Fighting For Your Life. Lysa Walder
because at first glance he doesn’t appear to have any injuries. The police are thinking it might be a suspicious death, so we don’t attempt to move him about too much. If it’s a potential crime scene and he’s been murdered, we’ll have to remove our footwear for forensic elimination purposes and if anyone in the ambulance crew touch anything at all, police will need fingerprint checks from us.
When we start checking out the lounge we find the answer. It’s a broken glass. It’s lying by the sofa – which is covered with his blood. Somehow the glass has cut his arm and severed an artery or vein. An accident, it seems. And sure enough, when we check and look at the man again, we find the cut – which is actually quite small. But it was lethal. It looked as if he was sitting there, on the sofa, for quite some time, just dripping blood and the sofa absorbed it like a sponge. He was in a badly inebriated state – the cans and empty bottles bear witness to that – and he must surely have realised he was bleeding badly at some point. It looks like he’s staggered around the place, dripping blood everywhere, too far gone to do anything to help himself – and very slowly he’s bled to death.
The police finally concluded that it was an accidental death. No one else was involved. He was definitely an alcoholic – and this was the tragic outcome, a lonely death in a setting that would give most people nightmares.
Later that evening, as I’m about to finish my shift, I run into a friend, another paramedic who works in the same area. I tell her about this young alcoholic who died at home and as I start to tell her about it, she stops me.
‘Oh no, that’s Gary. I know him. I got called out to him two weeks ago.’ She’s been called out to Gary quite a few times. She says that although he was always in a very drunken state, he was never aggressive or awkward and she’d often find herself chatting to him.
From what he’s told my friend, life had been fine until he was 20, when he’d been severely beaten up in the street by strangers. He’d been left with a head injury. And that was when the drinking spiralled completely out of control. He’d told her he’d dreamed of being a songwriter. And he’d even sung her a couple of his songs while they waited for an ambulance.
‘He was better than anything you hear on The X Factor,’ she tells me sadly.
In this job you get used to dealing with alcoholics; some will dial 999 three, four times in one day – and invariably they refuse to let us take them to hospital. Over the years you watch people like this get worse and worse as they carry on with their slow suicide – we just do what we can, as do all the hospital staff. It’s a slow means of destroying yourself. The alcohol blots out the reality – because, for whatever reason, the reality’s too hard to bear. But when you think about a young man in his 20s who dreamed his dreams, had his hopes, just like we all do, well, it does stop you in your tracks, doesn’t it?
Oh no, this sounds bad: ‘Female assaulted, multiple stab wounds.’
Instinct alerts me straight away that this call-out is most likely to be a really bad domestic. Women in London worry all the time about being attacked by a total stranger. But in fact 999 calls reporting an assault on a woman are usually due to attacks by the husband or partner. Or an ex. Sadly, despite all the awareness campaigns nowadays, domestic violence still manages to wreak its ugly havoc in too many lives. ‘OK,’ I sigh to Jim, ‘on go the rubber gloves – we’re gonna need them.’
As we pull into the street, police are swarming everywhere, waving us along to a house halfway down the road. In the front garden there’s a small group of plainclothes guys too. They briefly fill us in before we can go into the house. The woman’s husband has set about her with a meat cleaver in their kitchen. As she’s attempted to get away, he’s struck her many times, driving the cleaver deep into her back, her head and upper arms. A bloodbath. But she’s survived.
We’re steered through to the front room, but in the hallway we pass the kitchen and I see the husband sitting at a table – handcuffed, naked, looking terrified. He’s shivering, surrounded by police officers but, despite what he’s just done, I feel a momentary pang of sympathy. He looks vulnerable and confused. Is he mentally ill? I wonder.
Then we get to the poor woman in the front room. She’s lying naked on her tummy underneath a quilt that one of the officers has placed over her. She’s conscious, managing to talk to one of the officers. She’s not even crying. But I’m horrified by what I see. It’s a ghastly, blood-spattered horrorfest. He’s lashed out at her over and over again all over the top half of her body, her head, her shoulders, upper arms. She’s probably got about 20 wounds: some are minor, just glancing blows, others are really deep gashes, several inches long, on the back of her head. You can see the white skull glistening through one gaping wound. And they’ve bled so much you can’t really see the colour of her skin, it’s so saturated with blood. It’s a shocking sight: Jim obviously thinks so too – and we’re used to looking at things that would make most people throw up. This is starting to make me feel upset. How can a man do this to the woman he lives with and presumably loves?
In fact I’m not very far from tears as I bend down to talk to Eve. ‘Are you in any pain, anywhere?’ I ask her gently.
‘No,’ she says, then adds pleadingly, ‘Please tell me what’s happened to Joe. Is he OK?’
‘He’s fine,’ I tell her because the police have already told me about Joe, her nine-year-old son. He heard the noise below but remained upstairs throughout the attack: he thought it was a burglar in the house. So he called 999, not realising it was his father who was the assailant. But in all the chaos, no one thought to tell this woman that Joe was safe and uninjured. A typical mum, she’s thinking of her kid first.
Jim and I set about doing what we can. We manage to wipe her eyes, nose and mouth clear of blood and get some huge dressings over the wounds. We wrap her in a clean sheet, blanket on top, and carry her out to the ambulance. The police have closed the kitchen door so that husband and wife can’t see each other – or the horror that his crazy attack has inflicted. We race to hospital with blue lights and sirens on and there the doctors and nurses quickly take over. Eve is taken to theatre for her many wounds to be stitched. It will take hours for someone to sew her up.
Our bit is over, but this is not the sort of job you’d forget in a hurry. Jim and I debrief in the ambulance afterwards, a little bit of therapy for us. We need it. We agree she’s had a narrow escape. By sheer good luck, police had got there within a few minutes of the son’s call. ‘Supposing the kid hadn’t been around, Jim, how bad would that have been for her?’
‘Yeah, and it’s lucky the boy didn’t see it – or get hacked to bits himself,’ Jim reminds me.
Later that day I’m back at the hospital and I track Eve down in the ward. She’s sitting up in bed, swathed in bandages, looking a bit like an Egyptian mummy. All you can see are her eyes, nose and mouth. Even her ears have been badly cut and are hidden under heavy dressings.
I introduce myself and we start talking. In my mind, I’d assumed she was a long-term victim of domestic violence. Had her husband ever been violent before? I asked. I will never forget her answer.
‘Darling, my husband is the kindest and sweetest man you could ever know. He’s never hurt or even threatened to hurt either of us before.’
‘But what happened today?’ I say, not sure if I can quite believe what she’s telling me.
‘I just don’t know,’ she says sadly. ‘It’s not like him to behave this way – something’s gone really wrong with him. I don’t know what’s wrong. But I’m worried.’
How awful. Instead of being worried for herself, she’s concerned about him. Then she fills me in on the full story.
Eve woke up quite early that morning to the sound of what she thought was her husband just pottering and clattering around in the kitchen. But he was being exceptionally noisy, so she went downstairs to take a