I’m still mortified by my emergency ambulance callout
The breathlessness and exhaustion crept up on me over a period of a few days last month. Pains in my jaw. A stabbing in my ear. An abrupt need to sit down while queueing at the bank. I was too busy to be ill so after whinging a bit to my husband, I ignored it. He suggested I “see” the GP, which is to say, spend an hour on the phone hitting the redial button, more in hope than expectation, like one of those slot-playing zombies in Vegas. I was reluctant to expend my energy when it was in such short supply.
Besides, what would I say? That I was “dizzy” with brain fog and an inability to walk as fast as usual? Frankly, Holby City would be hardpressed to string a storyline out of those symptoms, even if they roped in Dame Maggie Smith herself to risk her life among the medical marvels of Keller Ward.
I might have been persuadable once, but not now that Covid has made the entire nation feel like an unnecessary burden. Those exhortations to “save the NHS” meant 1.5 million routine operations were cancelled and very ill people stayed at home, fearful of being a pest, terrified of catching coronavirus, bewildered and baffled as their silent cancers metastasized and cardiovascular conditions worsened.
At home, I started cooking supper, then I felt the colour drain, I stumbled. My husband put me to bed, gave me a glass of water, switched on The Archers.
My chest grew tight, my breathing shallow, pains radiating up my arm to my jaw. Both my parents had heart disease; my mother almost died. My father died of cardiac arrest in bed while reading three of us a story.
My sister had a heart attack a few years ago. I felt as though I was being sucked into a sinkhole – reached for my phone and called 999.
An ambulance came – within an hour, my husband says, although I was too confused to keep track. The paramedics carried out an ECG and checked my blood pressure. I opened my eyes, was able to focus.
False alarm. I was fine. Nobody said the words “panic attack,” but I knew. And my first response? Not a flush of relief but a rush of guilt. I thanked them effusively, apologised too profusely. They wanted to take me to hospital to be checked out. I demurred, too mortified to take up any more precious, limited resources.
I knew how lucky we were to have been seen so quickly. Since July of this year, 10,000 more people have died from non-covid illnesses than is usual in England and Wales, according to figures from the Office for National Statistics. We are in crisis on all fronts.
During the summer, a neighbour of mine – a nonagenarian cancer survivor – fell over in his garden. He couldn’t get up but, no fool him, he point blank refused to let anyone call 999.
“They would have insisted that nobody should move me and I’d either still be lying outside today or dead of hypothermia,” he concluded over a cup of sweetened tea, after three strong men had managed to get him up and carry him back indoors, purple bruises already darkly blotting their way across his legs and neck.
He’s not wrong. This week, we learnt of Emily Saunders, a singersongwriter on holiday in Devon who fell outside at 8pm, breaking her leg.
She called for an ambulance and the operator said she shouldn’t move but there were no available vehicles; they were all queueing at the nearest A&E, 18 miles away.
“The experience of not knowing when or even if one would turn up was terrifying,” she said. It would be almost seven hours on the cold concrete before a crew arrived. Did I mention she also suffers from an autoimmune disease and asthma? Then came hours waiting to be admitted. She was finally given a bed literally 24 hours after her accident. A disgrace? At least Saunders lived to tell the tale.
Last month, a woman went into cardiac arrest and died in the back of an ambulance languishing for almost an hour and a half in a Cambridge hospital car park. This, a week after another woman died of a heart attack while waiting for two hours in a queue of ambulances in Gorleston-on-sea.
These “one-offs” are happening with frightening frequency; in September a Shropshire cancer patient with breathing difficulties died while he waited at home for eight hours for an ambulance. He was found wearing a coat and had a bag packed, ready to go into hospital. I fear that for this government, tragedies are becoming statistics. How else can it be that 4,500 people died after waiting 12 hours on a hospital trolley last year?
Friends have told how their children’s mental health collapsed during the lockdowns. They needed urgent help. Or if not help, then support. Or if not support, then advice.
“We were in such extremis, I would have seen it as a victory if someone – anyone – had simply answered the phone on the emergency Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services number I was given,” my mate Rachel says. Rachel’s not her real name. Her 14-year-old daughter, so isolated and tormented that she tried to take her own life with pills on two occasions, isn’t called Olivia either.
“It’s hard to describe the nightmare, the powerlessness,” says Rachel, still struggling to get access to treatment. “God knows how we made it through. I don’t blame any one individual but I do feel very angry at how the whole system lacked resilience and that Covid is still being trotted out as an excuse for long waiting lists, cancelled appointments and inefficiencies that have a huge effect on the young people growing increasingly desperate.”
Fathers and mothers, sons and daughters, grandparents. Patients who waited patiently – their reward, a death without dignity. I still find my callout excruciatingly embarrassing.
How dare I waste everyone’s time? Our NHS may have pulled through the pandemic but the truth is, it no longer feels like ours.
Covid has made the entire nation feel like their health is a burden on the NHS