by Wharton, Kit
The nurses are pleading with us.
—Don’t do anything! It’s hopeless. The doctor said he won’t last the weekend. All you’ll be doing is prolonging his misery!
In my head I couldn’t agree more. God knows he’s suffered enough and I can see it’s hopeless. He’s obviously gone. But I’m also thinking: why did you call us? If you’d left it twenty minutes we could have left him alone. As it is we’re legally obliged to do something.
I don’t want to do this.
I start doing chest compressions, to keep his circulation going, but stop short of dragging him off the bed. I’m trying to think of what’s best to do, but I also don’t want to end up in court and on the dole in the same week.
—Can you get the doctor on the phone? Quick!
I carry on doing gentle chest compressions on the bed, trying not to disturb him too much. He’s so thin and wasted that proper ones would break every rib in his body. I carry on with one hand as the nurse hands me the phone. Doing CPR on the telephone. Ridiculous. I explain our protocols to the doctor as quickly as I can, still doing compressions. He gets it immediately.
—How can I help?
—Will you order me to stop the resuscitation now? Over the phone?
The doctor agrees.
—Yes. Right. I’m ordering you to stop. Stop it now. I’ll come round immediately and sign your paperwork.
And so thank God we can leave the poor man to rest in peace with his family, instead of breaking his ribs and dragging him off to the hospital to be declared dead in some shitty anonymous resuscitation room. We take our equipment off the bed and some calm descends, but we’re not out of the woods yet.
You should never outlive your children.
His poor mum, waiting downstairs, doesn’t understand why we’re stopping. She’s furious at the doctor for telling him he’d never last the weekend, and believes that’s triggered him to give up. She may be right.
Her husband and the nurses try to make her understand that if it wasn’t today it would be tomorrow, and if not then the day after. But none of it sinks in. We try and say the right thing, but what the fuck can you say?
We pack up our stuff and go.
18
Bodies
After I gave up journalism I spent years in the removals trade, humping furniture. That was quite like ambulance work as well, seeing people in their raw state. Divorces were usually the worst, when you were carrying out the furniture to two different trucks, trying not to bump into the warring couple. Not always the worst. Once we turned up to a job and an elderly lady came to the door, looking rather shocked.
—Morning! Ready for your move, love?
—He’s dead!
—Eh?
The lady’s husband had fallen down the stairs that morning, and died. The ambulance had been out to him but there was nothing they could do, so they had left him where he’d fallen. The police would come presently, to rule out foul play, then the undertakers would come to pick up the body, which was lying in a heap at the bottom of the stairs.
Removals companies get booked up months in advance.
—Well, look, that’s terrible. We’ll go.
—No you bloody well won’t. I’ve had you booked months in advance, and we’re moving today. You’ll just have to work around him.
And believe it or not, that’s exactly what we did. Stepping over the body on the way up the stairs and stepping over it on the way down with the beds and furniture. After about an hour the undertakers turned up to take him away. We tried our best but we still stepped on him a few times. At the time I’d never seen a dead body before – it was something to think about.
Not any more.
Georgie
It’s a warm summer’s evening, and a bunch of us are sitting around in the crew room of the station, just started the night shift, putting the world to rights.
Unfortunately, the weather doesn’t extend to Len’s mood. He marches into the crew room in a filthy temper, takes all the unwashed crockery in the kitchen and dumps it in the bin, then insists we sweep up the leaves out of the garage outside. The garage is the size of a football field. Everyone groans inwardly. Val rolls her eyes. Luckily, just as someone goes to get the brooms from the broom cupboard our beepers go off. We have a job.
International airport.
On the way the call comes over the radio – not always a good sign – and the controller sounds confused.
—Got a job coming in at the airport on an inbound flight.
—Roger?
—Well, if you could just go and assess.
—What?
—Well it’s a female, terminal-illness patient. She’s … er … coming in with her family.
—What’s wrong?
—She’s … Well, she’s dead.
—Eh?
—Erm, she’s sort of … dead. Died sometime on the flight.
—Well, what do you want us to do about it?
—Well … erm …
The controller can’t think of anything else to say.
—Just go and assess her, will you? Assess.
Great, says Val. What does he mean? Assess her? If you’re dead you’re dead.
Ours not to reason why. We shoot off.
The plane hasn’t landed yet, so we wait on the tarmac of the runway for it to make its deafening entrance. Then the doors are flung open and we make our way down the aisle to the patient, trying not to bang the passengers’ heads with the airway bag like the stewardess does with a guitar on Airplane.
The patient is sitting with an oxygen mask on between a man of her own age and a young woman. Luckily they are at the very back of the plane, so the other passengers can get off. The patient is cold, stiff, dead.
I put a foot in it straight away.
—Do you know the lady?
—Course I fucking do. She’s my mum.
Val gives me one of her looks. Brilliant. Fantastic. Well done.
—Oh, sorry. Erm … well, we have to do a few checks and so forth, just a formality you understand. Perhaps you’d like to get out of your seat?
The daughter and her father – obviously still shocked – get up and are escorted by the stewardesses away down the plane. Other family members behind go with them. The patient is a terminal-illness patient, coming back from a ‘goodbye’ holiday with her family. Father and daughter had a short nap on the plane, and she, sadly, took the chance to start a longer one.
The problem we have is the plane is a public place, and more to the point probably due to fly out in an hour or so, so we have to get her off and down to the mortuary. Getting her out of her seat and into the carry chair and down to the ambulance is no problem. The illness has wasted her and she’s frozen with rigor mortis into a sitting position anyway. But when we lie her on the stretcher her legs won’t go down, so she lies with them drawn up grotesquely. The husband stays with us while we wait on the tarmac for almost two hours for the port authority doctor to come and certify death. Then it’s off to the morgue at the hospital in the dead of night.
The mortuary attendant looks like death himself as we wheel the patient in. The mortuary is freezing – not surprisingly – and has what looks like oversize grey filing cabinets all along the walls. In one section there are tiny little filing cabinets standing alone. I can hardly bear to look at those.
—Just pop her in this one, the attendant says, opening the drawer.
It’s still like a filing cabinet inside, just wider and a good six feet long. But not very deep. We lift the patient in and lay her gently on her back. But the cabinet won’t close, because her knees are still drawn up in the sitting position. When we try to close the drawer they just bang against the top. We look at the attendant in panic.
—No problem, he says tiredly.
He steps forward and tucks the patient’s knees down and under the top lip of the drawer, then lets them go and pushes the head down to fit that under and in as he shuts the door.
Jesus, we
’re thinking. Now she’ll be jammed in there – you won’t be able to get her out! When you open the door, the back of her head won’t come out.
—No problem, says the attendant.
He reads our minds.
—It’s the rigor mortis. She’s stiff as a board now but she’ll be floppy as a baby by morning.
—Oh right, we say. Of course.
We get the fuck out of there as fast as we can.
Michael
Freezing midwinter afternoon.
I’m on my own in the response car today and the next call is a bit odd.
Man in car. Apparently dead.
The location is a parking bay, a hundred yards from a big house converted into flats.
The car in question is a knackered old Vauxhall with the windows a bit steamed up. It’s a murky afternoon and I can hardly see into the car. I can just make out, lying across the back seats, almost buried under various types of bedding and duvets and wearing a woolly hat, a man who does indeed look rather dead. He doesn’t appear to be breathing, his face has the waxy yellowish colour skin has when the blood has gone, and even when I bang loudly on the car window his eyes don’t open.
Unfortunately, there is something else in the car that is definitely not dead – a large dog that looks like a Staffordshire bull terrier. Every time I bang on the window the dog snarls and barks ferociously.
Normally I’m pretty good with dogs, but I can see this is not a good situation. The dog’s in its home space. God knows how long it’s been there or how hungry it is, and its owner is lying in the same car, dead. Now a weirdo stranger is trying to break into the car to attack both of them, and the dog’s going mental. I try to open the door a fraction (it’s not locked) and the thing goes ballistic. I shut the door again.
I get on the radio and ask for a police dog handler to come. I’m not going anywhere near the bloody thing. The patient looks very much like he’s past helping anyway.
Within a few minutes the policeman arrives and I explain the situation to him – the ferocious dog, the corpse, etc. The copper doesn’t look too cowed. He goes back to his car and gets a handful of biscuits from a packet he keeps for his own dog, then opens the door and holds out a biscuit for the savage dog. The ferocious beast takes the biscuit gratefully, starts eating it, and jumps down peacefully with his tail wagging and totters off to the field nearby, where he proceeds to do the most enormous poo imaginable.
The copper gives me the same sort of look Val sometimes gives me.
Plonker.
The poor thing must have been desperate.
Anyway, I can get inside and double-check the man really is dead, which he is. He’s stiff as a board, so much so that the undertakers are going to have a nightmare just getting him out of the car. He’s a big bloke. There’s no signs of suicide or foul play and, thank God, no signs that the dog – now busy stuffing biscuits down its throat as fast as it can get them – has started to eat him.
But he’s obviously been in there some time.
One of the residents of the house has come out to see what all the fuss is about and knows the deceased. The dead man was a friend of his, and was working on his car two days ago, but then vanished, leaving his own car here. He has a flat locally, has had some mental health issues in the past, and makes a living working on people’s cars. He’s been known to sleep in his own one before now.
—I thought he’d just gone home, says the resident. He looks devastated. Didn’t realise he’d been out here all bloody night.
It seems the patient’s worked on the car into the night in the freezing cold, then decided to go to bed in his own car with the dog, probably with a drink or two on board. Trouble is the temperature two nights ago was minus ten (it’s not much warmer now), and even with all the bedding and stuff, he’s frozen to death in the car. Death by hypothermia can be like that. Your heart just slows down and you feel more and more tired. And then you suddenly start to feel quite mellow and warm and cosy – and that’s it. Not a bad way to go.
He’s been in the car anything between twenty-four and thirty-six hours, and it’s a shock for the residents of the house, most of whom knew him. He’s been lying in the car dead and they’ve been merrily driving in and out of the place all day, oblivious.
To cap it all, the poor dog’s got a large tear in its scrotum, which looks horrendously painful but doesn’t seem to stop him being rather sweet and good-natured about the whole thing, provided the biscuits keep coming. The copper promises to take it off to the vet to get it seen to, and then it’ll go off to the pound, hopefully to find another owner. Having not eaten the bloke’s face off and not even had a poo in the car, I can’t help thinking it deserves a bit of luck.
I say goodbye and leave, as there’s little for me to do. The undertakers will come for the body in one of those private ambulances used to carry dead people in, and the police will deal with the dog and the car. And the residents will go back to their nice warm homes and fires, feeling just a little shameful, though you can’t really blame them, it’s not their fault. Not every car has a dead body in it …
… though some do.
Like the one that had a dead body – presumably the owner – in it, but also a sticker from the council on the windscreen, saying they were going to remove the car soon if it wasn’t moved. The sticker was days old.
(Who they expected to move it I don’t know.)
19
Those Left Behind
We lived in a flat in a house in south London. We used to play with the kids from the flats next door. Three of the kids were from an Egyptian family – their father was a film director or something. One day he got in his car, drove to the seaside, drank a bottle of vodka, and cut his wrists. They never talked about it.
The trouble with our job is you aren’t just treating the patient – you’re also treating their family. Sometimes the treatment for one is unbearable for the other to watch. Sometimes it scars them for life. And there’s nothing you can do about it.
Roger
Before we got together, Val did a night’s overtime with a colleague. Even more foolish, they did it on a Saturday night, in a town near here that’s a bit lively, to say the least. Lots of drugs, lots of drunks, lots of headaches. They had a typically busy Saturday night shift with plenty of the above. Then, about four in the morning when elsewhere things might quieten down, they get the job from hell.
It starts as a male, forties, fallen down the stairs.
So far, nothing too unusual, even with the age. Probably drunk again. When they get to the job it is a typical location, big Georgian house divided into flats. Very nice. The flat they are going to has a front door on the first floor. Behind it is a flight of stairs to the flat on the floor above. There’s a woman screaming behind the door but she’s not opening it.
—Can you open the door?
—No! I don’t know where the keys are.
For some reason the flat doesn’t have a Yale lock, only a Chubb one. And the woman inside – hysterical – can’t find the keys.
—He’s fallen down the stairs – help him!
—You need to go back up and look for the keys. We can’t help if we can’t get in!
Eventually they manage to calm her down enough to get her to go and find the keys and – miracle of miracles – open the door.
Then it gets even worse. The patient is a big man, naked, who has fallen down the stairs from top to bottom. He’s broken his neck and is in cardiac arrest.
Shit.
They’ve got to start cardiopulmonary resuscitation on him, doing chest compressions and getting air into his lungs, in a tiny cramped square at the bottom of the stairs behind the door, while trying to get a collar on him and immobilising his neck and head just in case there’s a miracle and his spinal cord is still intact. All in order to get him off to hospital. All the while the woman who’s called the ambulance – realising from what’s going on that the worst has happened, goes ape-shit. As Val said, to steal fr
om Jeremy Clarkson, it’s a bit like doing the Times crossword while being eaten by a polar bear. They try and calm the woman down by asking her to jot down some of the patient’s details – give her something to do. Name, next of kin, that sort of thing. It often helps, but not tonight.
—I don’t know any of his details! I only met him two hours ago! He’s called Roger!
Shit.
It turns out they just met in a club tonight, and have come back to Roger’s for, well … you know. Possibly a bit drunk. It’s Roger’s flat. He’s got up during the night to go for a pee and fallen down the stairs and broken his bloody neck.
In any dates-from-hell competition this has got to be right up there.
Somehow they manage to get Roger out into the hallway where they can work on him, carry on the resus, then with the help of another crew get him down the stairs and into the ambulance. Then it’s off to hospital. Val never found out what happened to Roger but it’s not likely to have been a good outcome.
As for his new friend …
Tracy
Early Sunday morning. The 999 call is to a female, fifteen, with abdominal pain. The call has been classed as Category C, so it’s not the most urgent we deal with. And it’s the first job of the morning, to a girl with a tummy ache, so we trundle off down to the location at a fairly leisurely pace.
Halfway down we get a call on the radio. The family have called back and could we get a move on? It’s still just a fifteen-year-old with abdo pain. Curious, but we put the blue lights on anyway and speed up.
When we get to the location it’s a fairly standard house in one of the better parts of town (there aren’t many). There’s a south-east Asian-looking man in his fifties outside, at the front door, staring at us. He looks deeply shocked. He points up the stairs.
—She’s up there.
He makes no attempt to come with us, just stares into space. Even more curious. At the top of the stairs we are greeted by a woman in her fifties, also looking absolutely stunned.
