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This book is dedicated to my mum and my brother, who have tolerated me with astonishing patience and love for almost forty years. It is also dedicated to all my work colleagues in the London Ambulance Service who do their best for the people who call them under some very difficult situations.

Finally to anyone and everyone who works for any of the emergency services – those people who bring calm to chaos, peace to despair and aid to the injured and frightened while working under incredible pressure and yet who rarely get the thanks that they deserve.

Contents

Prologue: Too Young

Part 1

Part 2

End Credits

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Copyright

About the Publisher

Sirens is not authorized or endorsed by the London Ambulance Service. The opinions expressed in this book are those of the author alone and do not necessarily reflect those of the London Ambulance Service.

There are a number of terms found in this book that may be unfamiliar; for the assistance of the non-medical reader there is a short glossary at the back.

In the interests of confidentiality patients have been made anonymous and identifying characteristics may have been altered or removed.

Prologue: Too Young

Yesterday started well, we had the only new ‘yellow’ vehicle on the complex, and it really is an improvement on the old motors. But then we got a job that should have been routine, but unfortunately was not.

We were given a ‘34-year-old male, seizure’ at a nearby football pitch in the middle of a park. Also leaving from our station was the FRU (a fast car designed to get to a scene before the ambulance). As we had a new motor, we were able to keep up with the FRU.

Arriving at the top of the street, we were met and directed by some of the patient’s football team-mates. Unfortunately, the patient was 200 yards into the park, and there was no way we were going to get the ambulance onto the field – the council had built a little moat around the park to stop joyriders tearing up the grass in their stolen cars.

The FRU paramedic had reached the patient first and I ran across the field to get to the patient as the paramedic looked worried, and this isn’t someone who normally worries.

As I reached the patient, carrying the scoop which we would use to move him, the paramedic asked me if I thought the patient was breathing.

The patient was Nigerian, and it is not racist to say that sometimes detecting signs of life on a black person is harder than if the patient is Caucasian. White people tend to look dead; black people often just look unconscious. Also, a windy playing field at dusk is not the ideal circumstance to assess a patient.

I had to run 200 yards back to our ambulance to get this, now vital, piece of kit.

On my return my colleagues had started to ‘bag’ the patient (this means using equipment to ‘breathe for’ the patient and performing cardiopulmonary resuscitation, or CPR), which is the procedure to keep blood flowing around the body in the absence of a pulse. Attaching the defib pads I saw that the patient was in ‘fine VF’ (ventricular fibrillation) – this is a heart rhythm which means the heart is ‘quivering’ rather than pumping blood around the body to the brain and other vital organs. Technically, the patient is dead and without immediate treatment, they will remain dead.