On our first day at Nee Naw Training School, we were played a tape of an American nee naw dispatcher talking to a child whose father had gone into anaphylactic shock after being stuck by a bee, to which he was allergic, whilst on a picnic in the middle of nowhere. The call started with the father talking lucidly in the background and ended with child performing CPR on his comatose father until the American version of HEMS was heard hovering overhead. This temporarily gave us virgin nee naw dispatchers that our jobs were going to be full of high drama and life saving incidents and that we wouldn’t spend hours on end talking to people convinced they are dying of stomach aches, old ladies who have fallen out of bed and footballers who have twisted their ankles.

The reason why I mention this is because on Friday I got my first ever case of anaphylaxis. If there is such a thing as a good call, this ticked all the boxes. The patient had collapsed after inadvertantly coming into contact with nuts and her colleague had called the ambulance. At first the patient was conscious and alert, but unable to talk because of her breathing, but her condition soon deteriorated and she was unconscious, barely breathing and making an ominous gurgling sound. The reason this was a “good” call, other than the genuine needs of the patient, was because of the helpfulness of her colleague. She did everything she was told, including getting the patient into the correct position, getting someone outside to meet the ambulance, and then she gave me a full report on everything that was happening to the patient, telling me every time she took a breath and not once saying “Hurry up!” or “Never mind all this ‘trying to help her’ business, just send me an ambulance!” The ambulance ended up turning up in a target busting four minutes and the good news is that after a bit of adrenaline the patient looked a whole lot more perky and was conscious by the time she got to hospital.

Another dramatic call came from a posh woman whose elderly father had developed breathing difficulties and “couldn’t be woken up”. This woman was not a great help, and to my dismay, the old man decided to stop breathing halfway through the call. Obviously, it is cases like this where CPR really matters — most times, you are just going through the motions on a long dead patient to help the relative feel that “I did everything I could”. The posh woman wasn’t exactly rude, but it felt at times as if she was being deliberately obstructive. The caller refused to make any attempt to get the patient out of his wheelchair. Maybe he was too heavy to lift, but I don’t understand why she wouldn’t even try. I explained what felt like a million times that the ambulance had already been sent but that we needed to help him now but all she kept saying was “Make them hurry up!” and “Get me some help!” I tried to keep my patience and explain that I couldn’t make them ambulance go any faster and that was I was actually trying to help. I decided to get the caller’s husband to start CPR with the patient still in his wheelchair (which isn’t something generally recommended, but better than nothing), since she refused to try to lift him but it was met with opposition at every single step: “I can’t do that!” “That won’t work!” “I don’t know how to do this!”

It’s funny that people ring and ask you for help but when you try to help, they don’t want to know. It is almost as if they think that if they do anything for themselves the ambulance crew will think they are doing fine on their own and turn round and drive back to the station. I don’t think her father made it. He was still in cardiac arrest when they got him to the hospital, although they hadn’t given up resuscitating him yet.

On a lighter note, the most pointless call of the weekend was from a man who wanted the phone number for Pizza Hut. This was one of those occasions when it was difficult to remain polite. It always mystifies me that people dial 999 and then ask for “ambulance” rather than police, fire, coastguard or mountain rescue for these kinds of call. I know sometimes it feels like the need for a pizza is a dire emergency, but really, it’s not. Have these people not heard of directory enquiries? Mind you, the idea of pizza appearing on blue lights and sirens is quite amusing.

Finally, a warning to us all. Do watch what you’re buying next time you’re in the supermarket. Yesterday, I had a call for a very indignant man. It’s not an emergency, he said, I just needed to tell someone. What he needed to tell someone was that he had found a dead mouse in a loaf of a well known brand of bread. He wanted me to make an official record that he had called the ambulance service about this, which I did, not that it will mean anything to anyone. I then expressed disgust and then exclaimed in a horrified manner that the ambulance service canteen stocked that particular brand for our morning toast, and, sorry, I had to go to warn my fellow coworkers. The man went away happy. Sometimes all you need to do is express a suitable amount of sympathy and shock at a caller’s predicament and they are as satisfied as they would be if you sent them an entire battlelion of nee naws with their light flashing in unison.

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