Nee Naw

One of the things I love about this job is the way it allows you to practice being a total liar and sucking up to people you don’t like in order to get things to go your way. A man ring up because his girlfriend has “a nasty head injury”. A law of emergency medicine is that if someone tells you what is wrong, but not how it happened, nine times out of ten something dodgy has gone on (the rest of the time, they just can’t say it in English). I ask the man how it happened. He pauses, and his girlfriend can be heard whimpering in the background.

“We were having a bit of an argument, and, um, well I sort of pushed her, and she sort of, slipped, and hit her head against the, um, table and then the, er, door.”

Girlfriend in the background starts to cry.

“I see” I say, in a sugary, “it could happen to anyone” kind of voice.

“You’re not going to have to send the police, are you?” he says.

I say a lot of things that don’t actually answer the question. I’m not the police, it’s my job to get your girlfriend’s injuries seen to, the final decision rests with the ambulance crew, the most important thing is that she gets help. This is all true, but at the same time I know the dispatch desk will have most likely sent the call straight down to the police as soon as they see what I’ve typed on the ticket (”30 year old female, fell after being pushed by boyfriend, head inj, ? domestic assault” — putting a ? before anything is a great get out clause, because you’re not accusing anyone of anything, merely stating it as a possibility).

I carry on speaking reassuringly and calmingly to the boyfriend and hope that his girlfriend isn’t going to have any more “accidents” while they wait for the police, I mean, ambulance, and then say goodbye in a way that conveys the message that I have in no way cottoned on to the fact that his girlfriend didn’t fall and quite obviously got those injuries when he punched her in the face.