Isn’t it funny how people are scared to say words connected with death? Here are some examples of what callers have said to me on finding a deceased body:
“I think the worst has happened”
“He’s not conscious… quite the opposite”
“He’s lying face down on the bed”
“She’s on the floor and isn’t moving”
“He’s very cold and blue in the face”
“She’s gone all black and smells bad”
“He seems to be very seriously injured”
“He’s been very depressed lately… I think he’s cut himself or something”
The latter case was the biggest understatement I had ever heard. It turned out that the patient had slashed his wrists, taken an overdose and then hung himself. The ambulance crew reported that the room had blood running down the walls and was like a scene from a horror movie. The “very seriously injured” man, meanwhile, was found approximately fifty metres from his head after a run in with a pillar whilst on his motorcycle.
Despite dealing with death on a daily basis, the Nee Naw Service are equally reticent about using words such as “death” and “dead”. There are actually specific pieces of ambulance jargon to get round ever having to use them. The first of these is the gloriously optimistic “suspended”, which refers to a patient who is unconscious and not breathing but who might return to life. All non-breathing patients are presumed to be in this state until the caller says otherwise, and us call takers waste no time in getting the CPR started, doing everything we can to coax the caller into it.
“Purple”, on the other hand, refers to a patient who is d-e-a-d. In most circumstances, when someone has not been breathing for three minutes, they are beyond resuscitation and thus “purple” (which, incidentally, is just a randomly chosen code word and not a description of the colour of their face). If a caller thinks the patient has been like that for some time, or if they’re cold and stiff, or even starting to decompose (yuk), then we put “purple” on the ticket rather than suspended — which lets the crew prepare themselves for comforting bereaved relatives rather than whipping out their bags and masks. In these circumstances, we still offer the resuscitation instructions, but it’s very much an offer and not necessarily one we’re hoping the callers take up. The reason for it is a small part “just in case” and a large part letting the caller feel they did all they could.
Purple Plus is what we call a patient who is definitely dead. We usually only make this kind of assertion when the crew have turned up and been greeted with a corpse. I’ve noticed that other call takers are very jumpy about declaring a patient to be dead, even with such a glorious array of euphemisms to choose from. Even if they dare to write “purple” or “suspended”, it’s usually prefixed with a “?”, as if writing that the patient has died on the ticket will increase the likelihood of this being the case. Sometimes, when feeling slightly delirious from lack of sleep, I feel like marking my tickets with “DEAD” instead of one of these namby-pamby euphemisms, and sending it off like that, in all its unadulterated starkness.
There has been a sharp increase in the number of deaths over the last few weeks because the temperature has dropped suddenly by about ten degrees. The summer months are our business, but most of the calls are a load of nonsense. In winter we get far more serious calls and far more deaths. It’s mainly the elderly whose poor tired bodies give out. In summer I often went a whole week without taking a call about a dead person — at the moment I’m averaging four per shift. My record is seven. I think I must have been sitting in the Unlucky Chair that shift.
