Stuart Gray is the Paramedic’s Diary blogger. On May, 26th, he write this touching post about people who have been abandoned, and that paramedics recovers all around the London’s corners:

It’s not a word used very often, and when it is, the relevance is rarely on point. But, when you are in a group of mates, out for the night and getting loaded on alcohol (because that’s the way its done nowadays), and you dump one of your friends because he or she is too drunk – that’s abandonment.

I don’t mean dropping them somewhere safe and warm to sleep it off; I’m talking about so-called friends who simply leave their drunken mate on a bus, in a taxi… or even worse, on the street. Shockingly, the vast majority of those I’ve attended in this situation are female. I’d always considered girls to be more protective about their friends, but suddenly at some point in the night, all of the close-knit, protective posturing goes out of the window because one of the group is too drunk to manage any longer. She can’t walk to the next club or bar. She is vomiting too much, or she is practically unconscious and a dead weight on the night’s proceedings.

A few years ago I was called to a young teenager who was found by a male passer-by in a doorway in the early hours of the morning during a weekend. She was curled up, half dressed and with vomit in her hair on the step of an office building entrance. When I got her awake and she was able to speak to me, she told me that her friends her left her and she’d tried to get a cab home alone. She’d thrown up in the back of the taxi and the driver had thrown her out. She’d staggered over to the step and curled up to sleep.

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