The man with the vibrator stuck up his bottom should count himself lucky. Some sexual accidents are beyond embarrassing. At 11am on a Sunday morning I received a call from a young girl living in a town on the outskirts of London. She spoke with a timid, mousy, on-the-verge-of-tears voice, and explained that there was something wrong with her twenty one year old boyfriend. He’d been fine one minute, the next his body had gone into spasm, he was stiff as a board, turning blue and making a choking noise. My initial thought was that the boyfriend was having some kind of fit, although the symptoms weren’t that of an epileptic fit (or anything else I’d ever heard of) — his body was rigid, rather than jerking. I categorised the call as “Unconscious (non traumatic)” which gives it a priority of Red 2, the second highest priority (after dead people, hangings and breech births). The boyfriend obviously wasn’t breathing very well, but I wasn’t terribly worried about this at first because of the fit-like symptoms — people fitting tend not to breath properly, but they recover without any intervention.

While I was waiting for the spasms to stop, I asked the mousy girl for some background information. She told me that they’d been out last night, they had been drinking but not taking drugs, and had been doing what couples usually do on a Sunday morning when too hungover to get out of bed when the incident occurred. (I don’t mean that they were ordering pizza from Dominos using wifi and a laptop, I mean they were shagging.)

Then the girl informed me that the boyfriend had stopped spasming and was now lying still, so I told her to get him into the ready-for-CPR position, expecting that the boyfriend would now start to recover. Instead, she informed me that he was now breathing very faintly and making a faint gurgling sound and that his breathing was definitely getting worse. At this point, I began to suspect that the gurgling and choking noises described throughout the call had not been harmless fitting related sounds but in fact the ominous “death rattle”*. (Unfortunately, the patient wasn’t close enough to the phone for me to hear, which is a shame because I’ve heard enough death rattles to be able to spot one a mile off now. A dubious talent if ever there was one). I asked her to check whether he was breathing and she was all over the place — “Yes, I think so, but I’m not sure… I think he’s stopping… I can’t tell! I can feel some warmth coming out!” I was in two minds about whether to start CPR (if the patient is breathing, it’s really not a good thing to be doing to them) and sent her back to check again. Then there were sirens, a buzz at the door, footsteps and talking. The girl was heard to squeak “He’s not breathing! He’s not breathing!” and then I got a tap on the shoulder to confirm that the buzz at the door had been the FRU (ambulance car, gets there first) and that I could hang up now. I turned round to find half of nee naw control peering over my shoulder.

As soon as I had my break, I went up to the dispatch desk to see if they’d heard any more. Apparently the boyfriend had been in cardiac arrest when the crew arrived, but they had managed to zap him with a defibrillator and get his heart beating again. He was still not breathing by himself. He was rushed in to hospital in this state with a normal pulse but very low blood pressure.

A few hours later, I got a call from the supervisor. The boyfriend had died in hospital! Not only that, but the police were treating the death as suspicious. I don’t know why they thought it was suspicious; perhaps just by virtue of the fact that twenty-one year old men do not usually drop death for no good reason. Speculation, as you can imagine, was rife for the rest of the afternoon as to what had caused this untimely demise.

It’s funny after you get a call like this. You’re allowed to take a break if you’re feeling upset by it, but I find the best thing for me is just to plough on and not dwell. The next call is always guaranteed to be someone ranting and raving because they called an ambulance for their stomach ache ten minutes ago and why isn’t it here yet and it is always difficult not to tell them to bog off and give them a lecture about dying people and what ambulances are really for. While life is going on as normal for you, you have just been listening in on the moment that will change the life of someone just like you forever. That morning, the girl and her boyfriend were just a normal couple like my girlfriend and I and now he is in a fridge somewhere and she is being investigated by the police.

When I got home I decided to invest in a flannellette nightie for my girlfriend and develop nightly headaches for the rest of my life. You can’t be too careful.

*Since I originally wrote this entry, the protocols have been changed, so that if there is any possibility agonal breathing is occurring, we get the caller to time the gap between breaths, and if the pattern appears to be agonal, we start CPR immediately. This might have been a help to this poor guy… who knows?

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