Today was the third day of classroom learning, choreographed by APCO. This course is the second of two classroom portions, the first being a two-day introduction to the equipment and software that our state’s dispatchers use. Next week, I'll take a five-day class that I think will give me some insight into what the hell I've gotten myself into.
Though I have yet to take any calls on my own, and will not be eligible to do so for a while yet, we did listen in to several recordings of real calls as examples. Two of these stood out to me as unique.
The first was a small child. Actually, this one was two different calls, separated by a window of three hours. Both consisted of the young boy, whom I would estimate to be around four years of age, whimpering and able to speak only a single word: “Mama."
The sound of this child crying and asking for his mama was hard enough to listen to, but the thing that made the latter of the two recordings especially heartbreaking was the point where the dispatcher on the line threatened to send the police to “get him in trouble” for “playing on the phone.” It was likely from a house phone, as the dispatchers on both calls were able to get an address from the system, which can only reliably be done from landlines. Neither call taker believed that the child could have had any sort of real emergency, so when it was discovered later that the boy’s mother had died sometime between the two calls to 9-1-1.
I cannot even wrap my head around the kind of trauma that young man must be walking around with now. His mother died in front of him, and he dialed the number he was taught for emergencies, not once but twice. Instead of getting the help he’d been promised, he was scolded and then scared with the threat of trouble with the police. Is it really such a wonder that so many people distrust the systems that are there to support and assist and protect them? So many parts of those systems are failing, and when the systems fail the people, we all pay the price.
The second call, somehow, was even harder. It was from a few towns over from my hometown. A ten-year-old boy named David called 9-1-1 after his father suddenly collapsed. His dad was breathing, but remained unconscious for the duration of the long, seemingly endless call.
"Daddy, I love you. If you die, know that I love you forever."
"Stay with me, Dad! I'm here."
"Hold me tight, Dad."
David was incredible. He kept relatively calm the whole time, considering what he was up against. And the dispatcher, despite being all but powerless to help any more once the ambulance was dispatched, refused to let the boy panic. "You're doing great, buddy," he told David again and again. "Help is coming, I'm here with you. We're gonna take care of your dad."
The entire time it took for help to arrive, the dispatcher stayed on the line with the boy, encouraging him as he went and got a cool cloth for his dad's forehead, which is, of course, what Mom and Dad do for him when he's sick. As he realized, "Oh! Our driveway is a blind drive. Tell the ambulance that it's a blind drive, they might not see it. Oh! I'll put on the light. That way they can see it!"
Up until that point, I'd never really been at risk of crying, or losing my cool. After all, this was just training, and not even the hands-on portion yet. If I couldn't stay composed for training, how could I expect to do this job for real? But David's call got to me. I teared up, just a little. I couldn't help it. I couldn't imagine being that call-taker, living the rest of his life not knowing if David's dad had survived. Wondering if he'd made a difference at all.
Fortunately for him (and, by extension, me, as I was thoroughly invested in this story by now), the dispatcher did find out. The dad had in fact, gone into cardiac arrest, but EMS did revive him, and the hospital announced the next day that he would recover fully (or as fully as you can recover after cardiac arrest).
Tim, the APCO instructor, told me that the dispatcher had won an award for his performance on that call, and it had been presented to him by none other than David and his father. They played the audio of that call, the same audio I'd just listened to, at the ceremony, and Tim said, "I'll bet there wasn't a dry eye in attendance that day."
I wish there was an award out there for David, too. Something that acknowledges the courage and fortitude he had shown in the face of a terrifying, nightmarish ordeal. But then again, maybe there doesn't need to be an award. After all, that ten-year-old's quick thinking and ability to remain calm enough to correspond with the dispatcher's instructions probably saved his father's life. And maybe having his dad around, able to play catch with him and see him get married one day, is enough.
