I know the entrance
to the crematorium. I’ve been here before, a couple of years ago. Then, we’d
turned into the top of the drive just as two men in black suits and sunglasses,
smoking cigarettes, were walking out. It was a hot summer’s day and the
ambulance window was down. As we slowed to make the turn, one of the men took
the fag out of his mouth and shouted: You’re
too late mate.
I got the joke. But
even though it must have looked incongruous to see a big yellow truck pitching
up to a crematorium, in fact it hardly needs saying that there are no places
beyond our reach. In my short time as an EMT I’ve turned up at schools,
hospitals, factories, homes, gardens, holes in the ground, holes in buildings,
cars, boats, trains, railway tracks, woods, swimming pools and the sea.
Anywhere that people go, an ambulance may follow.
This time, though,
there are no smart jokes, just a gardener, waving frantically over by the Garden
of Remembrance.
As I drive over I
suddenly catch a glimpse through the arched gate just behind him: another
gardener, kneeling beside a sprawled figure, pressing up and down on her chest.
I leave the
engine running as we throw open the doors and drag out all the bags we’ll need.
Over to the scene, and we find an elderly woman lying at the foot of some
concrete steps. I take over chest compressions whilst Rae cuts through the
woman’s top and slaps the pads on. There is vomit over the woman’s face, and blood
from a grievous wound at the back of her head which fans out in thick, geometric
lines along the joints in the pavement. Asystole.
Rae tries to intubate, but the woman has aspirated so much it proves difficult to visualise the cords; the suction unit keeps getting clogged with chunks of
food; we get little or no chest rise; her pupils are fixed and dilated, her skin
the colour of pumice stone. The second crew turn up and between us we try every
drug and procedure we can think of, but at the end of half an hour or more the
woman is as flat and dead as before.
Police have
turned up. They help liaise with the relatives, the crematorium management,
gathering information and controlling access to the scene.
We call the
resus, and drape a clean white blanket over the woman. We start to tidy up. The
police call for the coroner to attend, so we stay to finish the paperwork and
liaise with them. Also, it helps that our ambulance is parked in front of the
garden entrance; there’s another funeral gathering out in the car park, and the
truck is acting as a screen.
Rae and I go with
the police to where the woman’s relatives are waiting by a car. Most of them
have gone now, leaving just the immediate family. We tell them that she has
died, and how sorry we are. We tell them what we found, what we tried to do,
what we failed to do. They cry, and tell us some things of their own. Then we
leave them with the police and go back to the scene.
That’s when I see
two men, dressed in black, peering round the corner of the crematorium
building. I’m not surprised; it’s unusual to see an ambulance and police car
there, and they want to know what’s going on. When they catch my eye they nod and
wave a little shamefacedly, as if they were embarrassed I’d caught them
rubber-necking, and quickly duck back. But I don’t blame them. Out in the
street it might be different, but this is a crematorium, a place dedicated to
death, the business of it. And now with us, with me here in my uniform by this
big yellow truck, the police car, the body on the ground, it’s like a piece of
scenery has fallen down and revealed the staff who work the ropes.
I’d be curious.
4 comments:
I suppose funerals remind us all of our mortality.So to have an ambulance turn up as well must really dampen the mood.
Absolutely.
Actually, given the circumstances, I'm surprised we don't get called to more. (Glad we don't, of course. It's bad enough as it is, but a funeral... it feels even more of a brutal intrusion.)
That situation also has unique pitfalls: A friend of mime attended a funeral when the widow keeled over in grief and went into cardiac arrest. The paramedic who attended then assumed that the man helping him was the funeral director, and was accordingly direct with him when the man asked "Will she get better?": "Well no, she's dead isn't she?" That was her son. Ouch ouch ouch.
Double ouch. (But easily done).
I think there's actually something called 'Broken Heart Syndrome' - pause whilst he looks it up - (what would I do without Google?) - yep - a kind of stress-induced cardiomyopathy. So I suppose it's not surprising these things happen. I know someone at work who went to a cardiac arrest at a wake... and got them back! Talk about dramatic!
Cheers TV.
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