by Wharton, Kit
Our patient is one of the back-seat passengers. The car has broken in half on impact with the wall and our girl is lying half in and half out of what remains of the back of it. She is unconscious. One arm is obviously broken, as is one leg. The other leg has been almost severed by the impact, and is only hanging on by a bit of muscle and tissue – a lost cause. We put her on oxygen, get a collar on her and set about packaging her up to get her into hospital. Both legs and the arm need to go into splints to keep them intact. We have to wait for the fire people to cut the door off because the bad leg is trapped between the door and frame, but eventually we manage it. At one point the patient starts to wake up and moans, so we do our best to reassure her and get a paramedic to put fluids up to try and maintain her blood pressure, which is collapsing with the blood loss.
Then it’s on to the ambulance and off to the hospital.
As we leave the scene the fire crew are taking the roof off the car, with the driver still sitting there in the middle of what is left of it, the dead friend beside him. I heard later they left the dead friend in the car until the next morning – it was too complicated to get her out.
The hospital do their best for our patient, but it’s no surprise to learn she died the following day – probably from internal injuries. Any impact that cuts a car into two halves 50 yards apart is not going to do your liver or spleen or anything else much good.
It was one of the worst RTCs I’ve been to. Three dead, the driver badly injured, and only the poor sod sitting by the side of the road relatively unhurt.
For years the wall just sat there, the damage repaired by the council months later, occasionally with flowers left by the families.
We rarely find out what happens to patients in the long term. But with some jobs you know they’ll be scarred for life.
Physically or mentally.
If they survive at all.
Timothy
Being in the ambulance service is all about getting everything under control, and making sure things don’t get worse, only better. With car crashes that’s often hard to do. Before you can treat people, you’ve got to make sure the scene is safe, and no more accidents are going to happen. And then you’ve got to get the patient out of the car, which can take ages.
But despite the chaos and fear, some of them are funny …
Early Sunday morning, around 2 a.m. This is the sort of job I hate. Luckily I didn’t do it but Val did. Her favourite-ever job.
Male, thirties, hit by car, high-speed impact.
Some people are ‘trauma junkies’ who like this sort of thing, and this one has loads of potential. The patient is probably drunk, and the road is a fast dual carriageway. Even on a misty Sunday morning the car could be doing 70-plus mph. And why the hell is the bloke wandering around on a dual carriageway at that time of the morning anyway?
They speed to the job fast, lights on, probably with dry mouths.
Things are a bit surreal from the start.
First impressions are horrendous. The car is slewed at an angle across the road, wrong way round, hazards on. The driver’s standing beside it, staring, speechless. The bonnet of the car is crumpled and – worse – the windscreen is not just smashed but smashed to pieces. Most of it is on the road or in the car. Windscreens are not designed to do this.
The patient’s been hurled onto the bonnet of the car and then right through the windscreen. He’s ended up in the car itself.
Inside things get really weird.
Timothy’s in his thirties, lying in the back of the car, covered in blood but still conscious, thank God. His left arm’s smashed – open fracture above the elbow. There’s blood coming from a wound above the right eye. He’s smartly dressed, middle-class, very, very drunk.
The first thing to do is assess injuries and begin the process of immobilising him so they can get him to hospital to be X-rayed from top to bottom.
—OK, Timothy, try not to worry, Val says. We’re going to get you out of here and off to hospital. You’re doing really well. What’s hurting?
—Nothing much. Arm’s a bit sore.
Arm’s a bit sore?
—Oh. OK. Well Timothy, we need to get this collar on you, to keep your neck still, and then sort your arm out.
—What?
—I said we need to get this collar on you, to keep your neck still, until we can X-ray it at hospital.
—Don’t be ridiculous, I’m not going to hospital!
Eh?
—Timothy. You’ve been hit by a car at high speed. You’ve broken your arm.
Timothy looks outraged.
—Rubbish! I’m in a taxi. I just want it to take me home. I don’t need to go to hospital, there’s nothing wrong with me.
—Timothy, you’ve been hit by a car at high speed. You’re in it now. This isn’t a taxi. Look at the windscreen. Look at your arm!
Timothy looks completely mystified.
—Are you sure?
—Yes, mate. You got to go to hospital.
—So this isn’t a taxi?
—No. This is the car that has just run you down.
—Really?
—Yes. Really.
—Oh for God’s sake. It’s a waste of time. I’m fine. Never better.
—But you’ve broken your arm for a start.
—That? It’s just a bit sore.
—No it’s not. That’s bone coming through. Look!
—Really?
It takes an age to persuade Timothy that he really has been in an accident, and then he keeps forgetting, whether through alcohol or concussion it’s impossible to say. Eventually, with much persuasion that yes, this really is necessary, they get him packaged up and out of the car past the miraculously uninjured, and still speechless, driver.
God only knows what goes on in Timothy’s brain at the best of times. Maybe he’s a surrealist painter or something. On the way in to hospital he looks at Val as if a thought has just occurred to him.
—You’re not by any chance Hungarian are you?
She’s never been anywhere near Hungary.
He makes, as far as she is aware, a good recovery.
Back at the station Len shakes his head in wonder.
—Daft bugger.
13
Sex
—Doctor, I’m going blind.
—Well, stop masturbating.
—Why?
—I’m trying to examine you.
Sex.
One of the reasons I like the job is you’re dealing with life: living and dying, getting ill and recovering, breathing or not breathing. And having sex, of course. I’d been in the service a few years when the following job came in. But some jobs still make you wince.
Peter
Saturday night, Sunday morning. Things are not always as they seem.
It’s always busy nowadays, but Saturday nights in this town are murder. Job after job, drunk after drunk. Exhausted. We are called to a male in his fifties in a less than salubrious part of town, complaining of a painful penis after sex.
A painful penis after sex? The correct medical reaction to this is: For fuck’s sake! – call that an emergency?
And that’s roughly what we think on the way to the job. We stop the ambulance and walk into the house, trying not to look disgusted.
Shows how wrong you can be.
The house is clean and tidy and pleasant for a start – ambulance people tend to be a bit judgemental – and the white-bearded man sitting on the sofa seems quite respectable. He appears sober, and looks very worried indeed. He is dressed in a T-shirt and baggy jogging bottoms.
—What’s happened?
—Well, it’s a bit difficult.
—Don’t worry about that. Just tell us what happened.
—Well, my partner and I were making love when I heard a sort of snap.
—You heard a snap?
—Yes.
—Heard it?
—Yes.
Partner is a blond bloke – maybe thirtyish �
� standing in the corner of the room, looking startled. When we look at him he bolts out of the door.
—What do you mean, you heard a snap?
—Well I heard it snap, and then felt it go, and now this. It’s sort of swollen. And it’s gone blue. It doesn’t look right.
I ask to have a look and he pulls the jogging bottoms down. His penis is the size of a large marrow and purple with engorged blood. It looks like a balloon filled with water that could burst at any second. I try not to gulp.
Basically, while pulling out and then pushing back in he has missed the target and hit the buffers, so to speak. The penis has bent and the stiffened tendon that runs under it which carries its major blood vessel has snapped. The flesh of the penis is filling with blood. There must be pints of it in there.
We’re all sympathy now, making sure he’s not suffering symptoms of shock at the blood loss as we get him gently on to the ambulance. We call the hospital to let them know we’re coming in and what with, and I’ve never seen so many people in the resus department – the news must have spread like wildfire. What the man’s done is unusual, and doctors love to see things like this. We gently get him onto a bed and I give the handover to the assembled scrum of onlookers. Then we wish him the very best of luck and leave to go and pick up the next drunk.
We never found out what happened to him, but I asked a doctor what could be done. The man would be catheterised with surgery to repair the tendon. But it would be a long and slow recovery.
Another row. This time my father walked out. I can remember my parents screaming at each other down the length of the communal stairs. It ended with my father yelling something about how the situation could not be changed. My mum yelled back:
—What do I get out of it?
My father stared up at her.
—My cock!
Eh?
My cock. That’s what he said. I was only about six or seven. I didn’t really know what he meant. Still don’t know now.
(Not sure I want to either.)
Tania
Sometimes I think I may be a bit naïve. Thankfully.
Midnight. We’re called to a female, fifties, with a leg injury, hit by a car. She’s in a car park at the top of the motorway.
Seems like a nice place. The patient is lying on the ground, in obvious pain. She’s wearing jeans, and when we cut them off there’s obvious deformation, swelling and reddening to the right leg, just below the knee. It looks like a fracture. We get her on pain-killing gas as fast as possible and start to package her up to get her on the ambulance.
Seems like a very crowded place, this time of night. There are at least twenty or so people around, all sober and offering advice and trying to be helpful. The patient is a woman lorry-driver, parked up in the (smaller) car park just off the road for the night, and taking a walk in this one (presumably before going to bed in the back of her lorry) when she’s been hit by a car. Strange. Whoever’s inside is driving like a maniac trying to get out of the car park.
Everyone around is polite, sober, and remarkably well dressed. Most seem to be couples in their forties or fifties, the men smart and the women dressed in rather raunchy dresses. Lots of dyed blonde hair and cleavage. There are lots of smart 4x4s and pickup trucks here. The place is in the middle of nowhere, what can they be doing here? There are no nightclubs or bars for miles. The nearest place is the local university town, seven miles down the road. And it’s midnight.
Anyway, we have other things on our mind.
We get the patient on to the ambulance, and luckily the gas is working well, taking some of the pain away. Since this is technically an RTC the police may turn up at some point, but we can’t wait for them on a busy Saturday night – we need to get the patient to hospital, so off we go. It takes only a few minutes to get her into A&E, where we hand her over to the staff, who’ll look after her. She’ll probably have an operation tonight to set the leg.
Off we go to the next job. I don’t think much more about it, except to mention it to the crew taking over our ambulance in the morning, as we prepare to go home, exhausted.
—There were just millions of people around. Weird. It’s midnight on Saturday night, for God’s sake.
—Yeah, well there would be.
Eh?
Turns out this site is famous as a ‘dogging’ site. I had no idea at the time, but ‘dogging’ is where different couples drive to a prearranged car park agreed by all. Then in their cars, some of the couples start to have sex, while other couples look at them through the window. Something like that anyway. Presumably some like to be watched, and others like to watch. Apparently you signify which you wish to be by some arrangement of headlights, or something.
Nice.
What’s happened with our hapless lorry-driver is she’s wandered past the wrong car, no doubt perfectly innocently. The couple inside definitely didn’t want to be watched at whatever they were doing, and took off out of the car park like a scalded cat, running her down in the process.
Val is as surprised as I am. It doesn’t make much difference to how the job went, but it’s an education.
Sitting in his office back at the station Len laughs out loud.
—Dirty bastards.
All the loony parent stuff, wondering when they were going to stagger home or end up in an ambulance, was bound to have an effect. When I was about nine, I stopped getting undressed. I was frightened of having no clothes on. So I would wear the same clothes week in and week out, never taking them off, sleeping in a filthy polyester sleeping bag. This went on for some years. I must have stunk.
At university, I joined a scheme whereby in the holidays I would go to America to work for the summer. My father called an American friend, to see if he could get me a job for the period. He was embarrassed admitting to his illegitimate family. His friend wasn’t. Maybe Americans are a bit less uptight about this sort of thing. And a bit more racist, maybe.
—What the hell you so embarrassed about, man? He’s not black, is he?
(Charming.)
Funnily enough, as a kid, part of me was, sort of. I didn’t wash much. I used to bunk off school on the days when we went swimming, so I didn’t have to get undressed and show my filthy black toenails.
I still feel funny going into swimming pools now.
And saunas.
Chan
About 3 o’clock in the morning. Called to a male, forties, fallen down the stairs with a head injury. Off we go.
The location is a sauna in the town. There’s a plain, rather drab front to the building, with the word sauna on it, and a picture of a young man smiling. All very nice. I’ve sometimes driven past and wondered what goes on there, but being an innocent and sheltered person, have never found out. (The missus and I once had a sauna on a camper-van trip to Finland at a campsite and it was lovely.)
Anyway, an unremarkable man in his thirties wearing a white T-shirt meets us at the front door and tells us access would be easier round the back. I’m not going to insult you by making a joke about this. Round the back we go, where he meets us and leads us inside. The sauna has many rooms and passages and fills the entire (huge) ground floor and basement of the building.
At first it’s like a rather restrained and innocent nightclub, with red carpets and matt black walls, a few pictures of smiling young men dotted around, and a well-lit bar area selling sweets and chocolate bars. The only slightly odd thing is a large bowl on the bar, filled not with complimentary sweets but condoms.
Chan’s a nice, polite, Chinese man on the darker floor below. He’s drunk and has tripped and fallen down a flight of stairs, bashing his nose. We try to collar and board him but, embarrassed and drunk and claustrophobic, he’ll have none of it. Eventually we decide it would do more harm than good, so we let him stand up and walk him out to the ambulance.
The route out is through the sauna proper, which is a huge darkly lit tiled area, steaming, with shower cubicles, a large jacuzzi-type pool bubbling away merrily, and
more pictures of smiling young men on the walls – but this time they’re all completely naked, and seem, to my fleeting glimpse, to be remarkably well endowed in the penis department.
There’s a television high on one wall, but it’s not showing Coronation Street. (Not unless Coronation Street has changed quite a lot since I used to watch it.) Val says she can hear noises going on in some of the darkly lit rooms off the main one, but we’re quite busy and don’t look. None of the shower cubicles have doors or curtains, and one completely naked man looks at us rather startled as we pass carrying our equipment. His is on display for all to see. Val’s eyes bulge.
There’s a sort of jeweller’s shop cabinet with ‘butt plugs’ and ‘cock rings’ on display for sale. (Whatever the hell they are.)
On we go through the main sauna room. There are signs leading down a passage to something called The Glory Holes (another mystery). And finally in the sweltering steamy heat, the back door.
Outside we reach the fire escape. On it there’s a notice.
Please Don’t Have Sex On The Stairs.
(Seems an odd thing to have to request.)
After this odyssey of mystery we finally get our patient on to the ambulance and settled. He’s apologetic at all the fuss (‘mortified’) and we do our best to reassure him that we don’t mind at all.
How could we? It’s been fascinating.
I found out later what the ‘Glory Holes’ were.
(Trust me, you don’t want to know …)
My parents’ fights often seemed to be theatrical performances – exhibitionistic. They seemed to enjoy them. Once my mother bought me an air rifle for my birthday, and was keeping it under her bed until the big day. One night, they took their screaming row to bed. The next thing we heard was my father running out of the room, dressed only in his blue underpants, screaming to my eldest sister.
—Save me! Save me! She’s gone berserk!
My mother came after him, clutching the air rifle. My big sister was visiting, home from university. She was studying theology. She wasn’t home nearly enough for me.