by Wharton, Kit
(You’ve probably already guessed.)
Inside the bedroom is the teenager – their daughter – and she’s definitely got abdo pain because she’s having a baby. And I don’t mean pregnant, I mean having a baby. Fearsome contractions, waters have broken. Urge to push and crowning. All the signs. It’s not going to be long. We settle her down and get her on the pain-killing gas, and ascertain there is probably still just about time to get her into hospital. So we get her on board.
—Who’s coming with us? I ask the parents.
They are staring at each other, still in shock.
—You go, says the man.
So Mum climbs aboard and we tear off up to the hospital. In between sorting our girl out I am wondering if the parents can seriously not have known. The girl is quite slim. No matter how many jumpers and Demis Roussos dresses she wore, surely it must have been obvious?
Anyway, what do I know? We are just in time and get her to the hospital about five minutes before she gives birth to a nice healthy baby. By this time both parents are standing in the corridor outside still looking like they’ve just seen Elvis.
Then ten minutes later along the corridor comes another couple in their forties or fifties, also looking absolutely stunned. Between them they are accompanying – maybe frog-marching – a gormless-looking youth of about seventeen or so. Lanky long hair and spots, jeans practically around his ankles, Kevin and Perry to the life.
The two couples look at each other with staring, questioning eyes filled with rage, mystification and panic. You can see it all there.
Then, after we have said a very delicate and unsmiling goodbye and gone down to the ambulance to clean up, out of the hospital comes the gormless lad, still looking mystified, but quite cheerful. He looks around at the bright new dawn and then down at his phone and starts texting someone.
We can’t help but smile. Maybe he’s texting God to get him out of this one, but it doesn’t look like God’s replying today. I can’t help feeling a twinge of sympathy as we drive off and wave goodbye. If only he knew.
Like I said, often it’s not the patient you’re treating, it’s the family.
Philip
Wednesday, morning.
The call is a Category A Red 1 – the most serious. To an elderly male in cardiac and respiratory arrest. Dead, in other words.
We scream to the location, trying to get there as soon as possible. The flat is up on the third floor – no bloody lift – with the door open and the patient sitting on the sofa – no pulse and not breathing. He’d dropped his wife off at the garden centre to buy roses that morning, then come home to do some errands and died on the sofa. She’d found him like this.
Since we don’t know how long he’s been down we have to assume there’s still a chance. We pull him on to the floor and begin cardiopulmonary resuscitation.
Resuses are always full-on, and you tend to focus on what you’re doing and ignore everything else. It’s busy.
After about fifteen minutes we begin to give up hope. The patient is not responding to drugs in his system and his heart is still showing no activity on the monitor.
It is then that you finally take in your surroundings. The patient is a tall distinguished-looking black man with snow white hair. I notice there are two video boxes on the floor by him, even though the television is off. They would have been at the patient’s feet when he was sitting on the sofa. From the covers of the boxes it is very obvious what they are. The one I can see shows a lady doing something to another lady and neither have much in the way of clothes on.
Hard-core porn. Bollocks.
As if life wasn’t complicated enough, now we have to deal with this. He’s come back from dropping his wife off (to buy roses!) and … well, you know.
We have to try and protect the wife. Maybe she never noticed. In between chest compressions I get the two video boxes and push them as far as I can under the sofa.
The man’s daughter arrives presently. By this time we have given up on the resuscitation – there’s no hope. I gently ask her if I can have a word in private outside.
—What is it?
I’m trying to think of the best way of putting it, but they don’t teach you this in training school.
—Sorry to mention this, but we were thinking of your mum.
—What do you mean?
—It would appear your dad may have been looking at some … er … gentlemen’s videos … when it … er … happened. So to speak. We’ve hidden them under the sofa.
—Gentlemen’s videos?
What the hell else can I call them?
—Yes.
The daughter looks tired and weary and sad.
—Oh, that. Yeah, she told me on the phone. Don’t worry – she knows. I’ll get rid of them later.
As we go back into the sitting room she looks at Dad fondly and gives a sad laugh.
—Bloody hell, you old bugger. What are you like?
It might not have been dignified. But maybe that doesn’t really matter any more.
20
Pillars of the Community
It’s nice being in the ambulance service. You’re respected, liked, admired.
A pillar of the community, someone trusted and responsible. Like doctors.
Aren’t you?
Oscar
Evening. Called out to an RTC, one patient, eighties, injuries unknown.
Road accidents can be all or nothing. There are a lot of fast A roads round here which seem to be where the most serious ones occur – cars heading towards each other at high speed with no crash barrier to keep them separate like on a motorway.
Anyway, luckily this is a nothing one. An elderly gent driving back from the golf club, clipped by another car going the other way too fast and which hasn’t even stopped. Probably driven by ‘youths’. Our old boy has been taken into someone’s house for shelter and so there we check him out but he’s not injured, thankfully. And it looks like it wasn’t even his fault.
He’s a lovely old boy, very sprightly and apologetic at all the fuss, and grateful. Everyone loves him.
Problem is, when the coppers arrive and breathalyse him he blows positive – over the limit. It turns out he might have had one or two dry sherries down at the club and they haven’t quite worn off.
The copper’s an old friend of mine (his family looked after Abdul the hamster a few years back while we were on holiday, although this isn’t strictly relevant), and I know he’s a nice bloke and I can see in his eyes that he really, really doesn’t want to have to nick this sweet old man when it wasn’t even his fault.
But the old man’s blown positive. The limit is 35, I think, but he’s blown 37. Millisomethings of alcohol in the breath or whatever it is.
—What I’ll do is just go out and see if there are any witnesses, then we’ll try again, shall we? the copper says.
He’s got a certain leeway because the local police don’t prosecute unless you blow over 40, or something like that. Between 35 and 40 you’re still drink-driving but you just get a caution.
But when he comes back in the old boy blows 39. The copper’s looking desperate now. The readings are going in the wrong direction. At this rate the patient might even blow 40 next time and have to be arrested. Everyone would hate that.
Especially the copper.
—I’m just going to have a look at the damage to the car, then we’ll try one last time, he says.
He looks at me as if to say: Do something. Val does too.
And so I have an idea. While he’s out of the room I get the old man to hyperventilate as hard as he can without feeling dizzy, breathing in and out as deeply as possible, cleaning out his lungs.
Val’s laughing.
He’s still doing it when the copper comes back five minutes later, so I quickly signal him to stop before the copper sees what we’re doing.
And bingo, he blows 33. We can all relax. Daughter has turned up, and can take lovely old Dad home, the copper doesn’t have to nic
k him, and we can go back to base. Everyone’s happy.
Technically we’ve aided and abetted a crime. And let me emphasise this isn’t ambulance service policy. Or mine, most of the time. But I haven’t lost much sleep over it.
Emily
Evening.
Kidnapping is defined as the unlawful taking or transportation of a person against their will, usually to hold them unlawfully. Either for ransom or in furtherance of another crime, or child custody or whatever. If asked, no doubt, most lawyers will tell you it is ‘a bad thing’.
In the ambulance service the answer is: some days yes, some days no.
We’re getting towards the end of shift and called to a female, seventies, unknown problem. We’re working out of a station very near the hospital, but the call is nearly fifteen miles away. By the time we get there, we have about an hour of the shift left, and we’re forty minutes’ drive back to the station and hospital through the traffic.
So.
When we get into the house it’s to find a slightly unusual patient – a woman in her seventies or so, quite respectable house, quite respectable-looking lady. Only, this evening she’s drunk. Wandering around the front room in her knickers bumping into things, very unsteady. Once we’ve sat her down and done her obs we can rule out all the other worries that might be making her behave like this. Besides, the smell of booze is overwhelming and the empty bottles are all around the kitchen.
Val looks at me and whispers.
—She’s wankered. Pissed as a fart.
We phone the daughter.
She says it’s a recurring problem. Mum gets sozzled, then phones 999 and says nothing. Just attention-seeking, I suppose. The police have got fed up with her and so now they’re palming her off on us. But the daughter doesn’t want to come over – she’s been over enough times already.
—Just put her to bed and leave her. She’ll be fine.
And that’s what my crewmate and I are thinking of doing, when an evil thought occurs to us. Val gives me one of her meaningful looks. If we leave her at home, we’ll have to press the ‘available’ button on the ambulance, and like as not get another job, and we’ve only got another forty minutes left of shift. The job could be anywhere, we could be hours late off. If, on the other hand, we take her to hospital, by the time we’ve got there and handed her over we’ll be about five minutes from the end of our shift, and very close to the station.
Not exactly a ‘two-pipe problem’ as Sherlock used to say.
She doesn’t want to go, and her daughter doesn’t want her to go, but strictly speaking, she’s not safe to be left alone. She’s stumbling all over the place and knocking the furniture about. Me and Val look at each other, but no words are really necessary. We both know the score.
Unlike the patient, who doesn’t really understand how she’s suddenly been manoeuvred into a carry chair and hustled out to the ambulance. We phone the daughter back and tell her, and she bows to our superior judgement, probably just glad someone else is dealing with it. And off we go to hospital.
Fatima isn’t exactly chuffed to see her, but needs must and all that.
Patient safety must always come first.
21
Wonderful People
Hell is other people – but heaven is too.
It wasn’t all doom and gloom with my parents – they were quite a laugh a lot of the time. And ultimately, it’s far from doom and gloom in this job either. You meet some of the most extraordinary people you could ever hope to come across.
Vikram
The ambulance service is a wonderful institution and the best job in the world, as I have often said, but sometimes it reminds me of the old cliché about the swan, gliding serenely about on the surface, paddling away furiously underneath. With the service, it’s paddling with only one leg – the other’s fallen off.
I jest of course.
The next patient’s a bit like that. Male, thirties, breathing difficulties. A fairly average job, nothing remarkable. The man lives in a fairly average part of town, in an average street, average cars in the road, fairly average bungalow.
But this man’s not average.
When we get to the job we let ourselves in using the key safe as the patient apparently can’t get to the door. Inside is, you guessed it, pretty average, but very neat and tidy, spick and span.
Our man is in the front room, sitting in a wheelchair with an oxygen mask on his face. There’s the whoosh of compressed gas being released under pressure from a machine on the floor, and the tubing runs from that machine to the mask on his face. He doesn’t look too distressed.
In fact he looks calm as anything.
Through the mask he tells us the story. He’s paralysed from the armpits down. His head, arms and shoulders work – nothing else. An accident. Because the abdominal and chest muscles that expand and contract the chest and fill the lungs don’t work, he can’t breathe. The machine is what’s called PPV – positive pressure ventilation. It blows air into his lungs under pressure using the mask, which inflates them so they can do their work. Without it, he’d be dead in minutes.
He has two machines, one which services the front room and kitchen, and one for the bathroom and bedroom. Why he can’t have one hanging on the back of his chair all the time I don’t know – presumably there’s a reason. He plugs the mask into whichever one he’s closest to. And the one that does the bedroom and bathroom is broken. Which also means if the one he’s on now should pack up, he is dead.
That’s what I call a breathing difficulty.
Now we’re here we could take over his breathing for him if that one packs up too, but even so, he’s astonishingly cheerful about the whole thing. He can’t call the company to fix the machine because they can’t hear a word he says. So he’s pressed his care alarm button and – would you believe it? – apologises for wasting our time!
We reassure him it’s quite all right and phone the company for him and they will be round in a jiffy. We stay with him until then.
He is a truly astonishing person.
—Do you have carers?
—Only twice a day. I like to manage on my own.
—So how do you get from the front room to the bedroom, without the machine? There’s quite a long hallway.
—I just hold my breath.
I stare at him.
—You hold your breath?
—Yes.
—So what would happen, say, if your wheelchair got jammed in the hallway or you fell out of it or something, when you were between machines?
—I’d die.
He’s quite cheerful about it. Val and I stare at him with our jaws on the floor. He looks at our dumbstruck faces and laughs.
—I’m quite independent. I like to do things for myself. Christmas time I had the whole family over and cooked them Christmas dinner.
And the people on Bake Off think they have it tough …
We stay with him until the man comes to fix the machine. Then we say goodbye. We tell him to never think he’s wasting our time again. Ever.
Jesus. If he only knew.
The list of extraordinary people goes on and on.
Usually ‘old’ people. The Ukrainian immigrant who saw his family murdered by the Germans, then spent the war down a mine as a slave. The 95-year-old gent, caring for his wife and still sprightly, having spent three and a half years in a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp, eating rice and the occasional snake.
Vince, who – it turns out – is an amateur photographer, interested in Formula One. He’s been to the Monaco Grand Prix every single year ever since it began in the 1950s. He’s never missed one. As a result, a lot of the marshals have got to know him over the years, and often let him stand to take pictures where they won’t even let the professional press photographers stand. As a result he has taken some of the most amazing pictures I’ve ever seen. There’s one of Senna coming down the track in the lead towards Mirabeau which looks like our patient must have been sitting on the car’s fr
ont wheel. Senna is staring straight at the camera, probably wondering who this maniac is. You can see the whites of his eyes.
Casper, a very pleasant, sprightly American gent, who settled here after the war. He came over with the US forces for D-Day, met a girl, and never went back. Not only that, he was one of the first men onto Omaha Beach on the morning of D-Day. Omaha was the terrible one – Saving Private Ryan and all that – and the Americans lost I think over 2,000 dead that day. Far more than any of the other beaches, possibly combined. Our patient was there, and survived. He went on to fight in the Far East, against the Japanese.
Jane, a beautiful lady in her eighties, with long white hair. You can still see how stunning she must have been, all those years ago. She’s still stunning now. It turns out during the war she flew Spitfires for the RAF. Later, after the war, she was one of the fastest women on Earth, and the first British woman to break the sound barrier, flying a jet plane.
All of them sitting up in bed, drinking tea, with me chatting away to them.
And Val rolling her eyes.
—Do you think we could deal with the matter in hand, now?
22
Children (Again)
It’s not just old people who can be amazing. Not by a long chalk. Children can be the worst to deal with.
But also the best.
I started the three-month training course to work on emergency ambulances in 2004. At the end of the first week my head was buzzing with all the lessons we’d had and stuff.
Then Jo said: Oh by the way, I’m pregnant.
Our little girl was born seven months later, the most extraordinary thing ever. It was a difficult, long labour, which ended in a bloodbath even I found shocking, and at one point the midwives thought something was seriously wrong. A doctor came, and tried to work it out. Then it turned out it was OK; she was coming out with one hand over her head, like the Statue of Liberty.