One of the Nottingham stars of the latest episode of 24 Hours in A&E has spoken about her experience on the show. Lou Davis appeared in episode one of the Channel 4 show which was filmed in the Queen's Medical Centre emergency department in 2021 for the latest series.
The 54-year-old lead nurse featured heavily in the hour-long programme, which aired at 9pm on Tuesday, January 3, but admitted she had never watched the show. Despite dozens of cameras being present in the department during shooting, she also said no-one got in the way.
"After the first couple of times they put the mic on you don't really notice them, they were never in the way," Lou said. "They were considerate."
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One of the most gruesome moments in the episode saw 45-year-old mum Kirsty admitted to A&E with a horrific ankle injury, with her foot barely hanging on. Lou is filmed saying it was one of the "grimmest" injuries she has seen in 32 years of working there.
Recalling the injury, she said: "It was horrific. We'd received a telephone call to say someone was coming in with a compound fracture so when she came through the door and her foot was hanging off I was just shocked because usually you get some sense of what you're going to be confronted by.
"The fact that she kept her foot is incredible. When they put it back in I thought I was going to vomit... the bit they didn't show is graphic. When you look at Kirsty you're not looking at just the guy that put her foot back, you're looking at the probably 200 people who saved her foot, and she's got to be at the front of that as she could have said 'take the bloody thing off'."
Lou discusses aspects of her personal life during the show, including the breakdown of her near 30-year marriage with her husband and later falling in love with a woman. She also admits that she never planned to become a nurse, instead dreaming of becoming a librarian.
"When I was a kid I used to sit in my bedroom for hours on end reading and my parents as punishment used to send me out to play," she told Nottinghamshire Live. "They could never banish me to my bedroom because that's what I wanted, I used to sit on my window ledge eating ginger nut biscuits and reading books.
"I used to go to the library every week and get 12 books and read them all and take them back and get another 12. To me that would've been the ideal job. Quite how I ended up doing this I don't know."
However, despite its challenges, Lou said working in A&E was the best job in the world. "Nursing has been just the best job, ED is the best place to work bar none - apart from a cake shop maybe," she joked.
"I would defend to the death that it is the best job in the world you could have. We have seen babies born on the floor of a toilet and we have seen people at the end of their life, and that's an incredible privilege. We have laughed until we've cried and we still do.
"I don't want people to think we are laughing at them and that we're heartless, because we're not. We all have massive hearts but we have to protect ourselves sometimes." Lou recalled caring for 15-year-old girl Danielle Beccan, who was shot on the way home from Goose Fair in 2004.
"We feel every bit of it. You will fight to save someone's life but sometimes your best efforts aren't enough, and that's sometimes hard to bear. It's incredibly difficult."
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