I am pleased to report that finally, after a year of torment, Banana Man has been caught and stopped. I worked for twelve hours on the East Central desk today and there was NOT ONE single call to that particular Woolworths, no one collapsed on the runway at Gatwick Airport, no itchy penises and definitely no offers of a banana. He was caught by an ingenious police officer, who called him back pretending to be someone running a competition, asking him to give his name and address so his prize could be sent. Banana Man took the bait and revealed all.
It transpired that Banana Man is only a teenager and is seriously disabled, so at the moment he isn’t being prosecuted. Social Services are getting involved and trying to put a stop to the calls, and so far so good. I must admit that after months of tearing my hair out after being terrorised and frustrated by this individual, my sympathy-o-meter is rating about a zero and I am not terribly impressed by this lenient attitude. Disabled or not, he had the presence of mind to go out and acquire SIM card after SIM card after having them cut off; he was with it enough to answer call taker’s questions and laugh when they reprimanded him for hoaxing. I just don’t believe that he was totally unaware of the consequences of his actions and I think he should receive some kind of punishment for it. It also begs the question, if he is young and/or disabled, where were his parents or carers when the calls were being made?
Still, I suppose this is not for me to worry about and I should just be grateful that I will never be driven to distraction by him again. I expect to see a sharp decrease in the number of calls recorded in the East Central from now on.
For some reason, it seemed the depressives of London all decided to pick the same weekend to attempt to end it all. Even the nurses answering the blue call phones at the hospital commented on the number of overdoses and slit wrists that were coming in. There was one call that stood out, though. A woman in her thirties. Her husband had just walked out, leaving her with a selection of children between four and twenty-one. Beside herself, she couldn’t go on. Then and there, in the presence of her kids, she’d decided to commit suicide. You may ask yourself what sort of person would kill themselves in front of her children, but if you want proof that the balance of her mind was disturbed, look no further than the method she used to die.
She drank hydrochloric acid.
If you’re not familiar with hydrochloric acid, it’s a pungent, fuming corrosive that will burn through almost anything it comes into contact with. It is highly reactive and dangerous. Just inhaling it can be fatal because of the damage it will cause to your lungs. It is used for removing rust from metals, unblocking drains and in oil production for dissolving rock. The acid burned through one of the paramedics’ gloves and ruined the ambulance’s blanket. It took nearly an hour for the crew to clean up the vehicle afterwards.
The patient’s children tried to help her and in doing so, got the chemical on their bodies, causing some nasty burns, so the crew took them in too. A blue call was placed, and the patient was semiconscious and breathing at the time, but as the crew told me later, they didn’t think she could possibly survive. That acid would eat her up from the inside out.
On the way to the hospital, the patient’s ten year old son told the paramedic that as soon as he was back from the hospital, he was going to kill himself too.
On the whole, not the most cheerful of calls.
Meanwhile, on the extreme other side of my patch, a Hornchurch crew were on the way back to their ambulance station, which is located in a semi-rural area on the very edge of London. They were flagged down by a rather frantic looking FRU, who’d come across a loose horse wandering across a dual carriageway.
Horses aren’t entirely my speciality, and this is the LAS, not the RSPCA, but they couldn’t exactly just leave it, so I typed the incident as a running call and called the police, hoping they’d have the faintest idea what to do, because none of us did. An hour later (and fortunately with no life threatening calls in the crew’s area that couldn’t be covered, because that would have presented me with a dilemma) the horse was rounded up and returned to its rightful field.
When a crew attend a call and don’t take the patient to hospital, they have to record a “non-convey reason” on the computer, from a picklist with options such as “deceased, not removed”, “referred to GP”, “assist only” etc. I was amused to see that the crew opted for “declined aid against advice” in this instance. This conjured up images of the crew chasing the horse around and trying to take its blood pressure whilst the horse galloped away, whinnying “Please don’t take me to Newham General!” It had been a long night.
Two police officers on the beat around 2AM, five minutes walk from where I live, saw a gang of youths running away from a bus station. Running to the bus station, they found a eighteen year old boy lying on the ground with serious stab wounds. The ticket the police sent us requested an ambulance “on the extreme hurry up”. Fortunately, one of my vehicle had just finished up at the hospital, about a mile away, as the call came in. It only took them a couple of minutes to reach the bus station, but it was too late. The boy’s injuries were too severe, and although they blued him into hospital, he died.
Six hours later, at the end of my shift, I passed the bus station on my way home. I could see the blue and white police tape, a couple of patrol cars, and that people had already started to lay flowers at the scene. Though this was exactly what I expected to see, it was still a disquieting sight. Sometimes, working in the control room, where you can see nothing and only hear of events second hand, it almost feels like the incidents we deal with aren’t real - like an elaborate training exercise set up to challenge us. Seeing the aftermath, something as simple as an empty crime scene, brings home that every single patient is a real person with a real life to lose.
I clocked it as a hoax as soon as it came in. We’ve been getting regular hoaxes from a male who gives various addresses around a dodgy council estate in the East End. He’s cleverer and more calculating than Banana Man - he never gives the same address twice, so we can’t simply tag the location as one we do not send to, he uses different mobile numbers and call boxes, so we can’t recognise him by the number, and he gives outlandish yet plausible diagnoses - “I’ve stabbed my wife”, “My girlfriend has overdosed and isn’t breathing” and, on this occasion, he told us he’d been shot, howled in pain, then dropped the phone as if passing out.
I knew it was going to be a hoax. But I couldn’t treat it any differently. I sent the only ambulance in the area that didn’t have a patient on board, which was on its way to a 60-year-old man who was having a suspected heart attack, and a manager from another sector, as ours was already on a job. (It is protocol to always send a manager to firearms calls.)
The crew and manager waited for fifteen minutes round the corner whilst the police checked out the location and found some confused, sleepy people who had definitely not been shot. Everyone was stood down, and the crew continued to the man with the suspected heart attack. Fortunately, the FRU had been able to deal with him in the meantime and his condition was stable. If things had worked out differently, our hoaxer really would have been a murderer.
We get loads of these calls. Hundreds. The story goes, a helpful passerby has seen someone lying (NOT “laying”, please dear call takers) by the roadside, has not wanted to get up close to them, has rung us and has been unable to verify if the patient is conscious or breathing, and thus we have to treat them as if they are in cardiac arrest until proven otherwise. 99.9% of the time, not only are these patients not dead, they are not even ill. Some of them are drunk and a lot of them are merely homeless people sleeping. They rarely take kindly to having an ambulance crew turn up and prod them, and us control bods are similarly unimpressed that these calls have to take precedence over strokes and fits and broken legs.
So when we got the following ten minutes from the end of the shift:
Male lying at side of road, described as possibly deceased, umbrella over head, ? blood on clothes. Life status questionable, category Red 1.
I groaned inwardly and felt really guilty about sending that poor ambulance crew out in the driving rain and making them at least half an hour late for the end of their shift all because someone had picked an unusual place to have a kip…
… Well, I woke up this afternoon and found a text from one of my colleagues. Mr Life Status Questionable was actually DEAD! Very dead, in fact! So I must remember in future that just occasionally, the public are right to call these things in…
Having worked out that we are no longer sending ambulances to that address that might just be a Woolworth’s in the East End, our obsessive hoaxer has now taken to telling us he is at Gatwick Airport. Sitting on the runaway. Suffering from an itchy penis. Offering us bananas. I must have spoken to him twenty times last night.
I swear that if I ever come across this individual, I will do something with a banana which necessitates a genuine phone call to the emergency services.
Apparently we are getting a spell checker added to the call taking system. This is not a moment too soon. I sometimes think the ambulance service has a deliberate policy of employing people who cannot spell “vomiting” (it’s either vommiting or vomitting. Occasionally vommitting…) or diarrhoea (the permutations are endless…) I know diarrhoea is a difficult word to spell and some people are dyslexic or whatever, but honestly, if you need to write a word several times a day, you should learn to spell it! It’s a shame that a spellchecker won’t pick up the countless calls to persons “laying” in the road (to which my response is always “Laying what? An egg?”).
I’m not sure the spellchecker would help with the following error, though. We had a call to a house called “High Gables” the other night. The call taker spelt it “High Gay Balls”. We may have laughed at this longer than was strictly necessary…
Four people were stabbed to death on my sector (the North East) yesterday.
I’ve been on nights this week, so I was only really involved in the Walthamstow and Tottenham stabbings, though I caught the aftermath of the Leyton one. As they’ve all been reported in the national news, I can’t give any details other than to say what I heard from the crews and 999 callers was quite stomach churning and heartrending, and why the hell do people go round doing this to each other?
What the newspapers DON’T report is the hundreds of non-fatal stabbings that happen every day. Stabbing used to be a major big deal, but now it’s commonplace, and only makes the news if someone died. There was another stabbing in the afternoon on my sector, where the patient had life-threatening head wounds, but I cannot even find one mention of it on the news. The sad thing is that it’s only going to get worse, and I wouldn’t be at all surprised if in ten years’ time, shootings were just as commonplace as stabbings are now.
A while ago, I wrote about Jimmy, a regular caller of whom I am rather fond. (A stark contrast to most of our regulars, who are complete pains in the posterior). Shortly after I made that post, Jimmy called us feeling suicidal and was taken in to the local hospital - something which has happened on countless occasions before. From that day on, we heard nothing. Jimmy went from calling us several times a night to never calling us at all. I remembered what Jimmy had told me - that he’d been told he wouldn’t live to see his 25th birthday, that he was now 26, and certainly wouldn’t live to see another birthday unless he stopped drinking… despite his best efforts, Jimmy had cut down but not stopped. I assumed the worst, and felt sad for Jimmy. This is one of the perils of being an ambulance dispatcher, when one of your regulars stops calling, you have no way of knowing what happened to them. I hoped he was still in hospital, or had moved out of London, or even had miraculous recovered from his addiction, his depression and the health problems caused by his self harm, and didn’t need us any more, but I knew that the most likely explanation was that Jimmy was dead.
This week we received a call in the dead of the night from a address about two miles from where we last saw Jimmy. It was from a 26 year old male, suicidal, threatening to slit his own throat. The landline he was calling from was registered to a “G Smirnoff”. Jimmy’s surname, different initial. Could this be Jimmy, staying with a relative? How many twenty-six year olds are there in North London with that surname and a penchant for slitting their own throats?
As soon as the call taker hung up, I knew I had to call back to see if it really was Jimmy.
The young man on the other end of the phone was in a terrible state. Hyperventilating, crying, talking gibberish.
“It’s the ambulance service,” I said. “Help is on the way - I just need to take your name. For our records.”
No answer. I wasn’t even sure he was listening to me. “Oh god, oh bloody hell,” he moaned. “It hurts…”
The ambulance and police crew were just pulling up. I tried once more.
“What’s your name?”
“Jimmy… Jimmy Smirnoff…”
And the line went dead.
And I almost got up and punched the air in jubilation that Jimmy wasn’t dead.
Jimmy was later blued in to the local hospital with a deep, self inflicted laceration to the neck. It wasn’t an arterial bleed and it wouldn’t be the first time he has done this, so I was not overly worried or surprised. I’m just glad he is alive, and I wish he could know that.