traffic cop Phil Edwards has been called to an accident on the busy Eastbourne to London road.

A member of the public's called it in, a passer-by.

The full details not exactly known. We're just coming on scene now.

It seems that two cars are involved.

One is off the road and facing on-coming traffic.

Both drivers are out of their cars and appear uninjured.

-You're going through it, yeah?

-There's no injuries at all.

-No?

Local police are already taking details from everyone involved,

so Phil gets straight down to rescuing the car which is buried in the bushes.

Do you want me to drive it out? It might be a little bit stuck in there, but we'll give it a go.

Phil braves the spiky gorse to get into the car.

To everyone's relief, he drives the car out.

What it appears has happened is the lady driving this has overtaken coming towards us

and the car coming in the opposite direction has done exactly the same.

She swerved in to avoid a near head-on collision which has made her spin and go backwards into a hedge.

After a dry spell followed by rain, road surfaces become dangerously greasy.

Both the cars and the drivers have had a lucky escape on this wet road,

but Phil hasn't escaped unscathed from the gorse bushes.

I climbed in the car and got thorns down my back.

At least he's still got his sense of humour.

The driver of the other car, John Hickman, is also unhurt.

I expected to see a lot more damage, but fortunately, not.

-Did she connect with your car?

-Yeah, very slightly. There's just a slight scuff on there.

There's no real damage at all. But everyone's fine. That's the main thing.

The car that was overtaking in the other direction is long gone.

Thankfully, no serious damage has been done.

Both drivers are able to exchange details and get on their way.

But it's a lesson for everyone to always drive according to the state of the weather and the road.

Poor Phil! He's the copper and the only one injured and by gorse, of all things.

-A policeman's lot is not always a happy one.

-That's it for Real Rescues. See you next time.

-Bye-bye.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd