by Wharton, Kit
Waving at everyone.
Here I am!
Phoebe
Monday evening. It’s just got dark when we’re called to a female, eighties, fallen, query injury. This is pretty much the most common sort of call we attend – ‘nan-downs’.
There’s no key safe at the address and the patient can’t get to the door because she’s on the floor, so access might be a problem. If we cannot find someone with a key we’ll have to get the police out to break the door down. Again, all very routine.
But when we get there a man’s waiting for us outside and the front door is wide open. He’s an off-duty copper who lives over the road and knows the patient fairly well. We go in to find an elderly lady on the floor who’s fallen but is not seriously injured. She has an infection in her urinary tract which is making her very unsteady on her feet, so we decide it would be safest to take her into hospital. We package her up and get her out and comfortable on the ambulance.
—Well if you don’t need me any more I’ll shoot off, says the copper.
We say thanks a lot and ask him how he got in without a key.
—That was easy. My little girl did it.
—Eh?
Apparently a neighbour had first heard the old lady crying out and had gone to alert the policeman. He’d come across to see how he could help, but neither of them could see how to get in.
So of course what had he done? Went and got a screwdriver and removed the top slit window of the patient’s front room, which was slightly open. It’s only about two feet across and about a foot deep. There’s no chance of any adult getting in through it, even if you could get up there.
Had this been a problem?
Of course not. Now it’s time for Wondergirl.
Wondergirl is his six-year-old daughter, who is busy having her tea in his house over the road. She’s actually called Phoebe or something.
The copper goes and gets her and takes her over to the patient’s house. (Bear in mind it’s cold and raining and the house is in complete darkness.) He picks her up and feeds the little girl through the tiny window, lowering her by her arm till she can drop on to the windowsill inside the strange darkened house. Then he lets go. The little girl jumps down into the pitch-dark house and goes off to find the light switches and find the front door and open it to let Dad in.
Fantastic, we think! Where is she?
She’s back over the road finishing off her tea.
Well, we can’t let the opportunity pass of meeting a superhero, so before we toddle off I go over and knock on the copper’s door. Mum comes to the door and I say I want to shake the girl’s hand. She is a tiny little blonde thing, tucking into a plate of fish fingers and too shy to come out, so I just say thanks from the doorway. Then it’s off to the hospital.
Another experience I’ve had as a ‘customer’ was in 2006. Our daughter was eighteen months old, and Jo was heavily pregnant with our son. One Sunday morning we woke up.
—Shit.
—What?
The bed was soaking. Her waters had broken.
We weren’t going to panic. We had a plan. We would drop my daughter off with her aunt, then proceed to the hospital. No problem. But as I struggled to change my daughter’s nappy and get her dressed, Jo doubled up in agony. A contraction. Ninety seconds later another one. In other words – birth imminent. Shit.
I called an ambulance.
The crew who came in had had a long Saturday night – this was their last job. Or at least I hope so – they looked dog-rough. So they took her in to hospital. I dropped my daughter off. Our son was born two hours later.
Childbirth.
Simple.
My mother claimed my father insisted on having a paternity test when I was born, just to check I was his, apparently. And when I was going through my mum’s drawers when I was a kid, probably looking for money or something, or just bored, I found papers from an adoption agency. I don’t know whether it had anything to do with me, but presumably they didn’t concern the cat. Later, as a teenager, I had an interview with the army, but was rejected. My father bought me a book about an Englishman joining the Foreign Legion. As if to say: off you go then.
(I’m probably just being oversensitive.)
I often think children are the only really proper thing that’s ever happened to me – the only good thing I’ve ever done.
Jo looks at me like Val sometimes does.
—I think you’ll find I did some of the work.
Of course.
23
The Best Job in the World
People sometimes ask how has the service changed you – what have you ‘learnt’? Val laughs.
—What have you learnt? Do me a favour.
A rudimentary medical knowledge, maybe, only enough to turn you into a raging hypochondriac. Headache? Obviously a stroke. Tummy ache? Probably an aneurysm that’s going to pop. Chest pains? Forget about it.
The answer is I don’t know. I’ve had two children since joining – everything’s changed. I was never really happy before I had children and joined the service, and I’ve never been unhappy since. Make of that what you will.
One day I was walking back from the park with my little girl. She was three. On a whim I asked:
—Are you enjoying life so far?
She gave it a real think with her three-year-old brain, pondered it a good long while.
—No.
Oh dear.
Anyway. Life is short and according to the latest medical evidence, you only get one of them. So make it count.
What does Shakespeare say? I wasted time, and now doth time waste me.
(You can see what he means in this job.)
The ambulance service is like everything else: humour goes a long way. George Orwell said to be truly funny, you’ve got to be serious. He was right. In the service you deal with death and tragedy, injury and illness, misery and loss.
And if you can’t laugh about that lot, what the hell can you laugh about?
Another thing you learn – in life and the NHS – is that nothing lasts for ever. Fatima went to another hospital to stare mystified at people after a while, and Len retired soon after this – the years had taken their toll.
And Val and I split up, when I moved to a different area. Last I heard she was thinking of leaving the service.
I miss her.
Frank was the last job we did together.
Frank
It’s evening and we get a transfer from the local hospital all the way into London. To the major heart hospital, patient going for bypass surgery. It’s an emergency transfer because the patient’s condition’s serious and the surgeons are waiting, but it’s pretty routine for us.
When we wheel the stretcher into the cardiac ward, we find the patient very cheerful, surrounded by his family. The nurses bustle around coolly.
Frank’s an affable old boy and very comfortable and stable, no pain, no oxygen, no tubes anywhere. Wife and daughter are there. We get him on to the stretcher, collect the notes and get a quick handover from the nurses, pick up the bags, and off we go.
It doesn’t take long to realise the patient’s not just affable – he’s a lovely old boy. The sort of person who just takes everything as it comes and is a right laugh. He’s about eighty or so. Maybe when you get to that age you just don’t get frightened. You’ve had a good life – everything’s a bonus. Whatever attitude he’s got it’s the right one. I hope I have the same. He’s enjoying all the attention, joking with us and the staff. If the Grim Reaper does turn up he’ll probably sit him down and drink him under the table.
But by the time we get out to the ambulance his daughter’s looking morose and his wife’s looking worse. She’s trembling, eyes staring, white with fear. The surgery he’s going for is serious, no question. On his heart, under a general anaesthetic. At his age there’s a definite possibility of a bad outcome, or no outcome at all.
The two women watch as we wheel him onto the ambulance and get him com
fortable. Now they’re both white, and his wife’s looking like she might faint any moment. They’re asking for directions about how to get to the hospital, slap-bang in the centre of London, through the evening rush hour. They don’t have satnav, and they don’t have blue lights. They’re following up in a car. Maybe they’ve never even driven into London before.
I can see the fear in the old lady’s eyes. She’s terrified of the drive, the rush-hour traffic, getting lost, what to do with the car. More to the point, she’s terrified this is goodbye. He’s going straight into surgery when he gets there, on his heart. At eighty. Maybe she’ll never see him alive again. She stands shaking by the ambulance door.
I’m mystified.
—Don’t you want to go up with him?
The wife stares at me, speechless. The daughter stares too.
—Can she?
I’m staring at her now.
—Of course. Why ever not?
—The nurses said she couldn’t. There wasn’t room.
For God’s sake, I think. Stupid bastards. (The nurses, I mean.)
—Course there is. Hop on. Make yourself comfortable.
And the wife bursts into tears. She’s spent the last three hours – days? weeks? – dreading this one moment, thinking it might be the end. Now she can stay with her husband all the way to the operating theatre. She shins up the steps and into the ambulance. She might yet lose him, but not on our watch. That’s good enough for me. That’s why I joined the service.
The daughter smiles.
—They said she wasn’t allowed on the ambulance!
I smile back.
—Well, it ain’t their bleeding ambulance, is it?
Acknowledgements
I’ve had so much help writing this book it’s a bit embarrassing. Thanks first and foremost to Frances and Craig, for kicking the whole thing off. To Jane and John and Nick and Gabs for reading it. To Jane at Graham Maw Christie and Lettice and Nicholas at 4th Estate for (practically) writing it. To Jo for putting up with the end of it. And to Sarah and Sam and Cleo and Chris.
Last but by no means least, to colleagues and friends in the NHS emergency ambulance service, the finest bunch of people you could ever hope to meet.
About the Author
Kit Wharton has worked for the emergency ambulance service for the past twelve years. He lives with his partner and two children.
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