999--My Life on the Frontline of the Ambulance Service by Dan Farnworth

Author:Dan Farnworth [Farnworth, Dan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster UK

12

THE SEEMINGLY HUMDRUM

Even an ambulance person’s everyday jobs can be deeply unsettling. When you’re trained how to do CPR, your patient is a dummy. Dummies don’t have emotions, or eyes that stare straight into yours, or friends telling you what to do. Dummies don’t foam or vomit, they don’t have ribs that break or cardiac arrests in tiny bathrooms. When you’re doing CPR for real, the patient won’t be presented on a nice flat bed, at exactly the right height. He or she might be curled up in a toilet cubicle or face down under a pier on a beach.

Name a place and the chances are I’ve done CPR there, or know someone who has. And when you start pounding on their chest, you will be able to feel and hear their ribs popping, crunching and cracking, as if they’re nothing more than twigs. Some elderly people have a DNAR order in place, but many don’t. That means we don’t have a choice but to do CPR on them, which is highly unlikely to work. It’s the law, but is it morally right? Either way, it’s not nice for whoever has to do it.

I should make clear that I don’t describe jobs in such graphic detail for reasons of gratuitousness or vicarious voyeurism, but to impress upon the reader the stark realities of an ambulance person’s existence. Because if the reader doesn’t understand the stark realities of an ambulance person’s existence, they will never begin to understand what happened to me.

Before I started working out on the road as a technician, I received nothing at all in terms of psychological training. No old sweats came in and described what they’d seen and what we should expect. Nobody took us to the morgue to view dead bodies. Nobody told us that we’d probably see decapitated bodies at traffic accidents, people swinging from ropes in lofts, dead babies and screaming relatives. And I didn’t ask. It’s not as if I didn’t want to get a reputation as someone who asks difficult questions – or, in other words, a trouble-maker – I didn’t even think it was odd. And had I asked, ‘What are the possible mental effects of what I’m about to do?’ I’m pretty sure someone would have said, ‘What you on about, son? Just watch and learn.’

After seeing my first dead body on the job, my colleague said to me, ‘Are you okay? Because you’ll see this a lot.’ What if I wasn’t? Tough, get on with it. Those in charge would no doubt argue that nothing can prepare an ambulance person for the things they’ll see. As I’ve already illustrated, in some ways they’re right. But I think more of an effort needs to be made.

Every ambulance person has their kryptonite, and mine is bones sticking out of bodies. I see a fair few bones pointing where they shouldn’t be on football and rugby pitches on Saturday and Sunday mornings. I went to a rugby match once and this bloke’s shin bone was sticking out at a right angle, piercing the skin.

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