Post by Chips on Mar 17, 2004 13:20:52 GMT 9.5
Well over 30 years ago I spent time as an Ambulance Driver. Below is a few things we had to deal with and how we coped.
"EMERGENCY BAKER"
The two-way radio crackled into life, "All other units stand by - Emergency Baker."
My partner reached for the handset, "Baker receiving"
Back came the Radio Controllers voice, "Baker, RTA (Road Traffic Accident) location junction of Belgrave Road and Melton Road. Proceed code 1 message timed 1702."
Even as my partner was repeating back the message I had swung the Ambulance around towards
Belgrave Road and was mentally computing the quickest path through crowded city streets to the scene of the accident. The standard blue flashing light was switched on, together with headlights and twin klaxon horns which sounded out their urgent warning. The roads were congested with rush hour traffic but Leicester road users were used to Emergency Service Vehicles and the road was cleared ahead of our racing vehicle as soon as they heard the klaxons.
The only facility permitted to an Emergency Vehicle in the United Kingdom was to exceed the speed limit when ever the observation of their duty permitted them to do so. We were not supposed to travel against red lights or ignore other road signs but with due care and a blind eye from the police we always did, ever mindful of the fact that our license was at risk in the event of an accident. More than once the following rhyme ran through my mind when travelling at high speed.
"The Ambulance travels at a furious rate
and the Coroner utters defiance of fate
while dodging through traffic both agile and supple
it picked up a patient but knocked down a couple."
Travelling at speeds approaching 112 kph (70 mph) and taking more than one calculated risk, we arrived at the accident scene seven minutes later. "Baker/Control ... Baker at Scene."
"Roger Baker, arrival timed at 1709." replied the controller.
The scene at which we arrived was one of total confusion. Traffic was blocked on all four lanes of the busy city road, a double decker bus was resting at an un-natural angle into the curb, women were screaming and the bus driver was leaning against the door of his bus, vomiting.
Caught under the nearside front wheel of the bus was a woman in her early thirties. She had sustained massive internal injuries and each faint beat of her heart pumped her life's blood through her mouth. The only blessing on this dreadful scene is that the woman was unconscious and she died seconds after we had arrived.
It may seem strange to the reader, but the woman's death had no initial impact on my partner or myself, she was just one more in a long line of bodies that we had to remove over the years. In the job we were doing you could not allow yourself to have feelings, even to give the slightest thought about people would have been the Achilles heel in our defensive mechanism. My attitude was that the human body was a machine that broke down or became damaged, it could either be fixed or go to the wreckers. To even think of the impact death or injury would have on friends and relatives could have been an invitation for a mental breakdown and then we could not have helped anyone.
This particular accident out of the hundreds I attended, sticks in my mind for only one reason, the woman's husband was at the scene. He sat in the gutter holding her limp hand, "Please don't leave me, oh! please don't leave me. What am I going to tell the children?" he sobbed.
The pain of the poor man's emotion swept over me in an almost crippling blow. Under the wheel of the bus was no longer a broken down machine but a wife and a mother. She was a person who had touched the lives of others and was going to be badly missed by all who knew and loved her. My partner and I worked in silence as we freed her body from beneath the bus and loaded it into the ambulance. Even though the demise of the woman was obvious only a doctor can certify death. On the journey back to the hospital my partner worked on the lifeless form with a "minuteman' and applied external cardiac massage while I drove as fast as it was safe to do so.
The very same day we were called to a pedestrian versus train, it is not a pretty sight. It is even more traumatic when you have to walk the tracks picking up various parts of the human anatomy. What made that event worse, was the fact that the pedestrian had in fact committed suicide. He had placed his head on the track and waited for the train, he would have heard it coming for miles before it hit him.
Collecting a 9 month old deceased baby from her home to take to the mortuary, her little arms reaching up and out from her crib frozen in place by death. Picking up the baby was hard for me but it was harder to listen to the mother and fathers convulsive sobbing as I took their little girl away.
A young husband in the back of the Ambulance sobbing and begging his wife not to leave him, but she had died from a severe asthma attack before we even picked her up.
The lonely old man who had died playing cards, and was not found for six weeks, his hands still clutching the cards, among which were aces and eights, the "Dead Mans Hand".
Pulling the bodies of men, women and children, limp like rag dolls, from the wreck of the family vehicle. How is it possible to do a job like that and not be affected?
The answer in short, it is not. Most of us had the ability to 'switch off', even joke about the situation which I am sure many would have found to be in bad taste. But that never meant we didn't care, it was and probably still is, a defensive attitude which protected our mental health.
I came across the Daily Mirror Newspaper's, "The Perishers" cartoon strip not long after I joined the service and it became something of a cult among the personnel. Forget 'life and death', it seemed not one ambulance would move until the strip had been cut out and posted on the canteen door and read by all four rotating shifts. The happy feeling that Maurice Dodd, the writer of the strip created amongst the personnel was probably responsible for saving the sanity of more ambulance personnel than he can ever have imagined.
THE PERISHERS
Wellington, an orphan who lives in a deserted railway station with his dog Boot. Wellington (birthday 26th October) has come a long way, when I first knew him he lived in a concrete drainage pipe. When he is not attending school he sells carts with go-faster stripes to his friend Marlon.
Boot, an Old English Sheep Dog (sort of). He believes he is the reincarnation of an old English Lord and he has owned Wellington since he was a pup. Has been known to use psychic powers on the 'strips' readers, years ago when Wellington was dropping hints to his friends about his birthday, Boot was 'thinking' sausages. So it was, that one year in the 1960s, the Daily Mirror offices were swamped in sausages from an appreciative readership.
The main stars are supported by:
Marlon, who cannot decide whether to be a brain surgeon, or a guy who goes down sewers in big rubber boots when he grows up.
Maisie, she who can hear the rustle of a lolly bag at half a mile, girlfriend of Marlon, sister of Baby Grumplin, and an all time, "gold digger".
Baby Grumplin', the horror of any elder sister, has a penchant for digging huge holes in his mothers garden and blaming the deed on a giant mole.
B.H. (Calcutta) Failed. A bloodhound who cannot smell, not even a box of very old kippers. B.H. loves to take Boot's bones into custody on a charge of loitering, and indulges in romantic liaisons with, "Tatty Old Bit" (The sailors friend) as often as possible.
Kilroy - the Teutonic tortoise. His shell just happens to look like a German soldier's helmet from World War II and he talks with a very strong German accent. When he sticks his head out of his shell, he has a startling resemblance to a certain Austrian Corporal, complete with hair to one side of his head, a small moustache, and Iron Cross swinging from his neck. Always did wonder where he'd got to.
We picked up the scraps of broken humanity, Maurice Dodd picked up our traumatized minds and restored them to normal. Hard to believe that a simple cartoon should have such far reaching effects isn't it? In this day and age of sudden and horrific death, counselling is demanded by governments and unions alike. Thirty years ago all my colleagues and I had was Maurice Dodd, and I believe the consultation fee was about, "thruppence" a day.
"EMERGENCY BAKER"
The two-way radio crackled into life, "All other units stand by - Emergency Baker."
My partner reached for the handset, "Baker receiving"
Back came the Radio Controllers voice, "Baker, RTA (Road Traffic Accident) location junction of Belgrave Road and Melton Road. Proceed code 1 message timed 1702."
Even as my partner was repeating back the message I had swung the Ambulance around towards
Belgrave Road and was mentally computing the quickest path through crowded city streets to the scene of the accident. The standard blue flashing light was switched on, together with headlights and twin klaxon horns which sounded out their urgent warning. The roads were congested with rush hour traffic but Leicester road users were used to Emergency Service Vehicles and the road was cleared ahead of our racing vehicle as soon as they heard the klaxons.
The only facility permitted to an Emergency Vehicle in the United Kingdom was to exceed the speed limit when ever the observation of their duty permitted them to do so. We were not supposed to travel against red lights or ignore other road signs but with due care and a blind eye from the police we always did, ever mindful of the fact that our license was at risk in the event of an accident. More than once the following rhyme ran through my mind when travelling at high speed.
"The Ambulance travels at a furious rate
and the Coroner utters defiance of fate
while dodging through traffic both agile and supple
it picked up a patient but knocked down a couple."
Travelling at speeds approaching 112 kph (70 mph) and taking more than one calculated risk, we arrived at the accident scene seven minutes later. "Baker/Control ... Baker at Scene."
"Roger Baker, arrival timed at 1709." replied the controller.
The scene at which we arrived was one of total confusion. Traffic was blocked on all four lanes of the busy city road, a double decker bus was resting at an un-natural angle into the curb, women were screaming and the bus driver was leaning against the door of his bus, vomiting.
Caught under the nearside front wheel of the bus was a woman in her early thirties. She had sustained massive internal injuries and each faint beat of her heart pumped her life's blood through her mouth. The only blessing on this dreadful scene is that the woman was unconscious and she died seconds after we had arrived.
It may seem strange to the reader, but the woman's death had no initial impact on my partner or myself, she was just one more in a long line of bodies that we had to remove over the years. In the job we were doing you could not allow yourself to have feelings, even to give the slightest thought about people would have been the Achilles heel in our defensive mechanism. My attitude was that the human body was a machine that broke down or became damaged, it could either be fixed or go to the wreckers. To even think of the impact death or injury would have on friends and relatives could have been an invitation for a mental breakdown and then we could not have helped anyone.
This particular accident out of the hundreds I attended, sticks in my mind for only one reason, the woman's husband was at the scene. He sat in the gutter holding her limp hand, "Please don't leave me, oh! please don't leave me. What am I going to tell the children?" he sobbed.
The pain of the poor man's emotion swept over me in an almost crippling blow. Under the wheel of the bus was no longer a broken down machine but a wife and a mother. She was a person who had touched the lives of others and was going to be badly missed by all who knew and loved her. My partner and I worked in silence as we freed her body from beneath the bus and loaded it into the ambulance. Even though the demise of the woman was obvious only a doctor can certify death. On the journey back to the hospital my partner worked on the lifeless form with a "minuteman' and applied external cardiac massage while I drove as fast as it was safe to do so.
The very same day we were called to a pedestrian versus train, it is not a pretty sight. It is even more traumatic when you have to walk the tracks picking up various parts of the human anatomy. What made that event worse, was the fact that the pedestrian had in fact committed suicide. He had placed his head on the track and waited for the train, he would have heard it coming for miles before it hit him.
Collecting a 9 month old deceased baby from her home to take to the mortuary, her little arms reaching up and out from her crib frozen in place by death. Picking up the baby was hard for me but it was harder to listen to the mother and fathers convulsive sobbing as I took their little girl away.
A young husband in the back of the Ambulance sobbing and begging his wife not to leave him, but she had died from a severe asthma attack before we even picked her up.
The lonely old man who had died playing cards, and was not found for six weeks, his hands still clutching the cards, among which were aces and eights, the "Dead Mans Hand".
Pulling the bodies of men, women and children, limp like rag dolls, from the wreck of the family vehicle. How is it possible to do a job like that and not be affected?
The answer in short, it is not. Most of us had the ability to 'switch off', even joke about the situation which I am sure many would have found to be in bad taste. But that never meant we didn't care, it was and probably still is, a defensive attitude which protected our mental health.
I came across the Daily Mirror Newspaper's, "The Perishers" cartoon strip not long after I joined the service and it became something of a cult among the personnel. Forget 'life and death', it seemed not one ambulance would move until the strip had been cut out and posted on the canteen door and read by all four rotating shifts. The happy feeling that Maurice Dodd, the writer of the strip created amongst the personnel was probably responsible for saving the sanity of more ambulance personnel than he can ever have imagined.
THE PERISHERS
Wellington, an orphan who lives in a deserted railway station with his dog Boot. Wellington (birthday 26th October) has come a long way, when I first knew him he lived in a concrete drainage pipe. When he is not attending school he sells carts with go-faster stripes to his friend Marlon.
Boot, an Old English Sheep Dog (sort of). He believes he is the reincarnation of an old English Lord and he has owned Wellington since he was a pup. Has been known to use psychic powers on the 'strips' readers, years ago when Wellington was dropping hints to his friends about his birthday, Boot was 'thinking' sausages. So it was, that one year in the 1960s, the Daily Mirror offices were swamped in sausages from an appreciative readership.
The main stars are supported by:
Marlon, who cannot decide whether to be a brain surgeon, or a guy who goes down sewers in big rubber boots when he grows up.
Maisie, she who can hear the rustle of a lolly bag at half a mile, girlfriend of Marlon, sister of Baby Grumplin, and an all time, "gold digger".
Baby Grumplin', the horror of any elder sister, has a penchant for digging huge holes in his mothers garden and blaming the deed on a giant mole.
B.H. (Calcutta) Failed. A bloodhound who cannot smell, not even a box of very old kippers. B.H. loves to take Boot's bones into custody on a charge of loitering, and indulges in romantic liaisons with, "Tatty Old Bit" (The sailors friend) as often as possible.
Kilroy - the Teutonic tortoise. His shell just happens to look like a German soldier's helmet from World War II and he talks with a very strong German accent. When he sticks his head out of his shell, he has a startling resemblance to a certain Austrian Corporal, complete with hair to one side of his head, a small moustache, and Iron Cross swinging from his neck. Always did wonder where he'd got to.
We picked up the scraps of broken humanity, Maurice Dodd picked up our traumatized minds and restored them to normal. Hard to believe that a simple cartoon should have such far reaching effects isn't it? In this day and age of sudden and horrific death, counselling is demanded by governments and unions alike. Thirty years ago all my colleagues and I had was Maurice Dodd, and I believe the consultation fee was about, "thruppence" a day.