Jimmy the Alcoholic
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.
on January 25th, 2008 at 4:11 pm
I hope that somehow Jimmy comes through and maybe gets to help others in similiar situations.
The Driving Instructor
on January 25th, 2008 at 5:04 pm
Was about to give up reading your blog, thought that maybe the critics had got you down.
I dont usually post comments, but just wanted to say that its good to have you back - keep up with the blogging.
Lets hope that Jimmy gets the kind of care that he obviously needs. Surely the ‘powers that be’ are aware of his condition and are pushing papers somewhere to get help to him.
on January 25th, 2008 at 7:39 pm
Great post Mark! I think we’ve all got a regular caller who we secretly like going to. There was one round me who wasn’t seen for a week or so and the local A&E contacted the coroner to make sure he hadn’t died. There would have been a good few ambulance and A&E staff at his funeral if he had.
on January 25th, 2008 at 10:37 pm
Good to have you back.
I really hope against the odds someone helps Jimmy. If one person in psych services can make a connection, let him see there are so many things out there worth living for. Only 26…. wow.
on January 25th, 2008 at 11:22 pm
We do develop relationships with our frequent fliers, however dysfunctional and paternalistic they may be.
I blogged about the death of one of my regulars just a few months ago because his passing was a great loss to our department, in its own strange way…
on January 26th, 2008 at 9:02 pm
Dear Mark,
I’m reading your blog for more than a year, now, and I would like to encourage you to keep on blogging, no matter what the critics say.
In Belgium, we also have our regular callers. As you may know, the Belgian law on emergency medical care says that ambulance controll has to send out an ambulance for each call for help they receive. Because of this law, we have a lot of calls for drunk people.
I work in Ghent, which is one of the most beautifull places in Belgium, whith a lot of old medieval buildings. During our last shift (which is a 24-hour shift) my partner and I had 16 calls. 5 of them were for drunk people.
One of the drunks we’ve had tot attend to was our “most regular flyer”: a 40-year old alcoholic. A few years ago, he was atmitted to hospital with almost 7 promille alcohol in his blood. The doctor at the A&E departement could not believe his eyes, when the lab-results came in. They had to intubate him, and they kept him on intensive care for more than a week.
When we received the call, last night, I felt sorry for him. We drive him to a hospital more than twice a week, but he never seems to get the help he needs. In fact, 2 of the 4 hospitals in Ghent simply refuse to take him in. The other ones try to get him back on the streets as fast as they can. Sometimes, he’s dicharged before we have sorted out our paper-work, after bringing him in.
It’s a sad world, we live in…
on January 26th, 2008 at 11:56 pm
the closes i got to that is a regular First aid user at work. she would be seen by a first aid at least one a week, usually me. and when i dont get called to her (or fellow FA’ers) for a week i do wonder if she is fine. usually she is.
nice to see you are still blogging, after the comments you made in your last post. keep on, its nice to read.
on February 5th, 2008 at 12:07 am
I also take 999 calls and have similar e regular callers, although i keep proffesional i can’t help losing my sympathy with these regular callers. when you take a call for a baby in arrest one minute then a regular patient who has decided to self harm for the 3rd time today you tend to loose your sympathy for their mental state. Think there is a gap in the system as nothing ever seems to get done about these callers, and they are obviously in need of urgent mental treatment.
on February 5th, 2008 at 10:45 pm
It’s funny how those people you talk to regularly move through a spectrum as far as your personal regard goes. Frequent fliers can be both agonizing and comforting at the same time, for the reasons you’ve stated. One of our more colorful regulars recently passed and we all kind of had a moment of silence for her. We knew something had happened to her since we’d not heard from her in months, but it was still sad even though she usually drove us crazy. Best wishes, and I’m glad I found your blog.
on February 19th, 2008 at 9:59 pm
Good luck from a fellow Jimmy who couldn’t bother other people with it.
on March 11th, 2008 at 7:38 am
Thanks for the nice read. I enjoyed it.
on March 11th, 2008 at 8:52 pm
Is it me or are posts disappearing of here?
on March 11th, 2008 at 9:55 pm
Alastair:
Nope, I don’t think its just you, unless we are both suffering from some wierd paired pyscosis, I specfically remember reading the first part to a story about something? :s
Because of all of those stupid immature comments left by someone using the same username as me =[
How come you deleted them Mark?
on March 11th, 2008 at 11:00 pm
Superman: the other Superman and his friend started leaving some VERY silly comments using MY username, so I had to bar their IP address and delete all their comments - sorry if I accidentally took out a genuine one while I was at it! Judging from the IP address (and sense of humour!) they were school kids - I had half a mind to forward the comments to their headteacher. Until I remembered the things I got up to when I was at school
on March 12th, 2008 at 3:32 am
Hi Mark…we’re not just talking comments…There are now at least two complete postings gone missing!
on March 12th, 2008 at 11:44 am
Yep. Yesterday the post about “Part One” disappeared, I just thought maybe one or both of you had been told to take it down by bosses or something. This brought the post about the guy in Yarmouth whose daughter was thinking of suing the ambulance service to the top.
This morning, this post about Jimmy the Alcoholic is at the top, and the post about the guy in Yarmouth has disappeared.
on March 12th, 2008 at 11:16 pm
Now that IS weird. What is even weirder is that I can still see all the posts. What can you see today?
on March 13th, 2008 at 2:43 am
I can see Jimmy. Hence leaving the comment here. I too wondered if the 2-parter had somehow managed to offend senior management, but it seems that something far more sinister is going on!!!
Keep blogging away - love reading your stuff!
on March 13th, 2008 at 1:14 pm
Yep…Jimmy (posted 25th January) is the latest I can see too!
on March 13th, 2008 at 2:12 pm
Yup - I checked back for new posts and found some/one (?) missing. The most recent I can see is Jimmy too…
on March 13th, 2008 at 2:17 pm
I would tell Jim….If you don’t behave I’m going to give your phone number to every born again Christian church in the surrounding area.Then I’m going to give his number and address to the Jehovah witness in town.That way you will never be alone Jimmy!
on March 13th, 2008 at 5:32 pm
I can only see Jimmy too.
Alastair
on March 13th, 2008 at 11:48 pm
now the post about the Yarmouth bloke and the Part One post are back. However, comments seem to be closed on those two posts (I can see the comments, but not add one).
on March 14th, 2008 at 5:19 am
Yes…they’re back! Thanks Mark…