What is the address of your emergency?
It’s a term that seems so second nature that you don’t feel
it anymore. You don’t feel the weight that it holds. More importantly you don’t
feel the assurance that it provides on the other end of the phone. As I type
this, I sit inside a “high performance” dispatch center. I feel a sense of
accomplishment because I successfully killed a roach earlier in the night. Atta
boy. I look at the dispatch system as the minutes of the 12 hours slowly tick
by. Not knowing when that phone is going to ring. But you know that it is going
to.
From the street side of things. The dispatcher is the first
to get blamed. We have all muttered the term “the fucking dispatchers…” then
followed by some comment. I have done it several times. Even more so after I became
a dispatcher. They are the first point of contact with the person that woke us
up. Thus making them the problem. It was the dispatcher for drummed up the
chest pain patient at 4am. It was also the dispatcher that decided you needed a
work out, and 20+ minutes of CPR would be the perfect thing to get the blood
flowing (no pun intended, but kinda). I’ve worked with some phenomenal and some
not so phenomenal dispatchers. But it is one of the most thankless jobs on the
earth.
More often than not, the dispatcher is really only brought
to the public light when they have really screwed up, or happened to have answered
the phone on some glory call. This is hoping that it was that one call where
you were trying to eat dinner, our sneezing, or coughing, or laughing at the
scenario that is being presented to you at the time. Public safety is a front
row seat to the greatest show on earth, but dispatch holds the invite to the
party. More often as time passed the dispatcher, call taker, telecommunicator
becomes so jaded that it is hard for the stress to stick. Some are able to
simply, not give a shit, and move on like nothing ever occurred. Others have to
live with the fear of the unknown.
It is easy in the public safety world to work in the field.
The biggest reason to this, you are able to use your senses to their full
potential. In the dispatch world, not so much. On the streets, you can see what
you are going into, you can hear if things are occurring, you can use your
touch to change the outcome, and you can smell what may be a dangerous
condition. In dispatch, the only smells you have are the farts of another
person in the room, and your sense of hearing. That is it. You are forced to
use your sense of sound to determine what exactly is going on there. In a best
case scenario, a person will answer all of your questions and everything will
go along with the script and all will be fine. However, it very rarely works
out this way. More often than not. It is a complete shit show on the other end.
And it’s your job to determine what the most critical issue, as well as send
the appropriate help in a timely fashion. Simple things really.
The hardest part of this job for me, is the stress of the
unknown. To me, it is 12 hours of playing a game of Russian roulette with a
phone. Each time that it rings, there is no telling what is going to be on the
other end. Is it a person who cannot breathe? Is it a child that fell off of
their bike? Is it an intoxicated person sleeping? Is it someone who just witnessed
their wife of 50 or more years say her final “I love you”? Is it a person that
is down on their luck and does not want to be alone? Is it someone having the “big
one”? The one thing to know, is that you never know what it is going to be. But
you damn well better be ready, and you better sound like you know what you
doing. The whole time, you are personally freaking out on the other end. We all
have our moments of panic. That moment of, “what the hell am I supposed to do? This
isn’t in the guide cards!” That moment where you cannot offer reassurance,
because you cannot stray away from the cards. The moment were you want to say
that help is on the way, but the line goes dead… just like that, the line goes
to nothing.
A brief “hum” followed by a short “click”. The caller is no
longer there. Are they okay? Did you get it right? Did you say the right things
at the right time? Were you able to send the appropriate help? Are they going
to be okay? Please god, tell me that they are going to be okay! Don’t let this
be their last breath!
You don’t have much time to recover. A few short seconds
later the phone rings again. You hear the family screaming in the background. You
battle the caller who begins the interaction by screaming. “HURRY UP! YOU NEED
TO HURRY! THEY JUST DROPPED AND NOW THEY ARE NOT BREATHING!” You immediately try
to obtain an address, you can’t just send a unit to nowhere. You fight to
verify an address so that you can get the help going. Your partner assigns the
units to the job, Basics are rolling, and paramedics answer and acknowledge the
job. The caller tells you that they are turning blue and breathing once every
few seconds. You are going to have to instruct a person over the phone on how
to perform CPR, a process that will seem to go on forever. The caller tells you
that they cannot do it, they just can’t, that it is too much for them to
handle. You need to reassure them that this is going to save their life. You now
are faced with the task of making a complete stranger your eyes and ears at the
worst possible moment of their life. Your blood is racing and you want to just
hang up the phone and do it yourself.
But you can’t, that isn’t your job. You look at your deployment
monitor, the units are moving. But not fast enough in your eyes, to you they
are going to slow. They should have been there by now. It’s been 33 seconds. Dear
god, it has only been 33 seconds. This feels like a lifetime and it has only
been 33 seconds. You continue to provide instructions. “I need you to pump the
chest hard and fast, hard and fast, hard and fast.” You hear the caller putting
every ounce of energy into this and you can tell that you are changing their
life, in a way they ever saw themselves changing at this very moment. You could
a sequence of “1-2-3-4” over and over. You watch the counter on your console
county up and down 600 times. “Where the fuck are these guys!” is the only thought
as you continue to count. Your body syncs to the routine you are commanding
over the phone. You give the caller reassurance that they are, “doing great”
and “help is just down the street”.
Just then, it is a miracle, you hear the echo of your
partners voice through the phone, the unit arrived. The caller tells you that
help has arrived, you tell them that can disconnect and you hear that click.
You take a second, you hear nothing. For that brief moment, it is just you,
your mind, and the wonder. Did I do enough? Are they going to make it? Did I do
well? Did I make the difference? Did I save the person? It is the fear of maybe
never knowing. You may get the information. You may not. They may make it to
the hospital, they may not. You don’t know. But what you do know, is that phone
is going to ring again. And that you have no clue what is about to come your
way.
