Nee Naw

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.

If you’re at a loose end, I strongly recommend you have a read of Siren Voices, a new blog by an Emergency Medical Technician. I know there’s a lot of ambulance blogs out there now, and I do enjoy reading all of them, but I think this one is something special. Go and have a read!

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On a less cheerful note, there has been a spate of comments on my blog recently from a disgruntled colleague who seems to think that I make up tales to “spice up” this blog. This simply isn’t true. I change details to protect patient (and colleague) confidentiality, but that’s it. As for background information, I use reliable sources like the BBC and the LAS website. If ever there is an error in anything I have written, it was made in good faith and not to “spice up” my writing. Quite frankly, there is enough drama in that control room to last a lifetime without me having to make things up!

In particular, I did take the first call on 7/7. One of my colleagues was featured heavily in the media after 7/7 for her call taking involvement, and that’s because she took four very significant calls that day, and I think this has led to other people thinking that she took the first one. I’m not grumbling that she got more attention than me, because what she did was probably more important, but I don’t like being accused of lying!

The last couple of comments have started to cross the line into abusiveness and I think this is a real shame because us control bods should be sticking together. We get enough abuse from callers without starting to turn on each other. So in future, if anyone spots an error in my posts, or wants to clear up anything I have said, perhaps a private email might be the best way to go, as this is meant to be a Proper Serious Grown Up Blog and not Livejournal. Cheers.

Many of my non-ambulance friends say they don’t like New Year’s Eve. Everywhere’s packed and expensive and you are forced to hug people you don’t like and then make your way home with a bunch of puking drunks. Well, let me tell you that compared with my New Year’s Eve, that sounds like heaven! You people with normal jobs don’t know how lucky you are. A New Year’s Eve of call taking is about as close you can get to hell on earth. However many ambulances you have, however many call takers you have (we had more call takers than telephones), you are never, ever going to cope. There were 1,825 calls between midnight and 4am, and 6,114 for the entire day. (To compare - on an average weekend night, I’d expect about 700 calls between midnight and 4am, and probably about 300 on a weekday.)

Broadly speaking, there were four categories of calls:

1) Alcohol Related Accidents
My mate’s got drunk and got in a fight. My mate’s got drunk and fallen down the stairs. My mate’s got drunk and taken some dodgy pills, and now he’s having a fit. My mate’s got drunk and fallen out of a jacuzzi. My mate’s got drunk and fallen out of a first floor window… It never ends. Some people grumble about these calls, complaining that these injuries are self inflicted and therefore not deserving of our sympathy and help, but I don’t agree with that. It is not like anyone deliberately has an accident and it isn’t against any laws to get drunk, so unless you think people should avoid doing anything fun just in case it ends in an accident, I think these calls are just as deserving as any other. On the other hand, I wish they wouldn’t all happen at once. And I wish I didn’t have to talk to drunk people in order to help with them. As well as the abusive ones, you get a lot that won’t shut up or don’t make any sense. There was one woman slurring so much I had to get her to repeat herself three times and I still couldn’t understand so I had to get her to put someone else on. She wasn’t even the patient!

(The worst thing about the calls is possibly the realisation that if I wasn’t at work, *I* would be one of those drunken fools…)

2. Just Drunken.
“My mate’s had too much to drink and now he’s puking up and staggering around!” Yes, that’s what happens, you idiot. He’s drunk. And if we send you one of our fully equipped emergency vehicles on blue lights, he’ll still be drunk. I realise it’s a bit of a pain watching your mate puke on a street corner because none of the taxis will take him home, but really, do you have to make it our problem? Do you realise you are going to have to spend the next six hours in A+E waiting while the doctor sees the people who are actually ill? Do us all a favour, and ring your mum to pick you up instead. And don’t you dare puke in the back of the ambulance. You do realise that it’s the crews themselves who have to clean them, don’t you?

3. People Who Don’t Know What Day It Is
Maternataxis, broken fingers, bellyaches… they all seemed to think that we’d got a special service running just for them and it would be unaffected by the fact it was New Year. I got a call from a man who’d rung a total of six, count ‘em, minutes ago, whose teenage daughter had backache. It may have been more serious than that, I wouldn’t know, because he’d refused to answer any of the original call taker’s question and hung up on her. He rang back to say he was taking her in the car (so why didn’t he do that in the first place?) because “she could have died in the time you get to get here!” and “your service is ****ing rubbish”. Cheers, mate, so are your manners. Don’t envy the staff who had to put up with that for the next six hours in A+E…

4. People Who Are Genuinely Ill
And of course, it doesn’t stop just because it’s New Year’s Eve. I felt desperately sorry for the old people with breathing problems and heart attacks - and due to the cold weather, there were loads of them - knowing that all the ambulances were out dealing with the drunks and they wouldn’t get a vehicle until one finished up at the hospital. I reckon that if you are struck down with a life threatening illness on New Year’s Eve, you must be one of the most unlucky people alive. Along with those poor suckers who have to work.

Fingers crossed that this is the last New Year that I will EVER have to spend call taking…

Just as everyone is whinging about going back to work, I am finally getting four whole days to myself. I only managed two complete days off between December 21st and today… so I was looking enviously on at everyone else enjoying the post-Christmas and New Year Festivities (more on the latter later) and eagerly looking forward to joining in… only to find it’s too late and everyone is busy taking their trees down! Damnit. Who’d be a shift worker?!

I was hoping for a q-u-i-e-t shift yesterday. It was my last one, and having changed from days to nights and back again in the space of four days, my body clock had packed up and I was half asleep. Still, a chilly Wednesday at the beginning of January - there wouldn’t be much going on, would there?

Wrong.

“Hello, it’s the fire brigade here. We’ve got an eight pump fire going on.”

“Okay. What’s the address?”

“It’s the Royal Marsden Hospital…”

Well, that woke me up.

“The fire’s in the roof. At the moment there’s no casualties, but we’re going to need an ambulance on standby…”

Funnily enough, these words didn’t make me feel any better. It was the exact phrase the fire brigade had used to me at 8.53am on July 7th, 2005, two minutes after bombs killed 52 people and injured 700 others. Don’t ask me why I always get these calls! Perhaps the powers that be should stop putting me on call taking if they want to avoid major incidents.

The Royal Marsden is a medium sized hospital in Fulham, which specialises in cancer treatment. There is no A+E there, but there are operating theatres, wards and outpatient clinics. At the time of the fire, there were around 900 people in the hospital - including around 40 bedridden inpatients and two under general anaesthetic.

The dispatch desk sent the requested ambulance, along with a manager and the HART (Hazardous Area Response Team) vehicles. The manager was quick to report back with what was both good and bad news. The hospital had quickly been evacuated and no one had been hurt. This meant there were now 900 people standing outside on the icy streets, many of whom were seriously ill cancer patients. The doctors and nurses - some just in their surgical scrubs - were busily ferrying them into a nearby church to protect them from the cold. The manager requested another nine ambulances while beds in nearby hospitals were found for the patients. Those patients that could be were sent home, but many were far too ill for that. The ten ambulances spent the afternoon going back and forth, taking patients all over London.

Call taking became a bit hectic after that. Of course, we weren’t getting calls about the fire itself, but being ten ambulances short for an entire afternoon lead to delays, particularly in the west and central areas. As vehicles moved out of their areas to cover, the shortfall was felt all over London. It wasn’t so bad that we had to refuse any calls like we did on 7/7, but response times were definitely slower than you’d expect.

The response of callers was an interesting insight into human nature. I must admit I quite liked having a ‘proper’ answer to the ‘why isn’t the ambulance here NOW?’ type questions. Terribly sorry, but we’re having difficulty finding someone to deal with your bellyache because there’s a hospital full of critically ill cancer patients on fire and we’re out SAVING LIVES like we’re meant to. Not everyone knew about the fire, and some people were incredibly apologetic. One woman, a perpetually drunk regular caller, seemed absolutely mortified when I told her, and was silenced for the first time in her entire life. Others were understanding and offered to make their own way to free up ambulances for the fire. Others, on the other hand, made me sick to the core with their selfishness. “I don’t care about the fire, what about me? You have to get here NOW.” If there was an award for selfishness, there’d be two callers fighting for it. A nurse at another hospital, who was waiting for an ambulance for a routine transfer, so she could go home. And a first aider in a well-known department store, who rang because a child had cut his foot and couldn’t walk properly. Sometimes I feel I am going to lose my temper with these kinds of people. I’m glad I don’t have to do call taking so often these days as I definitely feel I had done my time listening to the stupid and selfish.

Griping about The Public aside, though, I went home with a general sense of relief. It may have been a hectic afternoon but it could have been so much worse. The incident was winding down and all the patients were safe in their new hospitals. The outcome could have been so different.