A PARAMEDIC'S DIARY_Life and Death on the Streets

by Stuart Gray

We found the right place - by accident - and knocked on the door. It was answered by a large, broad man with a thick accent and foul, beery breath. He wanted us to go inside and check his friend out because ‘he ish hurrrt’. I wasn’t sure about this and neither was my crewmate. The flat had no lights on inside, and we had no way of knowing what the hell was really going on. But he was insistent and, not wanting to be seen as cowards, we crept inside to the hallway.

  ‘You close door now!’ he spat.

  Not a chance in hell, I thought.

  ‘No, I’d like it to stay open if you don’t mind,’ I said. ‘The light is very bad.’

  I was trying diplomacy and giving us an escape route if things went bad. I hoped he was buying it.

  ‘No, no, door must close!’

  ‘No, we won’t go any further unless it is open.’

  I really must learn Russian. It may not be their first language, but people from the Baltic states all speak Russian as a result of 40-odd years of Soviet occupation.

  He gave in and pointed to the room ahead of us. I presumed, correctly, that it was the living room. Another door, to the right, was open and it looked like a bedroom. We walked in to the room ahead after him (neither of us wanted him at our back) and his friend, who was smaller, but only by a notch, was sitting on the sofa with a cut to his hand. It looked, even from a distance, like a knife wound.

  ‘What happened to you?’ I asked.

  ‘Cut myself on blade,’ he said, his speech quick and garbled.

  ‘Accidentally?’

  ‘Nyes.’ I took that as ‘Yes’.

  ‘What were you doing when you cut yourself?’ I honestly didn’t want to know. The lights were still off and I felt very uneasy because my crewmate was looking into the other room, the bedroom with the open door, and the first Lithuanian man was watching him with suspicion.

  ‘Hey!’ he shouted. ‘What you doing there?’

  My crewmate jumped out of the darkness and hurried into the room I was in, with the tall, wide man lurching after him as if he had just stolen the family silver. He had, in fact, been checking to see if there was anybody else in the flat; anyone who could have posed a threat to us.

  ‘Put this light on please,’ I said, as firmly as I could.

  No-one moved, so I reached for the switch. The man physically tried to stop me from switching it on.

  ‘Look,’ I said, slowly and carefully. ‘If we don’t have the light on, we will leave and your friend won’t get any help.’

  He backed off and I switched on the main light to the front room. My crewmate was back in the hallway, peering back into the bedroom. This time he had the leaking light to help him see.

  I was in mid-sentence with the man with the injured hand when my colleague came up to me and said, quietly, ‘I’m getting out of here.’

  That got the hairs on the back of my neck standing up in a flash. What the hell is going on?

  I tried to follow because ‘I’m getting out of here’ is code for ‘Let’s both of us get the f**k out of here now’. But my way was barred by the broad man, and now he had attitude.

  ‘Where he goink?’ he shouted, in my face.

  ‘He’s leaving and I need to go with him because we need to discuss the patient,’ I lied.

  He put his massive paw on my shoulder and attempted to sit me down next to his sorry, bleeding flatmate, but I resisted and pushed it aside, trying to keep my balance at the same time.

  ‘No, you stay and help my friend.’

  ‘I will help him,’ I said, ‘but only if you calm down and get out of my way so that I can leave for a few moments.’

  A few seconds of nervous tension passed as we stared at each other. I never once let this guy out of my sight. This wasn’t going well, and I felt in imminent danger. I didn’t have my stab vest on and I knew there was a knife around somewhere. I might be in serious trouble if I didn’t negotiate my way out of here.

  ‘Look, I’ll come back and deal with your friend,’ I said. ‘But you have both been aggressive and my colleague has left for his safety and I should leave too.’

  I think he was confused by this. I think he wondered why we felt intimidated by their behaviour, especially his behaviour. He moved out of my way and I picked up my bags and left the flat.

  When I got back to the ambulance my crewmate had already alerted the police and a Duty Officer.

  ‘What the hell was that all about?’ I asked him.

  ‘There was blood all over the walls of that bedroom,’ he said. ‘It looks like somebody has been murdered in there.’

  We waited until the cops arrived and told them what had happened before our hasty exit. We watched them go up in force and thump on the door.

  ‘Police. Open up!’

  Nothing. Not a sound.

  They thumped on the door again, much harder this time, and the neighbours began to appear at their windows and doors.

  ‘Police. Open this door now!’

  They didn’t reply. We both watched and wondered what was going to happen next.

  After three or four more attempts, the police broke down the door and charged inside. We saw one of them struggle with the wide Lithuanian man. Then it all went quiet. They spent no more than ten minutes inside before re-appearing. One of the officers came up to us and told us that the man with the cut hand had been trying to hurt himself in a drunken rage earlier and the blood on the walls was the result of him smearing it all over the bedroom after he had cut his hand open. It was a bizarre but strangely credible explanation, though their threatening behaviour inside that dark, little dump they called home had still been unacceptable.

  Night-time psychiatric calls have their own potential. One night, when we were particularly busy and the police were run off their feet, my crewmate and I were called to an address for a violent man with mental health problems - he was a schizophrenic. We were warned to wait until police arrived because he had already assaulted someone and was known to use weapons. We parked up at the end of the road out of sight and waited for backup to arrive, but a figure on the street started to move towards us, shouting and waving his arms frantically. I told my crewmate that I thought this might be our man and that we had been spotted. We watched as he drew closer and I started the engine of the ambulance for a quick exit if needed; he held his ground in the middle of the road and now we had no way out.

  He stood there, shouting and gesticulating in a very threatening manner, and we called for an ETA on the police. There were no units available so we had to sit this out. He carried on his erratic behaviour and began to get closer to the vehicle again.

  Just as we were preparing to leave by whatever means we could, a lone police officer arrived in a patrol car. He immediately approached the man and a struggle broke out, with the cop trying to wrestle him to the ground. We got out and helped bring him under control, and he was cuffed by the officer before he became any more of a threat. Luckily, he had no weapons because I’m sure he would have used them.

  We sat there, the four of us, sweating and shaking with adrenaline, sucking in lungfuls of air. I looked at the policeman; he wasn’t huge and he didn’t look all that tough, but how brave was he?

  I have transferred a couple of psychiatric patients that have a place in my memory. One of them was a young girl who had murdered her sister and was being taken from one secure unit to another. A nurse escort was provided and in these cases they tend to be very large men, which is comforting. For some reason, this girl was intent on psyching me out and stared relentlessly at me in the rear view mirror as I drove the ambulance. Every time I looked into it to check the back I saw her eyes burning into me - they never wavered, not once. Thoughts of Jack Nicholson’s face through that broken door in The Shining ran through my head.

  Worse was to come. The girl demanded cigarettes and the psychiatric nurse decided to buy her some to keep her quiet. He asked us to stop while he got out of the vehicle and went to get them from a little shop. This was not an emergency transfer,
so a stop like this wasn’t out of protocol, but it left me and my crewmate alone with her. She continued to stare at me and, in a hushed tone reminiscent of every horror movie murderer you’ve ever heard, said, ‘I stabbed my sister, you know.’

  Yeah, I knew. I knew twice now, and I wanted that nurse back pronto.

  On the subject of murdered sisters, another patient who was being transferred while I was ‘third manning’ (a crew plus me) repeatedly demanded to know who had killed her mother. She had murdered her own sister and was convinced that someone else had killed her mother, too. She continually barked, ‘Who killed my mother, who did it?’ as we drove her to hospital. When we arrived and she was being taken into the psychiatric ward, she asked again, very loudly, ‘Who killed my mother?’ I was walking behind the crew and they thought it might be funny to turn in unison and point directly at me.

  Luckily, she didn’t see them and I got away with it (their joke, not the murder). Only two of the three of us were smiling about it, though.

  Not all calls are creepy because of the potential for harm. Some are just weird and leave you with an uncomfortable feeling afterwards.

  I went to the aid of a man who was complaining of chest pain and when I got to his flat I discovered a collection of what I can only describe as sexual torture instruments strewn about the place. I started talking to him as he sat on his sofa and, although his name was Sam, he insisted I call him ‘Samantha’. I could clearly see his Adam’s apple bobbing up and down and his voice was a couple of octaves down from a woman’s. But I thought, Fair enough, Samantha, if that’s how you want it. It didn’t feel right calling him by that name, though.

  When the crew arrived, one of them started to take the equipment brought from the ambulance back as ‘Samantha’ didn’t want to go to hospital and was simply emotional. As I spoke to him, I noticed that his gaze had drifted to something in the background. I looked up just in time to see my colleague walking out with a long blonde wig attached by a strand to the Velcro of one of the bags. It looked like a fair-haired puppy was walking behind him. He had no idea.

  On the way out of the flat I noticed that ‘Samantha’ had left photos of himself in suggestive poses and completely naked on the table. They were arranged almost as if he had deliberately laid them out for us to see. Took me a while to get that one out of my head.

  * * * * *

  Every so often, a shift will start in such a way as to put you on edge, but rarely does a single shift contain such a bizarre chain of events that it is guaranteed to make you re-consider your profession.

  Night shift. I was sent into a north London estate to investigate a 999 call made by a resident who claimed that a 14-year-old girl was lying on the road, ‘screaming’. The caller also stated that there was a gang of under-age drinkers hovering around.

  I went to the call expecting to see a drunken teenage girl with nothing better to do than draw attention to herself, but when I got on scene there was nobody around. I drove along the street and, as I passed one of the estate complexes, I saw a little gang of teenagers staring at me from a balcony – they all had bottles in their hands.

  I decided to stop and ask them if they knew anything about the screaming girl, but before I could pull up I heard a yell, directed at me I think, and then a sudden, loud bang. I thought something had hit the car, so I moved forward to get away from the immediate area. As I did so, I heard the crunch of glass beneath my wheels. The yobs had thrown a glass beer bottle at the vehicle. Luckily it hadn’t made contact but had landed on the road in front of it instead. I got clear and called for urgent police assistance.

  A few seconds after I called for help, the ambulance crew arrived. Unsuspectingly, they drew up where I had been before, right across from the gang of louts on the balcony. I flashed my headlights at the ambulance and they saw me. They were just about to get out, I think, but instead drove on to where I was, a hundred yards or so away.

  When they joined me, I explained what had happened. They had seen the group of young boys and girls on the balcony and hadn’t liked the look of them either.

  We waited for the police but when they finally arrived most of the gang had gone. We followed the officers up into the complex and found a few of them hanging around trying to look innocent. The police challenged them about what had happened but they denied everything, of course.

  ‘This is harassment,’ a scrawny, spotty boy asked. ‘Did any of you see me throw a bottle?’

  Of course I hadn’t seen who had thrown it, I just heard it fall and break in front of me. The glass was still on the road.

  The youths continued to deny everything and got a little heated at times about ‘harassment’ and ‘breach of human rights’. They get all that stuff from the TV – modern kids know more about the law than the police, I think.

  They were given a warning and we left the scene. I went back to my station and waited for my next call. I was edgy after that little bit of nonsense, so I was glad to get a couple of routine jobs. Then I received a call in south London; it was amber, so not a priority, but it was still a long way to drive, so I called my Control and asked if I was the nearest vehicle. They said I was, and that there were no ambulances assigned, as yet.

  When I looked at the call description, it read ‘50 year-old male ?# arm’ – I was going to someone who may have broken his arm. Fine. Except, underneath it read ‘blood all over chest, ? cause’, and that worried me. It worried me because it didn’t make sense. People with broken arms generally don’t have blood all over their chest. Something was wrong with this call, but I was running on it and I waited until I got on scene until I queried it further.

  I arrived to find myself driving into a dead end street, deep inside a rough housing estate. It was dark and very quiet and more than a few things were beginning to rattle me. Starting with that call description. I picked up the radio and requested some information.

  ‘I’m on scene,’ I said, ‘but before I go into the address can you tell me what the caller said about blood being all over the patient’s chest?’

  ‘Sorry, he just said that and hung up to go back to the address and wait.’

  ‘In that case, I’m going into this with caution.’

  I should have asked about police back-up – I normally would – but tonight there just seemed to be nobody around to help. The police hadn’t arrived for 15 minutes on the broken bottle call so there was little chance of a speedy response to this one, especially as all I had was a bad feeling.

  A car drew up across from me and its headlights shone on me as I got my bags from the car. The driver seemed overly-interested in me and I kept an eye on him. A woman stood outside a pub on the corner. It was late into the night, around 2am, so I figured she must be the landlady. She just stared at me, too. It was all becoming a little more than unsettling now.

  The flat I needed to reach was on the first floor and there was scaffolding all around the building, so once I was up there I wouldn’t be visible from the street. I considered waiting until the ambulance crew arrived but I called myself a coward in my head and went to do my job.

  I climbed the steps leading to the first floor very cautiously – a lot more slowly than I normally would have. There wasn’t a sound. Every shadow could have been a threat, but nothing moved. The guy in the car was still hanging around. I was being watched as I made my way to the address.

  Once on the landing, I approached the door of the flat and stood outside for a few seconds. It was one of those flats that you can see into through a couple of small windows at the side of the front door, so I made use of one of them by peering in to see if there was anything amiss. The window looked into the kitchen and I could it was a mess, but that’s not unusual in these places. I also saw something else, however, and it rang alarm bells with me. The cutlery drawer was lying open. I should have stopped there and then but instead I looked through the other window and saw that the front room was also a mess. There seemed to be nobody around.

  I resol
ved to knock on the door and watch who came to answer it. If I didn’t like the look of the person I would leave the scene and wait for back-up. I stood away from the door and saw an old black man approach to open the door. I felt a little less insecure.

  He waved me inside and motioned to the front room.

  ‘He’s in there,’ he said. ‘He’s a mess. Help him.’ He didn’t look at me as he spoke.

  I walked into the room, and it looked like an abbatoir. There was blood smeared on every wall. Every piece of furniture had been smashed, as had the television. Something very bad had happened here.

  On the sofa to my right sat a tall black man – he, too, was elderly, in his mid 60s at least I thought. He was covered in blood and had clear wounds to his head and left arm. They were stab wounds. He had been viciously attacked and it had happened right here and not long ago.

  ‘Is there anyone else in this flat?’ I asked. I was urgent about this, because I had no idea how much danger I might be in.

  ‘No, only us,’ the old man said.

  ‘I’ll ask again. Is there anyone else in this flat?’

  ‘No,’ they both said.

  I looked at the man on the sofa. Some of his wounds were very deep. I saw he had a lethal-looking injury to his throat and penetrating slashes to his skull. He was lucky to be breathing, never mind talking to me.

  ‘I’m in pain,’ he moaned. ‘My arm is so bad.’

  He was cradling an obviously broken left arm. It had either been stabbed so deeply that a bone had broken, or he had been beaten mercilessly. He was still sitting upright, but he was nervy and I still felt uneasy about the company I was in, regardless of their ages.

  I dressed the worst wounds at the back of his head. Someone had carved a cross into it. They must have sat on him and done this, because I can’t imagine he’d have allowed it to happen without putting up a serious struggle – it must have hurt a lot.

  I called my Control and requested urgent police and an ambulance and explained that the situation was not as given. I was stressed and I made it clear on the phone that I wasn’t happy.