There is only one thing that you can do in a situation like this, which is to scoop up the baby and run to hospital as quickly as possible. I reached down and picked up the baby; I was shocked to find that it was as stiff as a board and very purple, indicating that it had been dead for some time. It looked more like a doll than anything that had once been alive. We could have recognised the child as dead on the scene, but taking the child to hospital would mean that the parents would see that everything that could be done was being done and, more importantly, they would be in a hospital with all the support that the hospital could provide.
I ran out to the ambulance with mother in tow, and told my crewmate to get us to hospital as quickly as possible. The father and grandmother followed behind us in another ambulance who had heard this call go out and had turned up to see if there was anything that they could do to help. On the way to hospital I did the CPR that I knew was ultimately pointless and spoke to the mother. She had last seen the child alive at 3 a.m., and he had been fine then. It looked like it may have been a case of sudden infant death syndrome, and I did all that I could to prepare the mother for the worst.
We pulled up at hospital and handed the baby into the care of the hospital. I spoke a little more with the mother and grandmother, but there is nothing that you can say to people who have had such a tragedy. Our station officer met us at the hospital and asked us if we were alright, then he booked us off the road so that we could go back to station and have a cup of tea and ‘decompress’. If we needed more support I think it would have been there, but I just wanted to get away from the hospital.
I’m not often affected by jobs, and this isn’t the first dead baby that I’ve had to deal with, but it is the first dead baby I’ve had since joining the ambulance service and it is very different from dealing with them in hospital. Going into someone’s house to take away a dead child is very different from having the child and parents turn up at hospital, which is your safe territory.
At the hospital all the other crews were asking if I was alright and, to be honest, I wasn’t really alright – I was upset that while I was doing CPR on the baby its legs were seesawing into the air, and it looked too much like a doll. There was a point after the job where I thought I was going to start crying, but a moment outside the Resus’ room and I was back to functioning as I normally do. I’m not weak, and when in the midst of something I can deal with anything – it was only after the doctors and nurses at the hospital had taken over that I started to feel anything.
We returned to station, where the therapy of talking about anal surgery with another crew, and a cup of tea, soon had me feeling better. It used to be that you would return to work straight after a job like this, but then I think they realised that if we got our normal inappropriate call (bellyache for 2 weeks sort of thing) we might say something to the patient that we might later regret.
Well, an hour on station later and I feel fully prepared to deal with that sort of thing again – but I think that I’ll be haunted by the image of that child lying dead on my trolley.
I had loads of people commenting on this post, loads of support, which was very much appreciated. The title is a reference to the fact that I have found my blog to be ‘therapy’ for some of the things that I’ve seen and done in the ambulance service … and it’s cheaper than hitting the bottle.
I’ve often mentioned that the ambulance service and the police tend to get on rather well together; this is at least in part due to us both being called to the same jobs, and probably because we share the same view of the ‘Great British Public’.
An example: we got called to a drunk who was being verbally abusive to a bus driver – we were called because the drunk had fallen over, while the police were called because of the abuse. The drunk man was obnoxious, and well known to both of our services, and because of the lack of an injury was left in the care of the police. If he had been injured then the police would have left the matter in our hands.
So, when we co-respond, the ambulance crew pray that the patient is uninjured, so the police have to deal with them, while I suspect that the police hope that the patient is injured so they don’t have to arrest them.
However, there are a lot of specialist teams in the police service that we tend not to come into contact with that often; we mainly get to meet the normal ‘beat’ coppers. Thankfully, we rarely see the murder, child abuse, drugs or dog teams. This isn’t to say we never see them (and our station did get a Christmas card from the local murder squad telling us to ‘keep up the good work’), it’s just that it is fairly rare.
So, it was rather surprising that I met with the dog-handling team twice last week. On the first occasion, we were called to a known schizophrenic who had threatened to kill herself. The patient herself (a regular attender at the local A&E) was a bit of a pain to deal with, she wanted to stay at home and kill herself and couldn’t see why we wouldn’t let her do that. Her dog, on the other hand, was a real pleasure – happy to see us, interested in smelling all our equipment and extremely friendly. As the police were already there, they got the dog squad to look after the animal until the patient was discharged from hospital.
In case you think I am being harsh on the mentally ill, the patient attends A&E every day with the same complaint of wanting to kill themselves … she hasn’t managed it yet.
The second time I saw the dog-handling team was when we had to gain access to a house where the patient was unable to come to the front door and let us in. The interesting part in this story is that there were five dogs of unknown temperament in the house. For half an hour the police unsuccessfully tried to gain access, mainly by climbing up a ladder and trying to open a bathroom window. We were able to talk to the patient, and so we knew that they were not badly hurt, otherwise we would have had to kick the door down. Then the dog team turned up and, using a top secret criminal technique, managed to get the front door open in about 10 seconds, thus putting to shame the half-hour everyone else had spent trying to gain entry.
All five dogs were really lovely, although energetic, and at the end of the job I had to spend 20 minutes brushing the dog hair off my uniform.
There is a joke we have about dogs. When we ask a patient if the dog is friendly, the patient always answers that they won’t bite; the reply to this from the ambulance crew is to add the unspoken ‘They only bite people dressed all in green.’
I’ve only had one dog take a dislike to me. But I managed to pull my hands away from his gnashing teeth before he could catch me.
It was the usual type of busy last night – we heard rumours that there is such a thing as an ‘ambulance station’, a mythical building where one might use the toilet or partake of the life-giving ‘cup of tea’. It must be a myth, as we never saw it at all.
As I have mentioned, we get our calls sent down to a computer screen in the ambulance cab; sometimes you wonder how the Control crew have entered it while keeping from laughing down the phone at the patient. A case in point was one of our calls last night which was given as ‘53-year-old male, taken 3 × crack cocaine, cold and lonely, needs to be put back together’.
Avoiding the rather obvious ‘Humpty Dumpty’ jokes, we soon realised that the complaint, and the location he was calling from, fitted one of our semi-regular callers. By the time we got there he had left the phone box and neither us nor