If I’d been on night shifts this week, I’d have David Beckham’s dad to add to my list of celebrity patients (along with David Hasselhoff and Brian Harvey). But as I was on days, I found myself dealing with what must be one of the most horrible calls ever. I was on the radio at the time and I don’t envy the call taker who took this one bit.
It came in from man who was doing building work on a house. He heard a commotion coming from the house opposite and went to see if everyone was okay. Everyone was not okay; everyone was screaming because someone was not breathing. Since everyone was panicking, the workman dialled 999. Before starting CPR, the call taker quickly asked what had happened, in case this was a dangerous situation for our crew. The workman didn’t know. All he could see was a young woman lying on the floor, not breathing and her hysterical family around her - and that the young woman was clearly pregnant. Not wanting to waste any more time, the call taker started CPR.
Meanwhile, upstairs, we’d sent two crews, an FRU, a manager and the police. The FRU was a paramedic, the first crew were the usual technicians, but the second crew were what is informally known as a “green truck” - lesser qualified technicians who usually spend all day taking old people with minor injuries to hospital. Since the second crew on a suspended is primarily there just to assist with fetching equipment, lifting the patient, looking after distraught relatives and keeping in touch with control, and the “green truck” was far closer than the next regular ambulance, it made sense to send them. I bet they weren’t expecting to see something like that when they got up for work that morning.
The FRU arrived on scene first, took one look at the patient and asked the workman for the phone.
“Send HEMS, please, it’s a hanging!” he said.
HEMS was sent and then we didn’t hear anything from any of the crews for quite some time. Our sector control, concerned for their safety, decided to call the manager, who told her that everyone was still working on the patient. It had been over an hour and we wondered what was going on - had they managed to save her? Someone pointed out that if a woman dies when she is nearing full term, sometimes her baby can be saved if it is delivered by caesarian quickly. Were they doing that?
Then the HEMS desk got a call from their doctor to say that the resus attempt had failed and that they had pronounced life extinct. The woman was too early on in pregnancy for the baby to have any chance either. One by one, the crews withdrew from the scene, going off the road for that infamous cup of tea that makes everything better and them ready to face another call, which they did, an hour later. We made sure we gave them nice calls to little old ladies for the rest of the day.
We all felt quite despondent in the control room after we’d heard from HEMS - I guess we’d all been hoping for a happy ending against the odds. We all wondered what could be so awful in that young woman’s life that she had to destroy it, and her unborn child too. But perhaps the circumstances of her pregnancy were what was too dreadful to bear, and she felt it better that her child didn’t have to deal with them. Or perhaps she was suffering from a psychotic illness, not thinking straight, not realising what she was doing. You just don’t know, do you? It was too horrible for words. We didn’t want to think about it any more. We just pressed on, more calls, more ambulances… think about something else…