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.
September 18th, 2007 at 9:21 pm
Very good points! And something you’re particularly qualified to remind us of!
September 18th, 2007 at 11:05 pm
You say:
(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…)
I do agree it’s a bit rubbish, but here’s my story.
I did this with the police once. I was driving along the motorway and there was a car which appeared to be on the hard shoulder at a funny angle. It took 15 seconds for me even to register that it had been at a funny angle, 30 seconds for me to think about it and decide ‘that wasn’t right, there were no police there’, and maybe another minute to discuss it with my wife, and persuade her to phone the police (I was driving).
By which time there was no point in stopping. And trying to walk 2 miles back up the hard shoulder probably would have exacerbated the situation.
I still felt like crap about it though! Wished my brain had worked quicker and I had pulled over 500 metres after the incident. But I felt less crap than if I hadn’t [persuaded my wife to] phone the police at all.
September 18th, 2007 at 11:44 pm
Exactly so. When I found someone who was very close to me unconscious and not breathing, I didn’t panic (much) until the ambulance arrived; until it did, I was too busy carrying out CPR. Although it became clear fairly quickly that they were almost certainly beyond medical help, I was very glad to have a job to do and to know how to do it until the professionals showed up; and I can quite understand why people in a frightening situation are able to stay calm by adopting the attitude “here is a problem: how can we best try to solve it?”.
September 20th, 2007 at 1:38 am
I’ve been in the ‘will my child survive the night?’ situation a few times, and once, one of them didn’t. (Neonatal death while still in maternity unit)
I didn’t panic particularly at first, each time, but when the initial shock wore off, the child in hospital and taken care of, then I fell apart and howled my heart out for weeks.
I have no opinion about what happened to Maddy, but to have left such young children alone in the first place I consider incomprehensible selfish negligence.
September 20th, 2007 at 3:16 pm
I’ve had a couple of times when one or other of my children had to be taken to hospital as an emergency (one breathing difficulty, one testicular torsion - VERY painful, needs urgent surgery to restore blood supply to the testicle). On both occasions I kept calm - and collected some very disapproving looks and comments from the hospital staff who thought I didn’t care enough about my children to get upset. Exactly HOW would my having hysterics possibly have helped my children?? Especially annoying is the fact that when my husband also kept calm, he got approval from the said staff..
September 23rd, 2007 at 7:51 pm
The thing that’s made me suspicious of Maddy’s parents is not that they’re not broken down. It’s just… to my views, nobody sheds that many tears in front of that many cameras unless they are trying to prove something, both to the world and to themselves.
Now that something may be that they are good parents… or it may be that they weren’t at fault. I don’t know. I do know that the tears-and-media offensive made me suspicious, and that it wouldn’t surprise me terribly if they do turn out to be involved in some way.
October 6th, 2007 at 3:45 pm
The thing is with the Mccanns is that they are both professional medical people and are used to dealing with problems calmly. We are so used to people in this situation falling apart emotionally that when they don’t it makes people suspicious. In a way, they are managing the problem rather than just reacting to it