Do you know, dear readers, that I think I may have surpassed myself. There’s a three week gap in posts down there, I suspect it may be a record.
Three weeks ago I was watching the end of my course accelerating towards me at a terrifying speed. Colleagues and friends would clap my shoulder and ask “So, looking forward to the end of the course, then?” to which I could only respond “You mean the time when the patients are real, really sick and really die? No, no, I’m not particularly. I am, in fact, shitting myself.”
Come the Thursday night we were full of Chinese food and were wandering around the ground of the training college swigging from bottles of Moet. Friday involved washing vehicles and, in Clare’s case, leaning against the garage walls and groaning. We were debriefed, applauded into the dining room by the other classes and by one in the afternoon were all on our way back home
My first day on the road was the following Tuesday, I was meant to be third manning (working alongside a double crew), but because of staffing problems, I just ended up working with a leading Paramedic from the station. By lunchtime I was working with my DTO (the one who caught me dancing the cha-cha in the middle of the lawn at the college). The day went fairly well, we had a four year old girl with a fractured arm. Her mother was convinced it was dislocated and I had to restrain myself from telling her “One of two things has happened to your kid’s arm. Either it’s broken, or she’s grown an extra elbow.”
That afternoon I was sitting in the cab of the ambulance when I received a message from Flatmate Giles’ brother.
“Kal, our Dad’s really sick, in hospital, tell Giles to get on the next bus, he should be here, I can’t reach him directly.”
Giles Dad has had a few health scares in the past, a couple of TIAs, heart surgery, but he’s fighting fit and a GP, my GP. He knows how to look after himself and is so irrascible and such a big personality that I had little doubt he’d be absolutely fine. Still, I called Giles and let him know that since I was planning on heading north on Wednesday morning anyway that I’d drive him up on Tuesday night at the end of my shift.
I finished my first day on the road in good spirits, drove home and found Giles on the sofa, chalk white. He looked at me when I entered the room.
“My Dad’s not got long to live.”
I gulped, nodded.
“Days, or hours?”
“Days, they reckon.”
“Right, let’s get up the road.”
We grabbed CDs and I packed a bag, crammed some toast and milk down my neck and we were gone.
We drove north steadily, quietly, I at a loss for words, Giles staring out at the road ahead. I felt terrible, a day of being the reassuring presence in the doorway, the man with the medicines, the calm voice that takes control when it all goes wrong was crashing around my ears. It didn’t matter what skills I’d learned, how much comfort or relief I’d brought to the sick, how well I’d reassured my patients or transported them, how professional of proficient I was; I was receiving a stark message “When it really matters, with people you’d do anything to fix it all for, you are completely impotent.”
I just wanted to fix it, to make it all go away, and I couldn’t. We played harsh, brash music all the way up the road, skipping tracks with melancholy subjects or tones, we ate fast food at Perth, drank coffee in Newtonmore. I was reminded of the two of us driving north for Christmas. On occasion I’d turn to look at him, as you do when driving with a passenger; he looked like a shell of my friend, a stoic young man with set jaw and wet cheeks staring out at the cats’ eyes vanishing under our headlights.
By half past eleven we were at the hospital in Inverness, Giles’ Mum and brother standing at the entrance. I delivered him to them, hugged them both and turned on my heel, not wanting to burden them further by adding my distress to theirs. As I walked back to my car I heard G’s last vestiges of calm fall away as he sobbed and gasped in the floodlit car park. I waited until I was around the corner before bursting into tears myself, phoning SMM, not caring that it was late, that I might be waking him up, having to vent my frustration to someone.
I drove the last 20 miles to my parents’ house slowly, sat down at the table and, unfairly, snapped at my Dad’s welcoming “How you doing?”
“I’ve been up since five this morning, worked a twelve hour shift, driven a hundred and sixty miles and brought one of my best friends home to watch his father die. It’s not been a good day.”
He hugged me and poured stiff drinks until, exhausted, I headed up to bed.
On Wednesday morning I’m in the shower when there’s a knock at the door, I poke my head round and my Dad’s standing with the phone in his hand.
“Giles, for you.”
I take the phone and listen to my friend tell me that his Dad was dead by the time we arrived there, that the stroke he’d suffered had simply been too great to allow him any chances. Charlie had been CT scanned in the very machine that he’d lobbied and fundraised to have installed in the hospital and the neurologists had agreed that he had no chance of survival. I mumbled my sympathies, impressed on him that “If there’s anything I can do” in the selfish hope that he might make me feel better by making myself useful, he thanked me and hung up.
By Thursday afternoon he had called me back: “I need to get out, can we go for a drive or something? A movie, anything? I just need a break.” We head out to Inverness, watch a ridiculous film with lots of speedboats and explosions and drive around in the dark, laughing and crying by turns. We sit in the dirt of forestry lay-bys, leaning against the car’s wheels, he smoking, me feeding him the flask of Jack Daniels I’d put in my glove box. We reminisce, remember Charlie’s collection of horrific puns, how he was simultaenously the most humourous and yet least funny person that either of us knew. He cries, I cry, we hold each other and then, as men do in grief, call ourselves “Stupid bastards”, wipe our eyes, puff out our cheeks and agree a course of action, even if that only involves heading back to the house for a cup of tea, strengthening ourselves with purpose and structure.
Back in his Mum’s kitchen his little sister, Leilu, hugs me; she’s 19, but still as slight as when we were kids at school, we joke that regardless of how old she ever becomes, in our circle of friends she’ll always be 12. Her head comes up to my sternum, one of my arms can go all the way around her, she seems so small and young it makes my chest twist to consider her position. We smile, laugh at our differing sizes, agree that she gets the better half of the deal and that we’d have to find someone freakishly huge if I were to have the same experience.
Friday afternoon I’m driving alone back to Edinburgh to work my weekend of day shifts, praying silently that my shifts will allow me back up for Monday’s funeral. Thankfully, my position as lowest rung on the rota means that I get a lot of weekdays off, nobody wants to work weekends, so I’m free after the end of Sunday.
By Saturday morning I’m sitting in the station mess room, chatting with the paramedic I’m working with for the weekend, who we’ll call Atrio-Ventricular, or Node for short (we anonymise in these parts, but he’ll know who he is and why he’s called Node).
We check the vehicle, agree that I’m to drive for the first day and attend for the second and put the kettle on for the first cup of coffee, suss out each other’s musical and movie tastes, agree that modern R&B is pish and I’m just starting to feel truly comfortable in his company when he says.
“So I read your blog.”
My heart hits the floor and bungees back up just behind my tongue, I’ve been genuinely worried about SAS staff reading TQ because I fully expect to have the screaming piss ripped out of me for anything that I write up here. Especially since a certain leading ambulance person at the college called me “Kal” and then quickly said “Oh, I wonder why I called you that, how strange….”
I look across at Node.
“You’ve read my blog? Who gave you the address?”
“Someone here.”
“Someone ELSE here reads it?”
“We’ve ALL read it, we were talking about you starting and someone said ‘He’s got a blog’ and handed out the address. You write well, it’s camp as hell, but good.”
Damning praise indeed.
By the end of the weekend we were getting on like a house on fire, singing along to the radio as we zoomed along on blue lights; he accepted my enthusiasm and tempered it, I strained at the leash and occasionally looked over my shoulder to check that he was still there when I was treating patients.
Sunday night comes around too early, my dear friend Carrie has had suits for Giles and I dry cleaned while I’ve been at work, my bags are packed and five of us cram back into the amazing Daphne (little blue Clio) to drive North for the funeral.
I’ve never been to a funeral before, ever. I was sort of hoping in a half-assed way that my first would be for somebody who I didn’t like much, where I wouldn’t have to worry about standing up or sitting down at the wrong time because I wasn’t emotionally involved.
This wasn’t the case here, I’d spent the entire week wrestling with the desire to burst into tears, begging the gods of Ambulance despatch to just pass over me this week, please, jesus, don’t send me somewhere where someone’s Dad will die, please, I’ll do three deaths next week if I can just have a single week without. The week before I’d concentrated on being a mate to G, supporting him in any way I could, smothering my own grief as far as I could; I was almost looking forward to an opportunity to face my distress.
I’d done the lifts, I’d listened and hugged, got people pissed, stood grim-faced in the background. I wanted a chance to say goodbye to my friend, a man who inspired me, who made me laugh, who would look up from his paper when I was a teenager and answer the most sensitive or delicate medical queries, grabbing a prescription pad and scribbling out a line. A man whose jokes could reduce a crowded dinner table to silence, who rarely stopped laughing or smiling, who would drag me, as the only of his son’s friends likely to be over 18, into the kitchen to counter-sign and witness documents.
Monday afternoon we trooped into the village hall, Charlie’s adored jazz quietly tinkling in the background and took our seats amongst at least two hundred other members of the community who’d turned out to pay their respects. It was a Humanist ceremony, no hymns, no prayers, a pragmatic and down to earth service for a man who would have approved.
It’s hard to laugh when you’re quietly weeping, but those that spoke managed to make me do just that, we fondly remembered the man himself and his bedside manner (including his habit of marching into crowded waiting rooms and saying “You, you and you aren’t ill, go home”.)
On to the cemetery and, well, I think the only way to describe my actions are to say that I lost my fucking shit. I thought I was holding it together just fine until I saw Leilu take one of the cords to lower her father into the ground. I was furious; still am. Nineteen is too fucking young to bury your dad and there was not a damn thing I could do but shove my face in my hands and sob a week’s worth of frustration and grief.
We loitered, old school friends and I, by the graveside while G and his family lined up and had an endless stream of well-wishers wish them well, shake their hands, take them in awkward embraces. The last thing I wanted to do was look these people in the eye, this extended family of mine, these people who have, for years, shuffled along the dinner table to make another place setting, accepted me at Hogmanay without question, introduced me to their newborn offspring as “Your Uncle Kal”.
Eventually I had a realisation and voiced it - “This won’t get any less grim by standing here guys, let’s get it over with.” I walked the line, shook hands, gathered Leilu in a bearhug* and let her wipe her cheeks on my shirt, hugged Giles fiercely, quickly, a silent acceptance on both our parts of what we were feeling.
It was his Mum that trashed me, I was in the middle of hugging her when she whispered in my ear “Thankyou for everything, Kal.”
I shook my head.
“I didn’t do anything.”
She shook hers and smiled, eyes wet.
“You brought my boy home for me.”
Lost.
My.
Fucking.
Shit.
The wake was enjoyable, we all got pissed, laughed about Charlie a lot and I read an interview he’d given a photographer once where he described how he anticipates rural GP’s futures panning out. He talked about community paramedics working in small towns with GP services being more central. This makes me smile, because community paramedicine is exactly where I’d like to be in 10 years time, being the sort of community figure that Charlie was, gaining the trust and respect that he did. If I can be a tenth of the health care provider that he was, I’ll feel truly satisified with my career.
I dreamed about him that night, I’m not a big spiritual person, so I’m more inclined to believe it was my mind making sense of the day, rather than a paranormal visit from the man himself. But it was good to talk to him, to see him laugh at my exasperation that we hadn’t had a chance to say goodbye properly and to tell him that I’d miss him, that he’d been an amazing man. I genuinely feel like I got a chance to make my peace with him.
Rest well Charlie, you’ll be my bench-mark for the future; whenever I’m in an quandary over a patient, I’ll consider what you actions might be. And whether that’s taking the piss out of them or treating them with the utmost sensitivity, I’m sure it’ll be right.
*We were discussing our relative sizes later on in the day while I was telling Leilu about a job I’d had with a patient on the sixth floor with no lift. She joked that the reason we hug so well is because her ear lands right against my chest and she can hear my heart, maybe it was all to do with being in the womb?
I warned her that, as an emergency worker, I was likely to get really fat and that she might not fit inside the length of one my arms soon. She socked me in the arm, said “Keep running up those stairs, then.” and strolled off to get pissed.
She’ll be ok.
