So if last week was the Week of Horrors, this week seems to be the week of calls that are just very sad.
I was listening in to one of the suspended calls on our desk the other night. It was from a man who had found his elderly mother dead. It appeared to be too late for CPR. All he kept saying was “I told my sister not to visit mum today because she was too poorly. I told her to come tomorrow. What am I going to say to her?”
On Monday night, I took a call from an extremely upset lady who had been woken in the night by her elderly husband having a fit. He had never had one before, which I took as a rather bad sign — if a fitting patient isn’t epileptic, alcoholic, diabetic or a child with a fever, then it generally means something is badly wrong with them.
I stayed on the line with her and tried to calm her down as we waited for the fit to stop.
“It didn’t take this long last time I called!” she wailed. I looked at the clock; we’d been on the phone for two minutes and thirty seconds. I strongly suspected that, unless there happened to be an ambulance parked outside her house last time she’d called, it just hadn’t seemed that long. The longest minutes on earth are those spent waiting with a critically ill loved-one.
The fit stopped, and the lady laid her husband on his side. I crossed my fingers that he would start breathing. I heard a snoring sound, which at first sounded encouraging (people usually snore post-fit) but the snoring became increasingly irregular and the sounds stranger. I strongly suspected that I was listening to agonal (dying) breathing.
I think the lady knew what was happening. She totally lost it at that stage and put the phone to one side so I couldn’t talk to her. I could hear her in the background sobbing and saying “Oh Jim, oh sweetheart, please don’t go. Come on darling, please stay, please stay…” and I could hear her kissing his forehead. Meanwhile, I was shouting “PICK UP THE PHONE PLEEEASE!” at the top of my voice trying to get her attention. After a few seconds, this worked, and I began the instructions to put the patient on his back to check for breathing.
“I don’t think… yes… no… he’s gone blue… oh no, he’s… yes, he is breathing… no, I don’t know…”
I tried to use the breath timer gadget, but it was no use, she was sobbing too much. I asked her to put the phone to her husband’s mouth so I could listen to his breathing myself. She did so. There was nothing. I couldn’t hear anything.
At this point, the crew arrived. I heard one of them say to the patient “can you open your eyes?” which I thought was promising because it’s what ambulance crews say to unconscious people, and not “when did you last see him?” which is what they say to the relatives of dead people. Then one of the crew came to the phone.
“Hi, we’re here…” she said “… and I think we’re going to need a second crew.”
I didn’t need to ask the reason why a second crew was needed. We always send two to suspended patients if we can.
Half an hour later, the patient was blued into hospital, still suspended.
I suppose it is better that she got to say goodbye to her husband with a kiss on the head than by having to thump his chest and breathe into his mouth.
