Fighting For Your Life. Lysa Walder
was dreadfully wrong, she turned to flee. But then he set on her, flailing around with the cleaver, hacking her again and again. Screaming her head off, she somehow managed to get herself into their front room and shut the door to keep him out. Meanwhile their son, Joe, heard the racket and sensibly phoned for help and he was spared the sight of the bloodbath downstairs. By then the husband had got into the front room by forcing the door open. He started to try to slash her again but the police turned up quickly and managed to restrain him.
I don’t forget about Eve’s story. And several months later, while parked in the ambulance outside the Emergency Department, a woman approaches me. I have no idea who she is until she gives me her name. It’s Eve, virtually unrecognisable from when I last saw her, in her dressings and bandages. She looks perfectly normal now. Was her husband now in prison or a psychiatric hospital? Please don’t let him be out and about.
‘Darling, he’s dead,’ she tells me. I’m stunned.
‘He had a brain tumour,’ she explains. ‘They only found out when they took him in for tests.’ It turns out the awful attack on Eve was the first real sign that the man had a serious problem. After that his condition deteriorated very quickly – he’d died within weeks of attacking her.
I hug Eve and tell her how sorry I am. You can see she’s quite brave, this woman, but life has dealt her a bitter blow. To lose your husband unexpectedly is bad enough, even if he hasn’t nearly tried to kill you before. But to know that your child might easily have lost both parents if events had gone the wrong way, must be truly devastating.
My first really serious incident after finishing paramedic training is at a tall office block in the centre of town. Two firefighters are already on the case, up on the canopy which hangs over the building’s front entrance. All we know is that a man has jumped – or been pushed – from an office window. Somehow he’s managed to land on the canopy. No information about which floor he fell from – or why he may have fallen. At this stage no one even knows who he is.
We reach the first floor and, lugging our equipment, climb out of the window to get ourselves on to the canopy. The man is lying on his back.
‘Looks like it’s all over,’ comments my colleague Keith. The two firefighters are leaning over the man, furiously working his chest, carrying out basic CPR (cardiopulmonary resuscitation) to try to restart the heart, without success. They hear Keith, but say nothing. I look around: no sign of any blood at all. All very odd. Wordlessly Keith and I take over from the firefighters.
Now I’m starting to compress the man’s chest. But I can tell that something is very wrong. ‘His ribs are all broken,’ I say. ‘They’re not offering any resistance when I push.’ Then, kneeling at the man’s head, I start to try to get some oxygen into his lungs. As I begin to squeeze the bag, blood spurts out of his ears all over my trousers. This is bad.
‘Why are we doing all this? It’s futile,’ I hiss at Keith. He’s a senior paramedic, knows the score.
He shrugs. ‘Until we know a bit more, it’s best to keep going, Lysa.’ He’s right. We don’t know any more than what we see. We carry on with our hopeless charade. But now I’m starting to feel we’re part of something bigger, a spectacle, a live show for the public. Because anyone round here who has time to stop and stare is doing just that.
We’re quite near a bus shelter. A young dad lifts his small son up on top of the shelter, so he can get a better look at the paramedics trying to resuscitate the poor man. What a sight for a young child to witness. OK, it’s human nature to have a quick look. But giving your kid a front-row seat to watch an unfortunate person fighting a losing battle for life is going too far. To me, it’s despicable. How would these people feel if it was their colleague or partner lying there? Would they still stand there staring?
But now, almost on cue, things are happening: the welcome and distinctive whirring sound of a chopper overhead. The highly skilled pilots from HEMS (Helicopter Emergency Service) can land anywhere, on a postage stamp. They’ve managed to land on the nearby road junction, much to the delight of the enthralled crowd.
Now the team are up on the canopy with us: two pilots, a paramedic and a doctor. They wear orange boiler suits. The doctor takes control. He examines the man, pronounces him dead. Within minutes they’re gone, off to another call. Now it’s left to us to move the body.
As we start to move him the full extent of the damage his body has suffered becomes obvious. His arms and legs move in a most unnatural way. It’s horrible. He’s like a human bean bag in the shape of a man. He just flops about. What has happened is, his skin has remained intact. But inside his body every single bone has been shattered to smithereens. We get him on to the board, strap his body, cover him with a blanket. Then the fire brigade help us get it on to a ladder and lower it down to the street and into the waiting ambulance.
Only now do the crowd start to disperse. It’s a nasty job, this call, my first major trauma. I’m shocked at the prurience of the crowd, the state of his shattered corpse, my naivety that somehow he wasn’t badly damaged because there was no blood. Then we get the gen from the police. The man was just 30. He worked in the building in a clerical job. He threw himself off the roof – some 17 floors up. They’ve managed to find some of his belongings up there, along with a suicide note. It’s a first for me, the kind of first you could easily live without. I’m used to overdoses, suicide by hanging – but not the more desperate, violent extremes someone will go to in order to end it all. Despite my nursing experience, my time working in A&E (the correct term is now ED - Emergency Department), I’m still shaken up by this episode. The ‘bean bag body’ keeps coming back to me for ages. How bad was it for him, I wonder, to do it this way?
The next day my sister-in-law calls me. She works in the building directly opposite. She and her workmates had actually seen something fly down from the roof of the building facing them. Then they watched us all working away – and realised it was a person they’d seen falling. She’d spotted me.
‘I knew it was you, Lysa, because of your pony tail. But we couldn’t understand why you were trying to resuscitate someone who’d dropped from such a height. I nearly rang you on the mobile to say, “Don’t bother.”’ We chat some more. We both agree that people’s ghoulish fascination with the worst – like the man who put his kid on to the bus shelter roof – doesn’t say much for the sensitivity or compassion of strangers when another person’s life is at stake. Then I remember another thing that galled: a Peeping Tom in an office building opposite, staring at us through a pair of binoculars.
‘You live and learn about people,’ I tell her. ‘I know it’s part of what I’m doing. But I’m not sure it’s something I want to think about too much – or it’ll put me off this job for good.’
As you can see, it hasn’t. But you never forget.
Gerry has been doing the job for years – and he’s quite jaded. He’s seen it all, he says. Today we’re called to Brixton: a man, 21, can’t walk, legs hurt.
Blase as ever, Gerry shrugs. ‘This’ll be a load of rubbish,’ he grunts. He thinks it’s a waste of time. I laugh. You never know.
Inside the big house, converted into many flats, two young student types, a girl and a boy, accompany us up the stairs. They’re Italian. It’s their flatmate, up on the third floor. He’s been in bed for nearly 24 hours. ‘He come home sick from work and go to bed,’ we’re told. That’s all they know.
The bedroom is pitch-black, heavy curtains blocking all light. We can just about see the man because the sheets are pulled up right over him. They turn the lights on. I pull the cover down a little bit to get a look at him.
I don’t expect this. He’s got a horrible rash covering his face. It’s purple, flat