Unless you’ve been living on another planet, you will undoubtedly have heard of Madeleine McCann, the missing child whose parents are now under suspicion of murdering her. I have been rather captivated by the case, but this is a blog about ambulances, not missing children, so I won’t start boring you with my endless opinions and speculation. There is one thing, though, that I think is relevant, and that’s one of the reasons people have for suspecting the McCanns. Apparently, their lack of emotion, the way they have calmly and efficiently gone about setting up a fund and a worldwide publicity campaign to find Madeleine, is an indicator that they are guilty. According to some, any parent faced with the loss of their child should simply fall to pieces and become an ineffectual gibbering wreck. What a load of rubbish. The McCanns are not falling apart because they are treating Madeleine’s disappearance as a surmountable problem. They have barely acknowledged the possibility that she may be dead. This is exactly the attitude we have to adopt as call takers, and if our callers do so too, then they have the greatest chance of saving the patient’s life. Both times I have taken cot death calls, the parents were fantastically strong, and though sadly in those cases the baby couldn’t be saved, I have heard of plenty of cases where their resiliency has paid off.
Which reminds me of a call that came in while I was working some time ago, one which I was glad not to be personally involved in because it was frustrating enough to hear about.
It was the middle of the day and a call came in from a neighbour. The couple from the upstairs flat were running around hysterically shouting that their baby was not breathing. The neighbour had gone straight inside to call the ambulance, and, after giving the details to the call taker, ran back to get them to bring the baby in to start CPR. But when he went back into the corridor, he found that they were gone. He went back and told this to the call taker, who urged him to go and look for them and bring them right back. The ambulance was dispatched, and the neighbour ran off to begin a fruitless search.
The ambulance, which wasn’t far away, was just pulling up at the location when we got another call from a nearby main road.
“Big Long Road, W22. (Caller unable to be more specific.) Couple seen standing by roadside with baby, looking distressed, baby appears unwell. Caller not on scene. Was driving past.”
(You have to love these callers who judge a situation serious enough to call an ambulance but not to actually stop and help these poor people in case it makes them five minutes late for work…)
The ambulance was redirected to the main road and a general broadcast was put out to all vehicles in that area to look out for the family. Whilst the ambulance drove up and down, an eagle eyed FRU spotted the family getting into a black taxi. There was an argument breaking out. The taxi driver, very sensibly, had got out and was calling 999 on his mobile. The mother had climbed into the back of the cab and was hysterically insisting he drive them to the hospital, two miles away. The father was trying to wrestle the phone from the cab driver and shouting “just drive!” The baby was blue, lifeless and unbreathing. No one was doing CPR. The FRU paramedic had to forceably drag the mother and baby out of the car in order to start resuscitation.
By now it had been ten minutes since the initial call from the neighbour. The longest the brain can survive when someone is not breathing and CPR is not being done is three minutes. That’s how long the original ambulance took to arrive on scene.
It would be heartless to blame these parents for the death of their child, and for all I know he may have been beyond help from the start, but no one can say he was given the best possible chance either. The parents, obviously, “lost it”. They panicked. They thought to take the child to hospital, but not much else. They didn’t listen to the neighbour or the cab driver, both of whom knew that an ambulance and CPR would be needed to give him any chance of survival. Their panic and inability to keep it together failed their child.
How anyone can say that a parent should panic, and be contemptuous of one who does not, is beyond me.