EMS operator 74...

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.