Emergency Admissions: Memoirs of an Ambulance Driver. Kit Wharton

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      —Shit, says Val.

      What’s happened is she’s gone into labour, so they’ve made a break for the hospital, but then the baby’s decided not to play ball. It’s playing I’m coming out now! The trouble is they don’t know where they are or what road they’re on, and so they’ve got right royally lost.

      So we have an interesting ten minutes or so driving on blue lights up and down the road, looking for them. We come off the motorway. We go back on. No sign of them. At this rate the bloody thing will be collecting its old age pension before we find them.

      Eventually, from up on the motorway, we see the van in the moonlight, hazards on, out in the country in the middle of nowhere. Five minutes later we pull up behind. Inside the scene is … novel. Mum is a young girl, naked from the waist down. She’s already given birth while driving along, and the poor sausage has fallen out and landed in a heap in the footwell of the van before they even had time to stop. There’s what looks like a massive Irish Wolfhound, or maybe a small horse, going bonkers in the back.

      —Woof!

      The whole inside is filthy. It’s obviously a well-used vehicle, an old camper van, and hasn’t been cleaned or tidied in years. Mud everywhere. Baby’s now wrapped up in an old towel which doesn’t look too clean either and is being cuddled by Mum.

      The problem is the placenta hasn’t been delivered yet, and we need to get Mum out and on to the ambulance, and the baby properly wrapped up in something that doesn’t look like it’s used to dry off the beast in the back. Luckily the police have arrived behind us, so they close off the road, so that we can draw alongside, and they hold up a blanket while we get the stretcher out and get Mum and baby on board. Not that there’s anyone around here, anyway.

      I go round to tell the person sitting in the van with her what we’re going to do. He’s an old man, maybe sixty or seventy, and looks Middle-eastern. Balding but with a pony tail. Maybe he’s her father? He can hardly hear me over the dog.

      —Woof!

      —Are you a relative?

      —I’m the father.

      —Her father?

      —No, the baby’s father.

      —Woof!

      Shit.

      Brilliant. Val mouths at me. Fantastic. Well done.

      I’ve put my foot in it. Not for the first time. Oh well. Never mind.

      As we get her on board and he follows us into the hospital, it’s the elephant in the room – or ambulance – all the way in. We try and give the midwives a bit of a discreet warning so they don’t blow their own feet off like I did, but it’s difficult. Funny old world.

      Funny very old world.

      Mum and baby are doing fine when Dad arrives, thankfully dogless, shuffling in looking confused, every inch the mad professor. The midwives make everyone comfortable and test the newborn to make sure it hasn’t suffered from the unscheduled rolling around on the filthy floor.

      My crewmate and I wish them all well and leave, wondering how soon we’ll be back out to him with dementia or something.

      The interview with my boss Len for the ambulance service was pretty successful, compared with the charity fiasco. For some reason I didn’t feel so nervous. Maybe I knew I wanted the job. Or that I might be OK at it.

      Did I mind blood, vomit, faeces? Was I hard-working? Did I like people?

      No, no, no, yes, yes.

      Was I reliable and good in a crisis?

      Yes and maybe.

      Did I have any unsightly or offensive tattoos?

      I looked at his arms, covered in tattoos from elbow to wrist.

      No, but I can get some if you want.

      It was pretty much the only time I had ever seen him laugh.

      Silly bastard.

      I was in.

      So that’s how I started.

      The service itself started earlier. Wikipedia will tell you the first recorded ambulance was a hammock-based cart affair ferrying around leprosy and psychiatric patients a thousand years ago. Presumably everyone else had to walk. The first emergency ambulances were used by the Spanish 500 or so years later, and London had a civilian service for cholera patients a few hundred years after that. All pulled by horses or people. Then late in the nineteenth century came the first motor ambulances, before Ernest Hemingway hit the PR button with A Farewell to Arms.

      Only in the 1950s, though, did the emphasis shift from regarding ambulances as means of transporting patients to mobile hospitals for treating them. Since then the pace has hotted up. Equipment and procedures change almost by the year, reflecting changes in medical thinking.

      But one thing never changes. There’s always a form to fill out. Paperwork.

      There are forms for every patient. If they don’t go to hospital, another one. If they’re septic, another. If they’ve died, another. I have a joke if patients are not sure they want to go to hospital.

      —Let’s do the paperwork; then we’ll both have died of old age.

      And there’s an endless variety of jobs. An endless variety of things that can go wrong in this life.

      Where else could you take two people into the hospital on the same shift? One who’s suffered a cardiac arrest while driving and crashed into a building. We got him back. (Good job, said Len.) The other who’s fainted, frightened he was allergic to his cheese and onion sandwich.

      (For fuck’s sake, said Len.)

      One of the reasons I like the Health Service is I always wanted to be a comedian. This isn’t as strange as it sounds. My oldest friend used to run comedy clubs all over the place, and I used to help out on the door taking money. This was back in the nineties. A lot of people who would become household names performed. I used to yearn to have the bottle to get up on the stage and make people laugh, but I never did. In the ambulance service you can step on and off the stage whenever you like. You can be funny when you need to be, and serious when you don’t. A lot of times when people phone 999, they want someone to come along and take charge of a bad situation, not panic, and make it better. An amazing number of times, a joke succeeds in all three.

      —Haven’t I seen your face before?

      —Yes, on Crimewatch.

      Or:

      —You’re a smooth driver.

      —I’m even better when I’ve sobered up.

      Or:

      —I was in hospital last week with me legs.

      —Better СКАЧАТЬ