The 6.30 am call is always nasty. Its right at the end of your shift when your guard is down and you are quietly thinking to yourself that you are almost finished for the night. The call is often to somebody who is quite sick or worse, and you suddenly have to turn your brain back on and start operating at full steam, right just when you are ready to fall in a heap.
Sometimes its to a patient with acute pulmonary oedema (APO), who has been lying down all night with their lungs filling with fluid only to reach the point where they can no-longer breathe. Sometimes the elderly will wait "until a decent hour" before calling for an ambulance. As a result they can be very sick by the time you get there, apologising for bothering you and offerring you a cuppa even though their partner is almost dead in the loungeroom.
But occasionally the 6.30 am call is to the family who have noticed that grandma or grandpa is having a sleep-in today and has gone in to wake them finding them "unresponsive'. We get the call as a "Cardiac arrest - unwitnessed" and you know there and then as you head out to the truck that the outcome is never going to be good. With a witnessed arrest, there is a very slim maybe that if good CPR has been done and the universe is smiling upon everyone, that the person might be successfully resuscitated, and make it into hospital where the next fight begins. It is so very rarely that an unwitnessed arrest has a happy ending.
This morning was not one of those rare occasions.
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