It has been another common or garden morning when a job comes on our screen: CHILD FALLEN OVER IN SHOWER. UNCONSCIOUS. I always feel anxious whenever a child is involved. As a father of four young children, it would perhaps be strange if I didn’t. At the same time, experience has taught me not to always believe what I read on the screen. So I do wonder if this child is really unconscious. Although maybe it’s because I don’t want it to be true.
Me and my old mate Paul are only a few miles from the house and we arrive within minutes, siren blaring and blue light flashing. The house is in a relatively deprived area on a terraced street, with cars parked all along it, which means we have to park blocking the road. No doubt we give one of the neighbours the hump. Oh well.
Usually in jobs where kids are involved, the parents are waiting on the doorstep in a state of panic, so that we have to calm them down as well as deal with the emergency at hand. Not in this case. I knock on the door. No answer. I knock again. No answer. I think to myself, That’s odd, if my kid had fallen over and knocked themselves unconscious, I’d have that door wide open so that the ambulance people could turn up and sweep straight in.
There is a little alleyway running next to the house, so we make our way down there with all our gear on, kicking and shouldering aside weeds and overhanging branches. We reach a dilapidated wooden gate, force it open, pick our way through more weeds and piles of rubbish, bang on the back door and shout ‘Ambulance!’ Again, no answer.
I try the door and it’s locked. By now, we’re wondering if we have the right address. But suddenly, we hear the thud, thud, thud of big feet thundering down stairs. The door swings open to reveal a burly lad standing there with a limp child in his arms. Behind him, another toddler is peeping around a door. For a few seconds, the guy stands there staring at us, as if we’re a couple of sales-men flogging brushes. Eventually he says, ‘There you go, mate’, and shoves the child into my chest, as if she is nothing more precious than a pile of dirty washing or a tray of beers.
When I look down, I can tell immediately that the girl, who is about two years old, has horrendous injuries. Her face is black and blue, as are her legs. Her eyes are half-closed, her pupils dilated and her breathing is noisy and slow, which is always a bad sign. She is also completely dry, which suggests that the story about her falling in the shower is concocted. Paul says, ‘She’s really poorly.’ I give him a look that says, ‘Let’s move quick.’
We tell the guy to be as quick as he can and bring the other child with him. I hand the patient to Paul, who can feel her body clicking, which suggests she also has broken bones. We both know something is seriously amiss, but we can’t say that. We just have to try to save her life and leave it to the police to establish what has gone on. Meanwhile, a couple of cars are beeping their horns, their drivers only worried about themselves, not the little girl we are trying to save. The selfishness of some people is remarkable to behold. They couldn’t see exactly what we were doing, but that’s besides the point.
I get on the radio and say, ‘Critically ill child, unconscious. We need the full team ready to receive us.’ Me and Paul have worked with each other so often that we have an almost telepathic understanding. We throw everything at her, but she soon stops breathing. I drive the ambulance to the hospital as if I’ve stolen it, but the journey seems to take for ever. And the whole way there I’m thinking, This girl reminds me so much of my kids – blonde hair, blue eyes, a beautiful little thing.
When we arrive at the hospital, there is a full crash team ready to go: nurses, doctors, consultant, anaesthetist. We tell them everything we know – which isn’t very much – and what procedures we’ve carried out, and they take over from there. It’s always a privilege to watch a group of highly trained clinicians working together, as if they’re different parts of one perfectly calibrated machine. They manage to stabilise and intubate the little girl, but her injuries are such that it looks like she might go downhill very quickly. So a helicopter is called in to fly her to a specialist unit in another city. Me and Paul accompany the patient to the chopper and watch it take off, before trudging slowly back to A&E, neither of us saying a word.
Back at the hospital, the man has now been joined by the little girl’s mother. The doctors have already told them that the situation is grave, but the bloke doesn’t seem to be registering. The mother, on the other hand, is in a right old state. From what I can work out, the man is the mother’s new boyfriend and had been looking after her kids while she was at work. The doctors agree with us that the girl’s injuries are non-accidental, so I get on to the police, tell them about our suspicions and they immediately instigate a serious investigation. We provide them with statements, make our exits and a short while later, the man is arrested.
We drive to the ambulance station in stony silence. When we arrive, we both agree that we can’t possibly deal with anything else that day. We’ve done enough, it’s time to go home. In my ten years of service, I have never felt so low and utterly exhausted.
At home, I can’t shake the image of the little girl in my arms, covered in bruises, wheezing and gasping for breath. She was just an innocent toddler, who should have been playing in the garden or having fun with her friends. I also can’t stop thinking about the man’s seediness and apparent indifference. I sit there on the sofa for hours, thinking: What a messed-up world we live in.
I told my wife what had happened and she took me out for tea and tried to take my mind off it. But I struggled to sleep that night. I kept playing things over and over in my mind. Had I done something wrong? Could I have done more? I could still smell the house, all burnt toast and overcooked vegetables. I could see the face of the other little girl, peeping round the door. I was assailed with images of that black and blue little body. Round and round it went. The next day, I asked Paul how he was feeling. He seemed to be dealing with it okay. I didn’t want to burden him, so I said I was fine as well. But I wasn’t fine at all, I had gone into a tailspin. I sat there, staring at the telly. Not watching, just staring. But in my head, the visions were becoming more vivid and more frenzied. When I did manage to doze off, my mind tried to put the pieces together. I could see the man hitting the screaming child, and the scene became ever more violent. I’d wake up soaked in sweat, my heart pounding. It reached the point where I was desperately fighting to stay awake instead.
After two scheduled days off, I went back to work. I was quieter than normal, tried not to make eye contact and avoided engaging. That was probably me giving unconscious hints that I needed help. But nobody said anything. And why would they? They probably just thought I needed a bit of time to reacclimatise after a particularly rough job.
In reality, I was rapidly descending to the bottom of a deep, dark hole and the world was passing by above my head. Unless I made a concerted effort to concentrate on whatever job was at hand, all I could see was the face of that poor battered girl. I was consumed by guilt and numb to anything that was going on around me. And when I got home, it got worse. Even the sound of the kids’ feet reminded me of the man stomping down the stairs.
I’d had no training in how to deal with a situation like this and there was no one I felt I could talk to. So I hid my trauma from everyone and suffered in silence instead. I should have talked to my wife, but I didn’t want to burden her with my problems. I was the man of the house and needed to get a grip and pull myself together. My wife was always happy to listen, but she didn’t work for the ambulance service, so I didn’t think she’d understand. When I heard that the man had been charged with grievous bodily harm, I thought that might make me feel better. But it made things worse. I grew angrier and more frustrated. Whenever I imagined his vile face, I wanted to scream.
Culturally, things hadn’t changed much since the time I was stabbed as a teenager. A stiff upper lip was still seen as a noble and dignified thing to possess. If you’re a bloke reading this, when was the last time a male mate said to you, out of the blue, ‘How’s life? Are you okay? Do you need to talk about anything?’ When was the last time a male mate gave you a cuddle? Whatever the answer, it doesn’t happen nearly enough. Often people don’t talk because they’re worried that their mates just won’t get it. I suspect that’s particularly the case in the services, whether you’re an ambulance person, a copper or a firefighter. But doctors, nurses and soldiers will have the same dilemma.
It can be terribly deflating reaching out to someone and revealing your inner turmoil, only to be met with indifference: ‘Oh, that sounds awful . . . anyway, let’s keep it light, shall we?’ I can’t really blame anyone. I’m not really interested in the nitty-gritty of other people’s jobs, and I often assume they’re not really interested in talking about whatever it is they do for a living either.
Sometimes, someone will ask me how work has been and I’ll really want to say, ‘Well . . . I’m dealing with more dead people than you can shake a shitty stick at. I went to this one bloke who was found dead on the roof of a pub. And I saw this other bloke being dragged out of his house with smoke billowing off him. I could feel the heat radiating from his body and smell his burning flesh.’ Stories like that, which I experienced in every dimension and rattled me to my boots, are not easy to bring up down the Dog and Duck: ‘A pint of Fosters and some Scampi Fries please, Trevor. When you get back, I’ll tell you about the man I saw face down in a puddle. Then we’ll have a go on the quiz machine . . .’
I became more withdrawn at work, to the extent that I almost stopped talking. I stopped playing with the kids. It was as if someone had switched me off and I was sleepwalking, which isn’t ideal when you’re tasked with saving people’s lives. Then I heard that the girl had died and the man had been charged with murder. This pushed me further towards breaking point.
I started drinking heavily, usually on my own, to combat my anxiety and help me sleep. It didn’t work. There was a three-month wait for the case to come to court, and the closer it got to the date, the more anxious I became about giving evidence. I felt such a heavy responsibility. Because I was desperate to do my best for the murdered girl, I was playing the scene over and over in my head, to make sure I didn’t leave out any important details and allow this scumbag to wriggle off the hook.
I had a friend and colleague called Rich who was about my age, so I decided to reach out to him. But it wasn’t easy. My original plan was to phone him, but I couldn’t summon the courage. So I wrote him a text message, which I quickly deleted. I rewrote and eventually sent it, but immediately turned off my phone, because I was terrified by what he would say. When I turned it back on about half an hour later, I had a message from him: ‘I’m on my way round. Put the kettle on.’
When Rich turned up I kind of broke down. I already knew what I had to do – make an appointment with my GP, speak to a counsellor – but Rich reaffirmed it. In addition, he let me know that it was okay to feel like I did, that anyone who had seen what I did might feel the same. In short, he made it very clear that he understood. That conversation was the start of the next chapter.
Two or three weeks after attending the dead child, I paid a visit to my GP, at my wife’s suggestion. She offered to come with me, but I didn’t want her to see me cry. Sitting in the surgery’s waiting room, I was thinking, I can’t be doing with this. And even as I was walking into the doctor’s room, I was considering changing my story: ‘Oh, it’s probably nothing serious, but I’m a bit worried about this mole . . .’ I was embarrassed. I was a man, and real men don’t have these problems. And if they do, they certainly don’t share them. Not only that, I was supposed to be a hardy professional, not weak and feeble.
I plonked myself down on the chair and wanted the ground underneath to swallow me up. The doctor said, ‘How can I help you?’ I sat in silence for maybe a minute. Eventually I said, ‘I don’t really know where to start. It’s a long story. I work for the ambulance service, I saw something terrible. And I’ve been having a hard time since.’ As soon as I said that, it was like the weight of the world had been lifted from my shoulders. That first step is always the hardest.
My doctor was so understanding and supportive. She signed me off work and referred me for counselling. My counsellor was an amazing guy called Roger, who was based in the same surgery, a couple of doors from my house. Roger was a former police counsellor and totally got what I was going through. But while chatting to him helped, I felt like I couldn’t get well until the court case had been and gone.
However, on the day he was due to stand trial, the man changed his plea from not guilty of murder to guilty of manslaughter, which meant my evidence was no longer needed. The Crown Prosecution Service accepted his story that he’d lost his temper and violently shaken her, and he was sentenced to nine years in prison. It felt like being kicked in the stomach. I’d built myself up, braced myself, and now it felt like this guy had got away with murder.
The post-mortem examination had found that the girl had suffered severe head injuries, a lacerated liver, bruising to the lining of her stomach and other parts of her body. Her mother had been in police custody while she was dying, because her boyfriend hadn’t told the truth. And the person who had caused all this suffering would probably be out in a few years.
I lost all faith in the justice system, but I had no choice but to accept the decision and try to get on with my life. But I still wasn’t right. I became less and less interested in the people around me. I wrapped myself in a blanket of sorrow and all I could think about was how messed up and dark the world was.
I got the odd call from work, but the ‘How are you feeling?’ was usually closely followed by ‘When do you think you’ll be back in?’ or ‘Can you send another sick note?’ Nobody ever said, ‘Is there anything we can do to help you?’ I’m sure people cared, but it didn’t come across that way. If your bosses aren’t telling you not to worry about not coming in, you’re likely to think you’re letting the side down. Like a soldier injured in battle and dragged from the field, I felt guilty that my mates were still out there on the frontline.
Mental illness doesn’t just affect the person afflicted by it, it also affects the people closest to them. My wife tried to reach out to me, but I wasn’t interested. And before long, my marriage was falling apart. I was there in person but not in spirit. Amy could see I was suffering and tried to help. But I shut her out, which was obviously difficult for her to deal with.
But Roger was like a port in a storm. He left no stone unturned, delved right back to even before I was stabbed. And once he’d prised open the lid, everything came pouring out. He made me realise that a life is like a house. Your foundations are the childhood your parents give you (thank God my foundations were sturdy) and each year after that is like a row of bricks. Some of those rows will be laid with crumbling bricks and iffy cement, and if you ignore those flaws and carry on building on top of them, eventually the whole house will come crashing down. That’s what happened to me. Early fatherhood, the stabbing, the murdered woman, the dead child, the hangings, the drownings, the overdoses, the car crashes, the cardiac arrests, they’d all been compacted, but now they had come loose. And now it was a case of gathering up the debris and trying to make it whole again.
Roger encouraged me to channel the energy I’d not been able to use to give evidence in the court case into trying to instigate a change elsewhere. He suggested that before I return to work, I speak to my manager. So after about four months off, when I was starting to feel a bit more like my old self, I arranged a meeting. My manager insisted that HR be there, which made me think that they were worried I was going to lodge a complaint. That was never my intention.
At the meeting, I explained that I’d attended this horrible job, which had led to me being diagnosed with post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and that I didn’t think I’d been given sufficient support by the ambulance service. Actually, I hadn’t been given any support by the ambulance service. My manager sympathised with me, before saying, ‘If you can’t cope, then maybe this isn’t the job for you.’
I was quite taken aback by his response and couldn’t understand why they were so reluctant to help. I thought I was worth more. I told the manager I disagreed that it wasn’t the job for me and that it was more a case of me having a rough time and him needing to support me. But it was at that exact moment that I decided that if the culture within the service meant that my bosses couldn’t do anything about it, then I would.