JAKE JONES - CAN YOU HEAR ME? : a paramedics encounters with life and death.

First published in Great Britain in 2020 by Quercus.

Quercus Editions Ltd
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Copyright Jake Jones 2020

The moral right of Jake Jones to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

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EBOOK ISBN 978 1 52940 425 8

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In memory of my dad

The ambulance is halfway to hospital when Samuel lifts his leg and puts his boot through the window.

Its a humid afternoon and the roads are sticky with hostility, so the driver makes plenty of noise as she weaves through the traffic. But lights and sirens are old news in this part of town and no one gives us a second look. Unless they see that foot.

In the back with Samuel are two medics and a constable. We cant do much about the protruding limb, because were busy holding the rest of Samuel down on the bed. Hes tensing and twisting and grabbing and groaning. Hes a fish pulled from the water, a flailing power cable.

Its okay, my friend. Youre perfectly safe.

Were on the way to get his heart fixed. When we left he was calm, in a kind of stupor. But his brains just woken up to the fact its been cheated of something, and now hes lashing out, rolling over, throwing his face at the floor. And trying to climb out of a moving vehicle one limb at a time.

The windows barely big enough for a foot to fit through: a sliding porthole high above the bed. Reaching a leg up there would be an achievement for a man in the prime of his life.

What makes it more impressive for Samuel is that fifteen minutes ago he was dead.

Its there as soon as the door opens. Sour, sweet, stale: it surges down the corridor in search of the outside world. It burns the nostrils and sits like a powder at the back of the throat.

Small breaths, small breaths.

74-YR-OLD FEMALE, COLLAPSED, NOT ALERT

No one is ever alert. This is a truism of telephone triage. Even when theyve made the call themselves, no one is ever alert.

We approach the flat. Flies dance in the doorway. The odour thickens, expands, envelops us. It has layers; it has texture. Its a physical thing, a presence, a force-field. A chemical weapon.

In the background sits the acrid infusion of stale cigarette smoke, years of jaundiced fog now seeping back out of the walls, as if the building has emphysema. Then theres the moist undertow of congealed sweat turned rancid like butter, collected over weeks in flaccid pouches of unwashed flesh until the skin turns raw. More potent still is the stench of fermented urine, a restless homebrew, saccharine-rich and vinegar sour, viciously leering. Finally, the sharpest odour of all, the sickly fruit of peptic turmoil, an acidic, rotten tang, almost a taste: diarrhoea.

These are the smells that cannot be unsmelled.

Hello?

Come in, guys. Thanks for coming.

A bald head appears down the passage. Someone else whos up too early.

Its my downstairs neighbour. Shes in a bad way.

We step into the flat. The carpets are threadbare and rucked to reveal the concrete underneath. Crumpled council letters, pizza leaflets, food wrappers and tissues litter the floor. The yellow paper on the walls is peeling at the seams, and where the walls meet the ceiling, a dense lattice of cobwebs is laden with thick pillows of dust. The smoke alarm beeps: H EEP ! C HANGE MY BATTERY! Every forty seconds: H EEP!

Whats the ladys name?

Margaret. Peggy.

A single unshaded bulb illuminates the living room, but the stronger light comes from the giant television. Dominating the centre of the room, like a monarch at court, it pours out a multicolour cascade of the life Peggy could be living if things were different. Its sound has been muzzled to a dull, persistent murmur.

Torn curtains hang below the window line on a rail that can no longer take the weight. The walls are devoid of adornment: no black-and-white wedding day; no grandchildren in school uniform. The carpet in here is not something you see; its something you feel. As we step into the room, our shoes cling to it like flip-flops on wet sand.

Peggy doesnt have much furniture. On a small Formica table ringed with caffeine haloes sits a glass ashtray, overflowing with butts and tobacco threads and the mouldering debris of miniature oranges and other fruits. Mugs have grown encrusted with dregs, other food waste has been discarded on the floor: yogurt pots cultivating blue cheese and greasy wrappers hosting flies and their maggoty young.

The sofa itself is a broken-down hearse, beginning to fold in on itself, its material balding and sprouting foam, its original colour long forgotten. Surrounding this seat, within arms reach, sit five or six ice-cream tubs that explain the throbbing stench because each of them appears to be full of urine.

And in the centre of the sofa, her limbs flopped out exhausted to the sides, but with eyes staring stubbornly in front, sits Peggy.

Morning, Peggy. I think you might need our help.

Every occupation carries its own mythology. This one has the sparkle of excitement, but dont be dazzled. Not all flashing lights mean theres a disco going on.

Perhaps it sounds like an adventure. A little bit daunting, a tiny bit glamorous. The racing through traffic, the unpredictability, the public trauma, the blood. The vague whiff of danger. An exhilarating little escapade.

You see it when people ask what you do for a living. You say the word paramedic, and their eyebrows lift slightly, their heads tilt a fraction to the right.

Oh, wow!

And, just like that, for a moment, a very short moment, youre a tiny bit more interesting.

I could never do what you do...

I dont think anyone pictures a permanent adrenaline rush. But theres that tantalising collision between crisis and intervention, especially out in the real world, where local details can add a bit of spice.

You can guess what people ask next. We all have that guilty-morbid fascination with the nasty things that happen to people well never have to meet. So of course the next question is: Whats the worst thing youve ever seen?

When someone asks this, theyre after a cut-price horror movie. They want to hear about the man whos taken his hand off with a bench saw or the girl with a pen lodged in her eyeball. The more gruesome the better and preferably involving a large puddle of the red stuff. Tales of mangled limbs tend to be well received; descriptions of organs outside the body elicit luxuriant groans of horror.