by Stuart Gray
His seizure stopped but his breathing remained very noisy. I told the mother that we needed to get him to hospital quickly and I picked him up to carry him out to the ambulance - that’s when I noticed something very unusual. The little boy was covered from head to foot in some kind of oil. He was slippery to hold and I nearly dropped him on the floor as I lifted him.
‘What’s this on his body?’ I asked.
‘Oil,’ she said. ‘It helps him get better.’
I stood and looked at her for a second.
‘Oil?’ I repeated.
She nodded.
‘What kind of oil?’
‘Olive oil.’
I was dumbfounded, and so was my partner. I know nothing of African beliefs or traditional medicines, but I do know smearing olive oil on seriously-ill kids is a waste of time. This woman had left her son suffering for so long, only calling an ambulance because she had run out of options, that she had placed him close to death. He had been fitting for a while without any medical attention whatsoever, and he was by now very unwell.
‘OK,’ I said. ‘We need to go now. Can you arrange for someone to care for your little girl, then get your stuff ready and follow us to the ambulance?’
She nodded and left. We had to dry the poor little lad’s body with paper towels before moving him because he was just too slippery to handle safely, but eventually we got him down to the vehicle where we began the process of trying to stabilise him for the journey to hospital. It only took us a couple of minutes to get ready to go, and as my colleague climbed into the driver’s seat I looked around for the mother. She was nowhere to be seen.
‘Hang on a sec,’ I said, and hopped out of the vehicle and looked around for mum. Surely she understood the gravity of the situation? So where the hell was she? Time was absolutely critical here. I called out for her in vain. Then I heard a voice in the shadows - it was the mother chatting on her mobile phone to someone. There was no hint of stress in her voice. I called to her, and beckoned. ‘Come on,’ I said. ‘We really need to leave now.’
She ignored me.
‘Get in the ambulance now!’ I shouted.
She gave me a look, hung up and walked over - still in no hurry.
We finally got going, but the little boy was getting no better. His breathing had to be supported all the way and he was in peri-arrest; this meant he could die at literally any moment. During the entire journey, the mother said nothing and showed no emotion. I sat there, ‘bagging’ her son to keep him alive and she stared out of the window. I felt something like disgust, but I couldn’t express it.
The resuscitation of this child continued in hospital and I believe he survived his ordeal. I made an official complaint about the mother and the issue of the oil. I have no idea what happened about it. Probably nothing.
Not every close call is a life-or-death situation. There are lucky escapes which often defy the laws of physics and astound us all when we get on scene. Like the case of the luckiest Aussie I’ve ever met. He had fallen from the third floor window of a Bloomsbury hotel - located less than two hundred metres from my station - and I expected to be dealing with a serious head injury at the very least. In fact, I had pretty much resigned myself to the possibility that he would be dead when I got there. I raced to the scene and found a solo motorcycle paramedic attending to someone on the ground, on the other side of a fence. I climbed up onto it and leaned over, looking through the little crowd which had gathered around and trying to assess the situation. I shouted to the paramedic. ‘Do you need a Delta Alpha, mate?’
He didn’t answer, so I called for one anyway. I could see the guy he was attending to. He was lying on his back and he was talking, so that was a good sign. Maybe this wasn’t ‘as given’. I hopped over the fence and went down to where all the action was; I found myself on a narrow little patio area set aside for guests to have a drink outside. I thinned out the crowd, getting rid of anyone not connected to the guy and getting a porter to open the little gate at the end of the patio so that the crew could get access when they arrived.
Then I turned to the bloke on the ground. He had no major head injury; in fact, he had no visible injury at all. He was lying there, smiling up at his little audience with a strangely serene look about him. I looked up. Three floors was a hell of a way down. Surely he hadn’t fallen from up there?
I leaned over and took a closer look. He was practically unscathed and very, very drunk. He wanted to get up, but he was being held down by the paramedic. ‘I’ve called for a Delta Alpha,’ I said.
‘We’re OK, I think,’ said the paramedic. ‘You can cancel it.’ A wise choice after all, I thought.
I gleaned the story of how this young man came to be where he was from an eyewitness - a firefighter from the States. He told me that the Aussie had walked into his room unannounced, said something vague about not finding someone, and had then continued walking the length of the room and through the third floor window, falling vertically 40 feet to the patio below. He made no sound and there was no effort to save himself during the flight.
He’d landed on a metal table, which had crushed instantly. Had he landed on the concrete, he would have been killed or severely injured without a doubt. There’s no doubt the table saved his life. It broke his fall and absorbed almost all of the energy, in the same way that crumple zones in car wings and bonnets take the brunt of most accidents. Luckily, there was nobody actually sitting at it when he fell from heaven. Now he was lying on the ground, surrounded by worried looking staff and concerned paramedics, with nothing worse than a scratched elbow to show for his adventure.
He was full of energy and, on reflection, it looked pretty clear to me that he had taken more than just alcohol. He was buzzing. When I spoke to him, he shook my hand and our conversation turned into a Python sketch.
‘Awrite, mate?’ he said. ‘What’s the problem?’
‘You fell a long way and you might have serious injuries.’
‘Nah mate, I’m awright… look!’ Now he was demonstrating his full range of movement by windmilling his arms around and attempting to raise his legs.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘That’s all very well, but you fell from the third floor window.’
‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘I’ve fallen before. I’ve had worse.’
‘It’s a long way to fall, so you may have injuries you can’t feel yet.’
He looked at his elbow. ‘Nah… it’s just a scratch, mate.’
I couldn’t help smiling all the time I was talking to him, but I thought it possible he might have a head injury which was being masked by the alcohol and, possibly, drugs.
The other paramedic spoke to him. ‘Listen, we’re going to have to cut your top off so we can examine you properly and make sure you aren’t hurt.’
At this, he turned quite angry. He wasn’t having any of it.
‘Listen, you ain’t cutting this top off,’ he said. ‘It’s brand new.’
‘We have to cut it off so that we can examine you properly.’
‘You cut this top, mate, and I’ll sort you out.’
‘Well, it’ll be cut at hospital anyway, so why don’t you let us do it?’
‘No way!’
And that was that.
By now, we had more than enough resources on scene to deal with him - two ambulance crews, the solo motorcycle paramedic and me. He stretched his arms out deliberately to stop us getting him into the back of one of the vehicles, locking his elbows to make it difficult to get him past the back doors. You’ve done this before, matey, I thought to myself. He laughed all the time, joking at our expense.
When he got into Resus the first thing they did was cut off his top. He lay there looking very upset and suddenly very passive.
‘Aww, mate,’ he moaned.
I think reality was sinking in at last.
TERRORISM
ON JULY 7, 2005, terrorists hit London again. In a big way. Not since the end of the IRA mainland bombing campaign had the Capital seen the
horror of a large-scale, indiscriminate attack on innocent people, and the Provisionals had never managed anything this big.
It turned out to be a huge test - the first in some years - of the ambulance service’s ability to cope.
On that day, I was at St Thomas’ Hospital practising my intubation skills on people undergoing routine operations in theatre. At around 09:50 I got a call from a friend at LAS. ‘There’s been some sort of incident at Liverpool Street station,’ she said. ‘They think a train has crashed. It sounds pretty bad.’
I didn’t think much of it; it wasn’t as though everyone was being called in to work. But twenty minutes later, I got another call.
This time I was told that London Underground thought that there may have been some kind of ‘electrical explosion’, although the word ‘bomb’ had also been used and was now catching everyone’s attention in the Control room.
There was still a lot of confusion about exactly what had taken place and on what scale, so I went back to theatre and continued my work. Just as we were preparing the next patient for her operation, the hospital’s Clinical Director interrupted us. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, ‘but all surgery is being cancelled today.’
Obviously, this was a bit bigger than I’d first thought. The hospital around me was going into Major Incident mode, with staff hurrying here and there and little knots of people engaged in quiet, urgent discussions. I put on my uniform and got out of there as quickly as I could.
By the time I got to the ambulance station, the picture was clearing slightly. It was now evident that a number of bombs had been set off, and I was asked to join a team of medics who were heading out to one of the scenes, at King’s Cross. I sat in the vehicle and the tension was palpable. No-one spoke much, and I’m sure everyone felt the same as me: nervous, concerned about what we would find, and mentally running through some of the procedures we might use.
Just before we left, I got hauled out and sent back to St Thomas’ to help with liaison between the hospital and the ambulance service. I was really gutted: I wanted to be out there with my colleagues, as a soldier wants to be at the front line. Being pulled back was difficult, but I understood the need for someone to pull it all together at casualty. During the trip back there, I listened in to the radio chatter - naturally, it was all very confused but one quick sentence leapt out of the speakers and hit me in the face: ‘There are a lot of people with blood on them coming out of Russell Square tube station… make ambulances, 100.’
I almost didn’t believe what I’d just heard. One hundred ambulances? It made no sense. A call for 100 hundred ambulances meant that at least 100 injured people were coming out of one small tube station (later I realised that they were survivors of the King’s Cross bomb). Yet the streets around us, just south of the river at the bottom of Westminster Bridge, with Big Ben just across the water, were as they are every day - calm and normal, full of people strolling along in twos and threes, chatting on their mobiles, hailing cabs. Yet we knew that a mile or two north all hell was breaking loose: the distant wail of all those sirens drifted through the air.
When I reached my assigned point, everyone was numb and quiet. By now, we knew this: three bombs had exploded on three separate tube trains, killing a large number of people and injuring many more. The first had gone off on an eastbound Circle Line train between Liverpool Street and Aldgate, the second on a westbound Circle Line train at Edgware Road and the third on a southbound Piccadilly Line train about 500 yards from King’s Cross.
I listened in to the radio, trying to blank out the noise around me, the endless wail of sirens, people shouting, phones ringing; now messages were coming across that a bus had also been blown up in Tavistock Square, and that there were a lot of casualties now coming our way. All the other hospitals - St Mary’s in Paddington, University College Hospital in Euston and The Royal London in Whitechapel - were full, and it was St Thomas’ turn to start taking the injured.
Almost as soon as that message ended, people started arriving on blue lights.
It was horrifying.
When I opened the doors to the first of the ambulances to arrive back, blood and water from saline drips poured out onto my boots. The vehicle floor was awash. Inside was a woman who had lost both of her legs and she was being resuscitated in the back. The paramedic was pumping on her chest, and as he did so he was pumping the blood out of her body; he couldn’t stem the bleeding and perform CPR at the same time. His driver, a young trainee, was as pale as death. I looked at the injured woman and thought, She can’t survive this. I was completely shocked later when I found out that she had.
The first few patients were in a similar condition, missing body parts and in cardiac arrest. All of the crews were ashen-faced and exhausted; they were being asked to go back again and again to carry more casualties to us. It felt like a war zone.
As things got busier, there were screams, wailing, blood and tears all around me. People were walking themselves down all the way from Central London into the A&E department with cuts and bruising and smoke inhalation. The more seriously injured had amputations, open fractures and facial burns. The hospital was struggling to cope. This became the longest day I have ever worked. It must have been all the more so for those brave ambulance crews out there, some of whom had risked their lives alongside the police and firefighters to get down to the injured and dying underground.
One of my colleagues, a paramedic biker, was first on the scene at one of the incidents. He crawled into the Tube train through a window that had been blown open and began to triage the patients. They were still sitting in their seats, dead, dying or seriously injured, all the way down that carriage; all he could do was look and count and assess who could be saved and who couldn’t. The police were in the background, yelling and shouting about a secondary device, and eventually he had to climb back out. He got onto the platform and then remembered he’d left his stethoscope behind; it had been a present from his wife, so he crawled back into that quiet, dark carriage of death to fetch it.
As the day wore on, and the fear of further attacks subsided, I heard that taxi drivers were offering free rides home to emergency staff but that hotels were doubling their room prices for those who needed to stay - a disgusting act of financial piracy, I think.
I finally booked off at around 8pm, struggling home through the heavy traffic of that evening feeling drained and very sad. I couldn’t get the faces of those poor injured commuters out of my head, and I couldn’t contact my family to let them know I was alright because the overloaded phone networks were down. This inability to communicate had left a lot of people frantic about their loved ones. (Earlier in the day, the networks had been briefly shut down deliberately, in the City at least; mobiles can be used to trigger explosive devices, and the police feared more may have been hidden.)
Eventually, I got back, switched on the news and sat and watched the aftermath. My partner works in the ambulance service, too, and she sat with me as the enormity of this terrible day hit home. I shed a few tears, thinking of all of those people who had bought a ticket to go on a journey but had ended up dead, dying or surrounded by the dead or dying.
Next day I went back to theatre and helped prepare some of the victims of the bombings for their operations. These were broken people, and it was heart-wrenching to watch them go under: many of them panicked and didn’t want to be put to sleep. One man had his mother holding his hand as he drifted off because he was so scared. He would have been in his forties. A woman with facial burns and a chest injury cried for a long time on the trolley bed as she waited for her anaesthesia. I tried to console her as much as possible; I would be the one intubating her.
Like all of the Tube bomb victims, she had filth and debris from the blasts ingrained in her skin, especially around the face. This was soot from the tunnels and dust from the carriages, blasted into the skin by the force. The injured were wearing the masks of their experiences and I could see that they had a long way to go, long after the di
rt was gone, before they would begin to get over this.
As I cannulated her and the anaesthetist set to work, she turned to me, fear in her eyes.
She wanted someone to talk to before she went under. I said, ‘I was there when you came out of the ambulance. You’re going to be fine.’ It wasn’t much, but it was all I had. Then we put her to sleep and she went in for her operation.
* * * * *
Two weeks later, a second group attempted to set off their own devices on London’s trains and buses. Thankfully, they were unsuccessful. It seemed incredible: our last experience with this kind of terror had left so many dead and injured, but now we had rank amateurs at work. We remained on high alert for the entire day.
The morning after the failed attempt, I was due back in theatre - we were still working our way through the 7/7 victims. I’d heard on the news that these would-be bombers had escaped: everyone was to be vigilant because the police didn’t know where these people were. Bearing that in mind, as I walked toward the hospital I saw a young man sitting on the pavement with his feet in the bus lane. Buses were swerving to avoid him but he wasn’t moving. He had a hood over his head, which was bowed. I was in uniform and a number of people asked if I could check him out, so I went up to him and asked him if he was alright. He looked up and nodded but didn’t reply. He was a man of Middle Eastern appearance and I noticed that he had a bag by his side. He bowed his head again and ignored me.
I hate the thought of over-reacting but there were potential bombers on the loose and this guy couldn’t have acted in a more suspicious way if he’d tried. I thought he looked depressed, which is how I imagined these men would feel about their failed attempts at suicide the previous day.
There was a police guard on the Tube station entrance just down the road, so I went to one of the officers and told them about this strange man. They radioed their bosses and within a few minutes the road was sealed off at either end. The traffic disappeared and the man on the pavement didn’t even notice. Other police vehicles arrived and two armed officers walked towards him. As they got close they issued a challenge and the man looked up for the first time. I wasn’t close enough to see his reaction.
