It’s impossible to mentally prepare yourself for what you might see as an ambulance worker. Some might argue that’s a good thing. If someone said to you, ‘In five hours, you’ll be sent to a five-year-old boy who’s not breathing,’ chances are that by the time you turned up, you’d be a nervous wreck.
Ever since switching to the frontline, I’d been worried about how I might react to having to deal with a stabbing, given what had happened to me. But when the inevitable call came in, there was no time to be nervous or upset. The adrenalin was pumping, because I knew I’d have to be in tip-top form. But I also slipped straight into work mode, completely focused on the job in hand.
A lad has been stabbed behind the bins at the bottom of some high-rise flats. When we arrive on the scene, he’s slumped over and full of holes, like a cheese grater. He must be about nineteen, the same age as me when I got attacked. But I don’t have the luxury of reflection, because this kid’s life is in our hands.
A stabbing is one of the jobs where an ambulance person can make a big difference. The decisions we make in the first couple of minutes after arriving on the scene – about which wound to pack first, which drugs to administer and in what dosages – will potentially save the patient’s life. Or not. Although sometimes we can’t do anything to help – for example, if the aorta, the largest artery which runs straight down the middle of the body, is severed.
My partner and I do everything we can. We can’t really diagnose the big stuff, such as whether his organs are damaged. The doctors and specialists at the hospital will discover the real extent of the trauma. What we need to do is stop this kid from bleeding out on to the floor and dying at the scene. We pack the wound with dressing, including haemostatic gauze, which coagulates the blood. We also administer a drug that helps stem the bleeding. Thankfully, it doesn’t appear that his lungs have been damaged, because that would mean sticking a needle in his chest and letting the air out, which is not a nice thing to do – especially on someone still conscious. The whole time we’re talking to him, telling him loudly and clearly to stick with us, because while all his other senses might have left him, he can still hear. After giving him some fluids, we put him in the ambulance and hot-foot it to hospital. It isn’t until afterwards that I think, Shit, that kid was me not so long ago. I can literally feel his pain. Thankfully, and also like me, he lives to fight another day.
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Gallows humour, however dark and seemingly callous or inappropriate, is as essential to an ambulance person as body armour is to a soldier or a shield is to a riot police officer. Gallows humour is one of the few coping strategies we have, and acts as a buffer between us and the reality of what we’re dealing with. So, for example, if we’re sent to a bloke who’s drunk and on the deck, we might refer to it as a ‘PFO’ – Pissed and Fallen Over. And if we’re sent to an elderly lady who’s taken a tumble, we might refer to it as a ‘Granny Down’.
Now, before anyone starts penning a letter of complaint to my publisher, I should at this point say that I love grannies to bits. They’re always grateful to see us and once we’ve got them up and put them back in their chair (assuming they haven’t done themselves a mischief), we often stick around, make them a cup of tea and natter about old times. Although, I’m not going to lie to you, I don’t have the same affection for the PFO.
The ambulance service isn’t like Inspector Morse or The Sweeney, where the characters work with the same partner all the time. That could never happen, simply because people work different shift patterns. But there are colleagues you pair up with more often than others. One of my regular partners was Paul, who ended up being a great pal in and out of work. We used to go for breakfast together and he’d tell me about his life, which was apparently quite turbulent. He always called me ‘brother’ in his text messages and we became close enough that I suppose you could call our relationship a bromance.
Paul had a particularly wicked sense of humour. Before he joined the ambulance service, he worked as a lifeguard at a swimming pool. One day, he and his mate dressed up a CPR mannequin, tied a rope around its neck and hung it from the ceiling. Obviously, when their other colleague discovered it, he almost keeled over with fright. But when Paul and his mate heard the commotion and wandered in, they pretended they couldn’t see anything: ‘What are you on about? There’s nobody there . . .’ That’s what you call a dark sense of humour and probably why he fitted right in when he joined the ambulance service.
Paul could be a bit of a nightmare to work with, mainly because I found him so funny. He could also get a bit giddy at times. One night, he was so keen to finish on time that he attempted a sharp turn and got the front of his ambulance stuck on someone’s front lawn. Eventually, the whole vehicle was on there, from where he’d tried to nudge it forwards and backwards. Paul was there for about two hours before the recovery man arrived to tow him out.
Whoever I’m working with, I might start giggling at the most inappropriate times. We might be working on a patient, chatting about what went on at the works do and some piece of scandal will crease us up. Very occasionally, something inappropriate will slip out. One time, we turned up to a lady in a fortune-telling booth. While I was checking her over, I couldn’t resist saying, ‘If you can see into the future, why weren’t you already at the hospital when you started getting chest pains?’ I said it with a smile and she found it funny. But maybe I shouldn’t have said it at all.
But, at least as far as I’m concerned, an ambulance person has to grab every bit of light relief they can, because those nice little chats with grannies are all too rare and those little pockets of humour are like pretty bubbles floating in the air – there one second, gone the next, replaced by a deafening clap of thunder. Laughter is the mind’s antiseptic cream and gallows humour is our coping mechanism, no different to soldiers trying to take their minds off the realities of their job with sick pranks and dark jokes.
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It’s a run-of-the-mill day. You know the drill by now. Me and my partner have just got an elderly lady back to her feet, brushed her off, called her neighbours and made them all a brew, when a shout comes up on our screen with a pub’s address. We turn on the hooters and tooters, head for the pub and the details appear: FEMALE COVERED IN BRUISES AND BLOOD. I’m with a paramedic I’ve never worked with before, but that doesn’t matter. Like soldiers in a crack unit, we mix and match, because we have an almost telepathic understanding and instinctively know what each other is capable of.
We both know something is badly amiss before we arrive on the scene, simply from the job description. Anyone covered in bruises and blood is never a good thing. We pull up outside the pub, an ambulance car paramedic waves us in and we grab our gear and follow him upstairs. In a utility room off the corridor, a woman has been beaten to death. Sometimes, the job descriptions that appear on our screens are a little bit understated, and we can immediately tell she’s been dead for some time. But she still looks scared. She’d been found by her son, who was asleep in his bedroom when the murder took place. The family dog was in there with her. As we’re appraising the scene, the woman’s other son turns up with his girlfriend. I intercept them at the top of the stairs and lead them to the furthest room from the murder scene. As we all sit down on the sofa, I still haven’t worked out how I’m going to break the news to them.
How are you supposed to tell someone something like that? I have no idea, because I haven’t been taught. Frontline ambulance staff still aren’t taught today. That’s remarkable, given that it’s the worst thing someone will ever hear. Not only that, but the way someone is dealt with in the first few hours after receiving terrible news can have a big impact on how they heal. Today, I take a lot of pride in having a caring manner, but I had to stumble across my own technique, having consciously and unconsciously picked up skills from more experienced colleagues. In this particular case, I take a deep breath and just go for it: ‘I’m really sorry, but unfortunately your mum has passed away. It would appear she was the victim of an assault.’ I think – I hope – I do okay.
The son is obviously very upset but manages to hold it together. He tells us that his mum’s boyfriend had a habit of knocking her about and that it was no doubt him who killed her. As he’s telling us this, he picks up a cushion and places it on his knee. Underneath where it had been is a large blood stain. Thankfully, and inexplicably, neither the son or his girlfriend notice, and I’m able to discreetly cover the stain with another cushion. Presumably, the woman was murdered on the sofa before being dragged into the utility room. And it suddenly dawns on me that we’re sitting slap-bang in the middle of a crime scene and potentially destroying vital evidence.
If we can save someone, the fact that it’s a crime scene goes out of the window. But in this case, I immediately realise I’ve made a category one balls-up. I can feel my trousers getting wet with what I assume is blood. And when the police arrive, I shuffle out of the room backwards. I quietly explain to a copper what has happened, and to say he isn’t happy doesn’t even begin to cover it. He obviously can’t give me a bollocking there and then, but his eyes are ablaze and his features twisted into a look of utter contempt. The copper asks the son and his girlfriend to go downstairs before informing his sergeant that two idiot ambulancemen have done their best to contaminate the crime scene.
The copper soon returns to give me a load of grief and tells us we should have left the building immediately after discovering the body. This is all well and good but leaving the building would have meant exposing the murdered woman’s son and his girlfriend to all the rubberneckers gathered outside.
As we’re waiting for the copper’s sergeant to get back to him, we hear on his radio that someone has phoned the police control room and admitted to murdering someone. I naively think that that will be that, but the sergeant radios in to relay the order that the idiot ambulancemen will have to remove their clothes, so that they can be submitted as evidence.
‘He wants us to take our uniforms off?’ I ask the copper.
‘Yes, like he said, take them off.’
‘So you want me to drive back to the station in my pants?’ ‘I’ll see if I can find you something to wear . . .’
A few minutes later, another copper appears carrying an evidence bag and a couple of Tyvek suits (those white zip-up coveralls you’ve seen on CSI). When I take my trousers off, I discover my pants are also soaked in blood, which is every bit as unpleasant as it sounds. At least they haven’t got holes in. When we emerge from the pub in our Tyveks and climb into the ambulance, bystanders are looking at us in bemusement, as if to say, ‘What the hell has gone on in there? And what have they done with the ambulancemen?’
Because the boyfriend confesses, we don’t end up giving evidence in court. But this is one story I’m able to follow to its conclusion via the newspapers. The victim and her boyfriend were planning to open the pub together, up until the night the murder took place. They apparently had a row, she revealed she’d been unfaithful, he flipped and stabbed her multiple times in the neck and eye, before strangling her. That’s the sight that greeted us. About half an hour before the attack, she had woken her son, given him a hug and told him she loved him. She was forty-four. The one piece of good news, if you can call it that, was that her killer got charged with murder and banged up for life.
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These 999 documentaries you see on TV don’t really tell the full story, at least not as far as the ambulance service is concerned. They do give an insight into the stresses of the job, but their framing is very narrow. I appeared in the first series of the Channel 4 show 999: What’s Your Emergency? and they usually only showed one of my jobs a week. And it was always a varnished version of what took place. For example, when they filmed us doing CPR, they wisely chose not to broadcast the patient’s face, with their eyes wide open and staring straight into mine. They didn’t film a dead baby or someone who had been catapulted through a car windscreen. I understood why, because it would have been unethical, and nobody in their right mind would have wanted to watch it. Nevertheless, it would have been a more honest portrayal, because that’s the sort of thing ambulance people see with alarming regularity.
One night, the documentary makers are desperate to get footage of the police, fire and ambulance services setting off from their respective bases and arriving at the scene of an emergency together. A camera crew has been out with us all night but decides to give up the ghost and knock off ten minutes early. Big mistake. A few minutes later, a call comes in for a house fire, which is why, unlike telly people, we don’t have the luxury of cutting a shift short.
Normally when a call comes in for a house fire, it goes straight to the fire service, they deploy and pass the job on to us. But on this occasion, for reasons unknown, we get the call first. The first thing I want to see when I turn up to a house fire is a fire engine, because ambulances don’t have hose pipes. What are we going to do, chuck a glass of water on it? But when we pull into the street, we can see fire and lots of smoke – but no engine. My heart falls into my stomach. My stomach struggles to digest it.
It’s seven in the morning, but the whole street is out. People are crying, wringing their hands and running around in panic. The fact that people are shouting ‘Help him! Help him!’ tells us that someone is probably inside. People see us in our uniforms and automatically think that we can help in any situation. But if someone has a heart attack on a plane, no one will ask if there is a traffic warden on board, on the basis that they wear a uniform as well.
I look at the burning house, thinking, What the hell am I gonna do here? I’ve got to do something. I can’t just stand here like a lemon. I snap some rubber gloves on, walk up to the door, touch the handle and my glove gets stuck. While I’m trying to pull my glove off, I can see the silhouette of a figure through the glass pane. Me and my partner discuss kicking the door in, but because we’ve both seen the film Backdraft, we decide that if we do kick the door in, we might get sucked in or incinerated by escaping flames. I’m also thinking, I don’t want to die, I’ve got three kids at home.
I’m about to be consumed by my impotency when Trumpton, as we call the fire service, appear on the scene (both the ambulance service and police refer to our friends in the fire service as this, after the old kids’ TV programme, or the water fairies, largely out of jealousy). I breathe a huge sigh of relief. A couple of firefighters jump out of the engine, smash a window and neither of them gets sucked in or incinerated. A few seconds later, the firefighters reappear, carrying a smouldering body. In the poor person’s outstretched hand is a set of keys. He’d obviously been trying to get to the door when he was overcome and was only a few feet from making it.
Having made certain the poor man is dead and there is nothing we can do to help, we clock off for the day and return to our respective homes. When I wake a few hours later, I switch on my phone and have about thirty missed calls, twenty voicemails and umpteen text messages. What the hell’s gone on? A terrorist attack? A multi-vehicle pileup? None of that. I’m in the latest copy of Heat magazine, sitting pretty at the top of their ‘Manometer’, just above Gok Wan. Every cloud and all that.
I roll out of bed, chuck on some clothes, pick the kids up from school and put on my smiley face. If anyone asks how work has been, I reply: ‘Fine.’ What else am I supposed to say? ‘Bloody brilliant. This guy died in a house fire. He was smoking when they dragged him out, with his door key in his hand . . .’ That sort of chat can be difficult to digest with your roast dinner.