Our regular callers are a funny lot. There are nice ones, nasty ones and downright annoying ones, like Mrs Haddock, an elderly woman with Parkinson’s disease, who calls every night without fail, claiming to be on the floor when really she wants the nice ambulance crew to change the TV channel for her. Legend has it that when one ambulance crew refused, she tried to attack them with her walking stick!
Probably the second most frequent caller on our sector, after Mrs Haddock, is Jimmy. Jimmy is 26 years old, a psychiatric patient and an alcoholic. His address is tagged on our computer system, and the warning reads something like this. “Jimmy Smirnoff, alcoholic, psychiatric, can be violent and unpredictable, self-harm, injects self with disinfectant and bleach, carries knives. Send police.” Jimmy sounds like the sort of person you wouldn’t want to meet on a dark night, right? Well, in actual fact, Jimmy is one of the nicest, politest callers you’re ever likely to speak to. He’s well spoken, intelligent and somehow has retained his sense of humour throughout the hundreds of suicide attempts. I’ve spoken to him many times, both as a call taker and on the dispatch desk. Sometimes when he calls, he’s overdosed or self harmed again. Sometimes, he’s in pain because of his previous attempts. He likes the call taker to stay on line until the police and ambulance arrives, and when he called a couple of weeks ago when I was call taking, I was happy to do so. Much nicer to have ten minutes of Jimmy than umpteen rude and ungrateful members of the public! Jimmy says he likes talking to us because we’re always nice to him. (I sometimes wonder if we should be LESS nice, so then he wouldn’t want to call us, and wouldn’t self harm. If only it were that simple!) Apparently he enters the lottery every week and if he wins, he’s going to give the money to the staff of Nee Naw Control so “you can stop working in that awful place and stop having to spend all night talking to idiots like me”. He doesn’t want the money for himself, because it can’t buy him the one thing he really wants - friends. He says we’re nice to him because we can’t see what he looks like. With a wry laugh, Jimmy tells me he looks like Frankenstein’s Monster. The alcoholism has caused his teeth to rot to stumps. His arms are gnarled from all the injecting and cutting. His neck is the same, because he’s tried to slit his throat countless times. Jimmy doesn’t know if he really wants to die or not. He just wants the pain to end, but every time he attempts suicide, he’s straight on the phone to us, telling us he’s “been stupid again”. Once, he told me, he went too far and ended up in intensive care for a week. The doctors said he was going to die and his family had all come to say their goodbyes. But somehow Jimmy had pulled through, albeit with massive liver damage. Jimmy was told that if he carried on drinking, he wouldn’t live to see his 26th birthday. He’d tried really hard to stop. He’d cut down from two large bottles of vodka a day (a day!) to one small one. His 26th birthday was last week. I said to Jimmy that perhaps the fact that he’d survived all the suicide attempts and the drinking against the odds was a sign, and maybe he really wanted to live and was meant to live. And then there was a knock at the door, and the police and ambulance took him off to hospital.
I hoped that maybe we’d hear the last of Jimmy, that he’d reached a turning point, that the suicide attempts would stop and he’d get on the road to recovery and start making the friends he craves.
A week later, Jimmy was back on the phone. Another overdose, another conversation with another call taker. Nothing solved.
Now I’m starting to think the only way we’re going to hear the last of Jimmy is when we get a call to him in cardiac arrest. So now when I see a call to his address pop up on my screen, I don’t think “oh dear, not again” any more. I just feel relieved that he is still alive.
