Читать книгу Fighting For Your Life - Lysa Walder - Страница 9

A heroin overdose usually comes through to us as ‘young male collapsed’ or ‘difficulty breathing’ – an overdose will stop you breathing. But when someone dials 999 to report such an incident, they’re unlikely to want to flag up the truth. If they’re heroin users, their main concern is not alerting the police.

Addicts buying heroin sold on the street don’t really know the purity of what they’re buying. It could be cut with other stuff. Or they might get the dose wrong. Seconds after injecting what they think is the right dose into their vein, they turn grey-purple. Their breathing stops. And that leads the heart to stop through lack of oxygen.

There are times when a heroin overdose can be a very quick end. But in some cases the person’s breathing just trails off. So if we are called there in time, there’s a chance we can save them. In this situation we can give them a drug we carry at all times. It’s called Narcan and it reverses the effect of any narcotic-based drugs like morphine or heroin. It can actually reverse the effect of an overdose within minutes.

But amazingly to us, heroin users are not always grateful or relieved if we manage to save them from a sad end. Often, once the effect is reversed by the Narcan, they’re up, alert – and angry. Their view is they’ve spent their money on heroin and we’ve gone and wiped out all the ‘benefits’ as far as they’re concerned! Amazing, isn’t it? But we don’t say, ‘Excuse me, you were dead a minute ago and you’re still worried about your drugs?’ But that’s really what they’re thinking. Sometimes they’ll just walk away from us.

This can be more dangerous than you’d think. Because the life of the heroin still in their bloodstream is longer than the life of the antidote, there’s a chance they’ll go into respiratory arrest again. If we can sense that they’re likely to run off straight away – and you sometimes get to spot the signs – we may give them another injection of Narcan. We don’t want them to collapse. For us, it’s a case of making the best of a bad job. But only if they let us.

Drug addicts are occasionally verbally abusive. But over time you realise that the verbal abuse you might get from them isn’t really personal. It’s just aimed at whoever is doing the job. If you’re female, the abuse is ‘fucking blonde bitch’ or ‘stupid blonde cow’. If you wear glasses, you’re a ‘speccy git’. A bald paramedic (like my husband) is a ‘bald git’. And so on. The abuse or aggression can be much worse when you’re trying to help someone on crack. Heroin’s a bit of a downer but there’s no reasoning with someone on crack. You’re wasting your time.

Tonight I’m called out with my husband Steve to a familiar address. It’s a rundown bed-and-breakfast, a hideously depressing building, tatty, seedy, hasn’t been decorated or touched for years. At the front desk there’s a scruffy, unshaven, unkempt individual with a fag clamped firmly to his lips resembling Onslow, the slob played by Geoffrey Hughes in Keeping Up Appearances. The whole place reeks of tobacco, stale sweat – and despair.

‘Have you got a room for two weeks in August?’ quips Steve, deploying gallows humour: we know we’re probably going to need it. The call’s come through as ‘breathing difficulties’ – but we’re pretty sure someone’s overdosed on heroin.

‘I’ve never been called out to this place for anything else,’ I remark to Steve as we follow Onslow down the shabby corridor to a squalid room. It reeks overwhelmingly of cannabis.

Sitting by the window is a 20-something man slumped in a chair. He’s not a pretty sight. His skin is mottled, purple. A crust of dried vomit is covering his face and chest. Three other people, two men and a girl, are just standing there blankly, no flicker of any kind of emotion from anyone. They’re completely spaced out.

One of the men gestures to the chair. ‘He’s not very well,’ he says in a matter-of-fact way. ‘We had to resuscitate him.’

‘When did he last talk to you?’ I ask, putting down my bag.

‘Oh, just a few minutes ago.’

Steve and I start to move the man from the chair to the floor so that we can get going on resuscitating him. But it’s impossible to move him. He’s as stiff as a board. It’s almost as if he’s moulded to the chair. Now I’m confused. Stiff means rigor mortis, when all the muscles in the body become stiff and inflexible. It’s a good indication of death, because you find it happening in the body in the first two hours after death – and after about 8–12 hours the body becomes completely stiff. So this man’s been dead for hours. Not minutes.

‘Are you completely sure he was talking to you a few minutes back?’ says Steve.

‘Yeah, he was movin’ around an’ everything.’

Unlikely.

As paramedics, Steve and I know there’s no way in the world that this is true. The man is very, very dead. And he has probably been so for some time.

Now another paramedic turns up, ready to help us. But I stop him. There’s nothing at all we can do. Again, we try to get some sense from the trio: what happened?

This time the story takes a slightly different tack.

‘Well, we were up all night ’cos we were talking. And at about 6am we noticed he’d stopped breathing. But we did resus and we got him back, we did. And then we put him in the chair. He was movin’, definitely. So then we went out for a bacon butty from the cafe.’

Nice, eh? But whatever you might think of their behaviour – leaving a half-dead friend because you suddenly decide you want your breakfast – in these people’s minds they actually think they did a good job. We don’t believe for a minute that they really did make any attempt to revive him. What they probably did was reluctantly call 999 when they got back from the cafe. And in fact he’d been dead for hours.

The police were called but it wound up as ‘a suspicious and unexpected’ death and we were never asked to give evidence. Probably it was an accidental overdose. But, unluckily for him, he was using in the wrong company. They just didn’t realise he was gone. But that’s not unusual. A lot of people don’t know a dead person if they see one.

On TV or in the movies, death is always violent, there must be blood coming from somewhere. Fictional death always has a lot of drama around it. Whereas in reality most people die fairly intact. And look quite peaceful.

Quite often you’ll go to a house and someone will say, ‘She’s upstairs, dear. She’s been very quiet.’

And very dead.