And now, back to the usual posts about misery, destruction and idiot callers.
On of the most irritating events in the world for us call takers (and believe me, there are a lot of events that irritate us) is the phenomenon of the Interrupter. Picture this: some kind of emergency is going on, and a helpful, sensible person has called 999. You’ve explained to them that someone will arrange help while you ask a few questions, and they’re calmly giving you the information you need.
Now enter the Interrupter. The Interrupter will invariably wrestle the phone from the original caller, and without giving you a chance to get a word in edgeways, will pompously bellow at you: “High Street! Outside Tescos! We need an ambulance here now. You need to get here fast! This is an emergency!” A really, really unhelpful statement, since you got the address (including which High Street and where Tescos is) two minutes ago, you know they need an ambulance because you work for the ambulance service and they wouldn’t be calling you otherwise, you figured it was indeed an emergency when the first caller told you a guy had been hit by a bus, and strangely enough, ambulances tend to get to places fast by virtue of the fact that they drive through red lights, on the wrong side of the road, etc. Do they think that you are going to send a “slow ambulance” unless they request a fast one? If you are lucky, they will follow this up with a lecture about how you are incompetent, wasting time and how they are going to put in a formal complaint about you. After that, they invariably hang up, which in a way is a good thing, because it prevents us being able to answer back in a knee jerk way that really would give them something to complain about.
Anyway, a prime example of The Interrupter occurred the other day. It was the early hours of the morning and some kind of drama had occurred, resulting in a 32 year old man being stabbed. We get loads and loads of stabbings, most of which are just a nick in the arm with a dinner knife, but I could tell straight away this one was serious. The girlfriend, who made the call, was absolutely hysterical at first (as you would be), and just kept shouting “He’s been stabbed!”, the name of the road, “help me” and “oh my god, there’s blood everywhere”. Fortunately, she’d called from a landline, so I cheated and grabbed the full address from that, and police and ambulance were immediately dispatched, giving me a bit of leeway in deciding what to do next. After establishing that the attacker had scarpered, I got the caller and her female friend to try and get the bleeding under control with an assortment of cloths and tea towels. The friend did this, while the girlfriend stayed on the phone. She calmed down a little once this had been done, and I was able to go through the rest of the questions. Despite being terrified and still crying her eyes out, she still managed to answer me (between “aarghs” and “oh god help he’s dying”s). Her boyfriend was indeed in a bad way, unconscious with multiple deep stab wounds to the chest and back. He’d been breathing at the start of the call, but I wasn’t sure this would last long, so I asked if he was still breathing now.
“Erm,” she said “I don’t know… I think he just took a breath… he’s not breathing now… aargh! help! Wait, he took a breath…”
This kind of breathing-not breathing-breathing thing is known as “agonal breathing”, and is what happens immediately before someone dies. I knew it was time to get ready for CPR. But the girlfriend was upset enough as she was, would she be together enough to do it?
At that point I heard a relatively calm voice in the background telling the caller to give her the phone. I guessed this belonged to a neighbour and felt relieved — she would be detached enough to either do CPR herself, or take control of the situation and get one of the others doing it right. I happily left Distraught But Helpful Girlfriend give her the phone.
You’ve guessed it, the neighbour was The Interrupter.
“Look!” she said crossly, “we’ve already called the ambulance - and police as well! Just get here! *click*”
Disaster.
I called back twice, leaving messages asking them to call back straight away, but no-one answered and no-one called back. The FRU was on scene a few minutes later, and the patient was in respiratory arrest. By the time the patient was blued into hospital, the patient had been in asystole (”flatline” — in other words, very little hope) for twenty minutes. He was pronounced dead in hospital.
From the crew’s reports, it seemed very unlikely that the patient would have survived, even with immediate CPR — “skewered” was the word they used to describe him. Nonetheless, in situations like these, we always like to feel that we did everything we could for the patient and gave him every possible chance, and thanks to the Interrupter, that wasn’t possible here.
