by Stuart Gray
‘Yes,’ the shuffling girl replied, pulling a tatty green cardigan tighter round her shoulders.
‘What for? I mean, what’s wrong with you?’
‘I’m ill, man. I have a terrible cough and a sore throat.’
‘So you think you need an ambulance?’
‘Well, yeah. I ain’t got no car.’
I looked at my colleague and he looked at me. In irritated astonishment. The one thing this call had had going for it was that our severe DIB wasn’t going to have to spend long in the ambulance, because this block directly overlooked the local A&E department. The cheek of this woman was amazing: she honestly thought we were going to take her down stairs, into the ambulance and across the road, literally, to the doors of Accident and Emergency.
‘You don’t need an ambulance, you only have a cold,’ said my crewmate.
‘Whaa?’ said the girl, her face twisting into a mask of aggression. ‘You have to take me, it’s the law.’
‘No we don’t, and no it isn’t.’
That stumped her for a moment. She coughed a bit, and sniffled. Then she said, ‘Well, what are you going to do, then?’
We took her temperature (normal), checked her pulse (normal) and listened to her chest (slightly wheezy).
‘If you want to go to hospital,’ said my colleague, ‘and I don’t think you need to but that’s by the by, then get a taxi. Or walk.’
We left.
Piling insult upon absurdity, as we walked away she pulled out her mobile phone and called her boyfriend to come and pick her up instead. He lived in the next block, and was waiting at the bottom, engine running, before we even got down.
THE HISTORY OF STRANGERS
I LOVE MY JOB, and I hope that has come across in these pages. Yes, there are frustrations and irritations, and we see some terrible things. It’s certainly not the exposure to violence, the drunken idiots, the senseless deaths and the smells and stains associated with bodily fluids. There’s just something about the job, something intangible that I can’t quite explain, that makes it almost addictive. It gets under your skin.
It’s interesting, it can be exciting at times, and it’s varied, because you never know what you will be dealing with next. Sometimes, you get to save a child’s life while the mother watches. But there is another aspect of the job that draws me to it. People.
If you asked anyone who knows me well enough they will tell you that I don’t actually socialise much. I’m not good at the whole getting together in a group thing. To an extent, that’s true - I like my privacy and I don’t agree with the common viewpoint all the time. I have my own ideas, beliefs and theories for everything in the Universe. I’m not a loner and I have a good circle of friends - I’m just not a party animal and I like to get home after work and relax with my other half and a cat with attitude called Scruffs.
Being a paramedic allows me the honour of walking across a stranger’s threshold and into their private lives. I get to see their memories in photographs and hear their tales and experiences first hand.
A lot of the houses I walk into are horrible places in which to live and many of the individuals I have dealt with are not the kind of people I would normally get on with. Of course, there are a few that I don’t get on with even as a paramedic, simply because they are bad people to start with, but more often than not I will walk into a home, horrible or not, where I will meet the nicest people you can imagine.
I work hard at my job, and I only really get rewarded when someone says ‘Thank you’. We all feel better when a patient or their relative says this - it validates what we are doing and doesn’t make the job such a lost cause when we are depressed about how the shift is going.
When I was young, my best friend and I were given the job of mowing the lawn and cutting back the shrubbery of a council house in which a family lived. The single mother was getting the job done for free and it had been arranged by my friend’s mum, who was a social worker.
We worked hard all day on that garden; if it wasn’t tidied up, the young woman and her kids would be thrown out. It was summer and the heat was relentless, making us sweat and exhausting us by the end of the task.
We went into the woman’s house and she sat us down and offered us a cheese sandwich. We hadn’t eaten all day, nor had we been offered anything until that point. I heard one of her children complain that she couldn’t ‘give all their food away’. I asked her what that meant and she told me that the bread and cheese she was offering was all that they had to eat until Monday (it was Saturday) when she could collect her benefit money.
My friend and I declined her offer, but I have never forgotten how generous she was prepared to be in order to thank us. She had no other way of showing her appreciation because she had nothing else to give.
I remind myself of her whenever I walk into a home where the family are clearly disadvantaged. I came from a rough Glasgow town and was brought up on a council estate, so I don’t have any airs or graces about it. I do, however, understand that a thank you from someone who has nothing is a valuable thing.
I met an old woman from a block of flats in one of those notorious estates in north London once. She was writing her memoirs down, in longhand, using a biro. She was 80 years old, and we were taking her to hospital because she had fallen over and hit her head. I had a long conversation with her and she told me what she did during the war.
‘I used to work in a factory,’ she said, ‘making the little dials for the instruments on fighter planes and bombers.’
My crewmate and I listened with interest as she continued, pride beaming in her aged face.
‘We used to have to paint them with special stuff. It was radioactive paint to make the dials luminous. We had no protection, no mask or anything in those days and I used to get home at night and when I put the light out I could see my footprints glowing on the carpet.’
She chuckled to herself, seeing those footprints all over again in her mind’s eye. I would never have got to hear that story - or a million others - if I hadn’t been doing this job, and it meant a lot to me because it was her life I was hearing about and she thought it was important enough to share - hence, the memoirs.
People of all cultures invite us into their homes and some of the most well-mannered kids I have encountered have been those belonging to Muslim households. I always make a point of apologising for my footwear when I enter a Muslim home because most of them remove their shoes before crossing the threshold. We don’t because there is a health and safety issue about it and it would be highly impractical for us. I believe we are going to be issued with shoe covers to resolve this issue.
Muslims are generally very family-orientated and their religion is part of everything they do; it provides them with the tools to lead a good life. This filters through to their children and what you end up with is a foundation for a good society. I am not writing this because there is a political point to be made, or any other rubbish; I’m highlighting the differences I see in people. I will say this, however; it’s a shame more of us don’t lead a more family-oriented way of life - for many indigenous British people, their kids seem to be the most dangerous thing running around the streets these days. No wonder other cultures look down on us as sloppy disciplinarians.
Some of my colleagues have been offered food, tea and cold drinks just because it is the way of hospitality in some families. I’ve been offered the most comfortable chair in the room, for example, when I have been treating someone’s son. These little gestures are ‘thank yous’, and we mustn’t forget that.
Many street people have histories that are well worth listening to, and can be especially sad.
I sat in the back of an ambulance with a homeless 45-year-old who had called us because he was cold and hungry. He was desperate and had nowhere else to turn, so he dialled 999 and hoped we would be nice to him.
I bought him something to eat, and I checked his temperature and other obs while he ate. We chatted about how he had found himself on the street. I’
ve been there myself - in my early days in London, when I was a teenager, I had to rough it until I found a job - so I was curious about how he had fallen to this.
He told me that he was an accountant and that his wife had left him with three kids to bring up, which he found difficult to do. He quit his job and tried to exist on Social Security payments, but he lapsed into alcoholism when things got real and he found he couldn’t cope. He had struggled like this for years until his children had grown up and left home. By then, he had debts and was drinking every day.
After a while, his home was repossessed and he found himself on the street because the council had no statutory duty to house him. He wandered about until he found a place to sleep, and that was pretty much where he’d been ever since.
‘How long have you been on the street?’ I asked.
‘Nine years,’ he said. ‘Today’s my birthday.’
He knew all he was going to get was another chance to sleep outside, but we took him to hospital in the hope that a diagnosis of ‘low temperature’ was enough to give him a bed for a few hours.
I never saw that man again.
I see a lot of elderly people and not one of them has given me grief without a good reason - such as Alzheimer’s. Generally speaking, they are lovely people and a few of them cling to a single memory because it’s the only thing they have left to live for.
We were preparing an 85-year-old lady for transfer to a hospice. This meant she was never going to see her home again. She spoke to us at length about her husband and it was fascinating and poignant.
‘I met him early in the war when I was 19,’ she told us. ‘He was an RAF pilot and I thought he was so brave that I fell in love with him immediately. We got married soon after we met and we bought this house. We had a wonderful couple of years together, but then he got killed in action. He was only 23. I never stopped loving him and I miss him every day. Even now.’
She was holding a photograph of him in his RAF uniform, and she showed it to me with pride and love in her eyes. She was standing with him in the picture, looking young and happy, and I realised that this woman had never entertained the thought of another man in her life. She was still married to the airman in the photograph, but he had died 60 or more years ago. She couldn’t have known much about him - he would have been in action a lot of the time - but she had loved him so fiercely that she couldn’t let go.
As we took her away from her home, the home she had shared with him, I felt a pang of guilt because - the photo and her thin gold wedding ring aside - we were separating her from her last tangible connection to her husband for the final time. I couldn’t find the words for her - nothing appropriate could be said, so I continued as if her story had been a pleasant thing to hear. In fact, it was one for the most emotional insights into another human being’s life I had ever been privy to.
Interested people usually ask the same question when they want to know about this job. ‘What’s the worst thing you’ve ever had to deal with?’ they’ll ask. I’ve yet to meet someone who enquires about my best experience.
So far, working in London has given me experience with the worst of society, the horror of violent death and the sadness of suffering that I am exposed to regularly. It is rare to go home with a happy memory - a call that leaves a smile on my face and dissipates the bad stuff.
Bringing a new life into the world gives me a sense of satisfaction, as does saving someone who would certainly have died had I not intervened, and there are often little comedy moments - irony and paradox in the behaviour of some of my patients. Human mistakes I have made in communication and interpretation have given me and others a little light relief. These things come along unexpectedly and are pleasant interludes, but they aren’t the gifts we hope for every time we go on duty.
My best experience has nothing to do with patient care. I was asked to become the Training Supervisor (TS) for a newly trained crew during their last few weeks of the course. They would be on an ambulance dealing with real emergency calls for the first time since leaving the classroom and I was to be with them every step of the way.
The two people I spent that month or so with have since become my friends and we have pleasant memories to share of calls with highs and lows, just like every other crew. What made it special for me was that I was able to watch them develop from nervous, inexperienced individuals to caring, thoughtful technicians with an equal love of the job.
Together, we successfully resuscitated a dying woman in the street, carried drunks to hospital, faced aggression and obstruction and cared for more than a hundred patients in need of help. I felt proud to be doing the job alongside them and sharing whatever knowledge I had to the benefit of their confidence and abilities, from driving at high speed to treating children with amputations.
I think we bonded over a short time and became a crew of three before the end of the training period. They are both now fully qualified EMTs and have saved or helped to save more than a few lives. They reminded me of my limitations and brought me down to earth. Every day or night out with them was a pleasure and something I truly looked forward to.
They did something for me that others have been unable to achieve because of the sheer pressure of the work. They made me laugh.
More from Monday Books
Thank you for buying and reading A Paramedic’s Diary - we hope you enjoyed it. You may also enjoy his first novel – The Station. and his guide to becoming a paramedic, The Street Medic’s Guide.
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Also by Stuart Gray
THE STATION
The Station is Stuart Gray’s first novel. It takes the reader through a single shift at a busy emergency ambulance station in London. As the story unfolds, the reader is given a glimpse of the world of the Paramedic. There is humour, fear and sadness mixed into a tragic sub-story that suddenly leaps out of the pages to shock the reader back into reality. The Station is not quite what you think it is...
YOU MAY ALSO ENJOY…
THE LITTLE GIRL IN THE RADIATOR
Mum, Alzheimer’s and Me
‘Deeply loving yet wryly comic... The most moving portrait of this cruel disease you'll ever read’ - The Daily Mail
THE LITTLE GIRL IN THE RADIATOR is a tale of love, loss and family: the touching, sometimes hilarious and occasionally heartbreaking story of a man’s struggle to care for his mother after her diagnosis with Alzheimer’s disease.
Martin Slevin’s mum was a highly active, very intelligent and fiercely independent woman who ran her own business and ruled Martin and his father with a rod of iron. But after Martin’s dad dies, her life crumbles, and she becomes listless and forgetful.
Eventually, she is diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, and Martin puts his own life on hold to care for her. Together, they embark on a journey through the various stages of the condition; the destination is never in doubt, but along the way there are many lighter moments, as she shaves the dog’s bottom, holds sing-songs with an imaginary Irish band and pins all of Martin’s socks to the wall. And all the time, the question nags away at him: who is the little girl in the radiator, with whom his mum has urgent, whispered conversations each day?
SICK NOTES
True Stories from the GP’s Surgery
'We wanted to thank you for all you did for mum over the last 14 years,' said Mrs Cobham.
Excitedly, I peered into the plastic bag. Inside was one small loaf of sliced bread.
'Er...' I stammered. 'Well, that's lovely.'
She nodded and smiled. 'It was the least we could do, doctor,' she said.
Welcome to the bizarre world of T
ony Copperfield, family doctor. He spends his days fending off anxious mums, elderly sex maniacs and hopeless hypochondriacs.
The rest of his time is taken up sparring with colleagues, battling bureaucrats and banging his head against the brick wall of the NHS.
If you've ever wondered what your GP is really thinking, why you can’t get an appointment when you need one, or what that funny buzzing noise in your ear is, Sick Notes is for you.
'Copperfield is simply fantastic, unbelievably funny and improbably wise... everything he writes is truer than fact.' - British Medical Journal.
'A mix of the hilarious, the mundane and the poignant. Dr Copperfield reveals what goes on behind those surgery doors.' - The Daily Mail
'A wonderful book, funny and insightful in equal measure.' - Dr Phil Hammond, Private Eye’s MD
SECOND OPINION
Theodore Dalrymple is a prison doctor and hospital consultant working in a tough inner-city area.
Drug addicts and desperate drunks, battered wives and suicidal burglars, elderly Alzheimer's sufferers and teenage stabbing victims all pass through his surgery - and in Second Opinion the renowned doctor and writer reveals a secret, brutal world hidden to most of us.
He writes with unflinching honesty and black humour to reveal a society where an insult can result in murder, where jealous men beat and strangle their women and where ‘anyone will do anything for ten bags of brown’.
‘Dalrymple’s clarity of thought, precision of expression and constant, terrible disappointment give his dispatches from the frontline a tone and a quality entirely their own… their rarity makes you sit up and take notice’ – Marcus Berkmann, The Spectator
‘Dalrymple is a modern master’ –The Guardian
