A stampede of prison officers crashed past my door. Their radios blasting ‘Code Blue on A Wing’.
When Code Blue was called, everyone went: nurses, prison officers, doctors – a train of people racing along the landings.
Just in case I hadn’t heard – though I could hardly miss the noise – nurse Sylvie banged on my door. ‘Doc, Code Blue.’ I grabbed my bag, shoved a pair of surgical gloves into my key pouch and joined the stream of staff flocking to A Wing.
A couple of weeks had passed and I was still finding my feet in the huge Victorian men’s prison, Wormwood Scrubs, famously known as ‘the Scrubs’, with its five wings, A to E, each spread over four floors in West London. I was also adapting to the rude shock of coming from a relatively sedate institution, dealing with teenagers with minor medical ailments, to running between wings in a vast building that housed some very violent criminals.
I was overwhelmed with the size, the noise, the throbbing life of the place. A Code Blue was called for the most serious and often life-threatening emergencies, possibly a suicide.
I followed the stampede past the counselling rooms, as more radios crackled and more nurses and prison officers boarded our train.
‘All out, all out, all stations. Code Blue on A Wing.’
I don’t think any of us had a clue what we could expect to see at the other end.
Sylvie glanced back to check that I was keeping up.
I was familiar with the double gates that needed to be unlocked and locked to get from one area of the prison to the other. There were four gates that needed to be passed through in order to reach A Wing. Luckily, the person in front held the gates open for the next person to speed things up.
Clang! I heard the gates slam shut as I arrived onto the second floor of the massive four-storey wing
The stench of sweat lingered in the air from the prisoners who had been walking the landings minutes earlier. It was association time – the hour in the day when the prisoners are let out of their cells to mingle on the wing. But they’d been locked up prematurely to contain the Code Blue, and they weren’t happy about it. Hundreds of fists pounding against the metal doors, exploding across the four floors.
I followed the human train along the landing, avoiding the stares of the prisoners leering out of the hatches in their green doors.
‘Oi, let us out!’
‘You’re having a fucking laugh,’ another man cried from across the wing.
I carried on marching to the beat of their fists, their eyes boring into me.
A deep voice, gravelly from cigarettes: ‘I like the look of you, Doc.’
‘Shut it!’ barked the prison officer behind me, thumping the door for good measure. I was already ten strides ahead, focused on the crowd standing outside a cell. By the looks of sheer horror on their faces, whatever I was about to see must be truly shocking.
I pushed my way through them into what I can only describe as a bloodbath. There was blood everywhere – splattered across the walls, on the bed sheets. On the concrete floor, writhing in a pool of his own blood, was a young man with a massive slit across his throat.
Fortunately, a very competent young doctor called Mark was already there, trying to stop the haemorrhaging. He had been working in the doctors’ room nearby when the alarm sounded. The ambulance was on its way.
Mark was on his knees, crouched over the man, blood spurting onto his white shirt as he pressed both hands over the gaping wound.
What had the prisoner used to cause such a wound? A smuggled knife or razor? In that moment it hardly mattered.
I pulled on my surgical gloves and crouched opposite Mark. We both had our hands wrapped across the prisoner’s throat, desperately trying apply enough pressure to stop the bleeding but not so much that we strangled him, as we were also having to press on his wind pipe.
It didn’t help that he kept twisting and turning, spluttering words in a language I couldn’t quite catch.
‘I think he’s Spanish,’ Mark said. ‘Can’t speak a word of English.’
The prisoner started squirming again, my hands slipping from his throat.
‘Goddammit, can’t we get anyone to hold him!’ I shouted.
The cell was already too small with the three of us inside. Two prison officers in the doorway grabbed his legs in an attempt to pin him down.
The pool of blood was growing by the second, spreading across the floor, creeping under my shoes towards the walls. Despite the amount of it, he must have narrowly missed an artery, otherwise he would already have been dead.
He suddenly stopped fighting us. The colour of his face faded to white, his eyes rolled to the back of his head.
Mark yelled, ‘Where’s that ambulance?’
It seemed to take for ever for the paramedics to arrive. With someone’s life literally in our hands every minute dragged impossibly on, with both of us wondering whether he was going to die in that hateful little room.
I kept pressing on the wound. It looked like raw meat. The blood bubbled up around my fingers, streaming into the man’s long dark hair, matting it in clumps. He was about 25 years old. Trying to end his own life when he’d barely lived, it was tragic. I didn’t even know his name. All I could do was keep talking to him, trying to reassure him.
‘You’re going to be fine, we’re going to look after you,’ I said as I continued to plug the wound. I don’t think he could understand what I was saying, I just hoped the tone of my voice would soothe him.
Suddenly, he jolted back to life and started thrashing around again. It was like trying to catch a slippery frog – there was so much blood everywhere.
‘Will someone please hold him down?’ Mark shouted. He knew it was no one’s fault the cell was so small, but we were feeling the pressure, the enormous strain to keep this young man alive.
‘Clear the decks, stretcher coming through!’
At last! Help had arrived, and relief washed over me. We had literally been fighting to hold on to a man’s life. The weight of that, the pressure . . . The knowledge that we were about to pass that responsibility on, and to people with the space and facilities to manage the burden more easily, made me light-headed.
The people hovering outside parted to make way for the paramedics. There was so much blood on the floor now, the two men had to be careful not to slip.
The prisoner was completely still again as the paramedics prepared to move him on to the stretcher.
His head rolled to the side, his eyes were opening, closing, opening . . . and then staying closed for longer each time. He was fading. The paramedics counted down the lift on to the stretcher.
‘One, two, three!’ They heaved the prisoner sideways while I continued to press on the wound.
Just when I thought he had finally died, his eyelids opened. He looked directly into my eyes, staring at me with the most intense gaze. The only thing I could think was Poor bugger, the last thing you’re going to see is me!
He clearly had other ideas, as he started struggling again like a caged wild animal. I wasn’t sure if he was attempting to make a run for it, or if he was trying to stop us from saving him.
We pinned him down as the paramedics tightened the straps around his arms and legs. I wanted to scream. ‘We’ve tried so hard to keep you alive, and you’re killing yourself with every movement. Just lie still!’
But I had to remind myself: dying was, it would seem, exactly what he had wanted. I watched the paramedics carry him off along the landing, hoping for the best. They continued to apply pressure to the wound and get him to hospital as quick as possible. The wound was far too deep and extensive for a quick patch-up. He would almost certainly need a blood transfusion, that’s if he even survived the journey to the hospital.
The banging from the prisoners was louder than ever, but a deathly silence had fallen across the crowd in and outside the cell. We all looked at each other, stunned.
Finally, Mark spoke, quietly thanking everyone for doing the best job we could have possibly done. We all shared the same sense of overwhelming relief that we had managed to keep the young man alive.
We then began to try to find out more about him . . . Who was he? How long had he been in prison? What was his story? Was he on an ACCT book, or was his act of self-harm completely unexpected?
Nobody knew the answers. He had only been in the Scrubs for a few days. He hadn’t needed to see a doctor, and as far as the staff knew, he was a foreign national on remand for burglary, waiting for sentencing.
The prisoner’s cell mate, who had raised the alarm, was in just as much shock as everyone else.
He was a half-Asian guy, with a goatee beard and a shaved head. He must have been on remand, too, because he was wearing his own clothes rather than the grey prison tracksuit handed out to those who had been sentenced for their crime. Just over 60 per cent of the prisoners at the Scrubs were on remand – waiting to hear how much time they would have to spend behind bars. He had a thick cockney accent.
‘I’ve been coming here for years and years. I’ve been in and out of prison since I was 17, but oh my days, I have never seen anything like that,’ he said, staring in disbelief at the blood.
‘Did he seem distressed or agitated?’ I asked. I was still struggling to get my head around the idea that someone could suddenly just turn and slit their own throat.
His cell mate shrugged, kicking his foot against the wall. ‘Nah, he was quiet, kept himself to himself, hadn’t been causing me any problems. But then I wouldn’t know because I couldn’t understand what he was saying, anyways.’ He coughed harshly. ‘So who’s going to clear this up then? ’Cos I ain’t touching that blood.’
One of the prison guards stepped in. ‘All right, all right, the Doc doesn’t have time to hear about this,’ he said and ushered him along the landing.
As everyone dispersed, I asked Sylvie if I could go to the loo. I was still being chaperoned everywhere until I had my own set of keys, which meant I needed someone to unlock the bathroom every time I needed to go.
We both walked in silence back towards the Healthcare block, still digesting what had happened. I didn’t really need the loo, I just had this overwhelming urge to clean my hands. Even though I’d been wearing protective latex gloves, I could still envisage the blood on my fingers, hard to forget the feeling of its warmth and stickiness as it began to congeal.
I’d been in the ladies for a while when Sylvie called out.
‘Are you all right in there, Doc?’
I’d slipped into a bit of a trance, letting the cold water wash over my hands, watching it swirl down the grimy plughole. My mind flashing back to the blood spurting out of the man’s throat.
I was still a million miles away, trying to process what had happened, when Sylvie called out to me again.
‘Doc?’
‘Just coming,’ I replied.
I looked up at my reflection in the mirror. My complexion was almost as ghostly white as the prisoner who slit his throat. My shirt was smeared with blood. On my face, splatters of blood! I rubbed furiously at the specks on my cheek with my forefinger.
Sylvie popped her nose around the door. ‘Doc?’
I drew a long breath.
‘Yes, sorry, just needed to clean myself up a bit. Ready to go now!’
Sylvie said that everyone involved in the suicide attempt had to head over to the governor’s office for a debrief. ‘It’s standard procedure after a major incident,’ she explained.
I was yet to properly meet the Number One Governor. The prison was so large it had a lot of governors, and they could be spotted easily amongst all the officers in uniform because they wore civvies.
I took one last look in the mirror, ran my hands through my cropped hair, took another deep breath and said, ‘Yes, let’s go!’
We walked across to the Admin block and a large meeting room where the governer was waiting. Soon we were all assembled, seated around the large conference table.
The governer thanked everyone for the part they had played in the incident, and asked if anyone had any concerns or comments about how things had been handled. He then said that if anyone felt traumatised by what they had seen they could go home early.
Nobody took him up on the offer. The day our response to seeing trauma was to walk away, well . . . that would be the last day we had in that place.
I normally would have listened to the radio on the drive home, but I didn’t want any noise cluttering my thoughts. Instead I let my body melt into the car seat, relaxing my limbs into the padded leather. All I could think about was getting back, slinging my clothes into the washing machine and jumping in the shower.
The sky turned grey and a little drizzle started to splash against my windscreen.
I wondered if the young man would survive. The last update I had heard from the nurses was that he had been taken to St Mary’s Hospital in London, and was in a stable but critical condition. It was a miracle he was still alive.
I couldn’t help thinking about Jonathan. How all those years ago I’d talked him out of slitting his throat. I’d been so shaken up at the horror of how I would have coped, if he had gone through with it. Now, so many years later, someone had actually done it and I had been there to help.
I had a terrible feeling it might not be the last time. I had chosen to step into an underworld where brutality was a way of life.
Maybe the young man hadn’t meant to try to kill himself. Perhaps he just felt so desperate and overwhelmed with being in prison that he didn’t know what else to do. I hoped and prayed that we had all saved him from making an irreversible, fatal decision.