The Gift

People think we live at the hospital and turn up only when we’re needed like elves at Christmas or something. But I live in a small house I rent with my girlfriend and I work from an office at the other end of town from the hospital.

I normally clock on at 8 a.m. and it can be an hour before I get my first shout, that’s when the excitement starts and the adrenaline pumps: blue lights flashing and sirens wailing. Karen and I jump into the ambulance and we race off, with little idea of where we’re going. Karen normally grabs the sheet from the printer as we leave and gives me a clue where we’re going.

I normally drive because I’m the senior paramedic in our team and hey, I’m a guy. I get travel sick when Karen drives, so it’s just better if I do it.

About half the time control radios us to tell us to stand down or that it’s not urgent and we end up driving across town stuck in traffic like everyone else. I hate that, it feels like a waste of time, even if we are needed at the other end because Aunt Nelly choked on a peanut but she’s better now but control wants us to bring her in because her breathing is a bit funny and she’s over 70.
I figure our reason for being there is to save lives that would otherwise be lost. Karen always sees the up side of the less urgent call outs.

“Sometimes people don’t have anyone else to call” she tells me “If your mother was on her own with you living on the other side of the world wouldn’t you want to know that someone like us would be there to help her?”

That’s Karen for you, always seeing thing from other people’s point of view.
But, the times I hate the most are Saturday night and Sunday morning. People get a little bit of drink in them and they start mouthing off and it all escalates until there’s blood spilled and we get called.
The women are the worst. I don’t remember women being this lary when I was at Uni but OMG the mouthy cows we get every Saturday night. Sometimes the trouble kicks off in the evening before they’ve even made it down the pub; tottering around on 5 inch heels, 2 slags lay into each other like professional wrestlers. There’s rarely too much damage then, except to hair extensions, nails and makeup. I normally let Karen talk them down and get them into the back then because…. well, frankly those women are a bit scary, and seeing a bloke can just set them going again, particularly if the point of the evening out they had planned was to drown one girls sorrows after her boyfriend did the dirty on her. I had one of those the other day and the reason for the fight turned out to be that the BFF who was dragging her out drinking was the one he’d been doing the dirty with. She thought it would be better to get a few drinks down the girlfriend’s neck before she spilled the secret. I think even I could have guessed how that would go and I am seriously stupid when it comes to women, Karen mutters and calls me a ‘typical bloke’. Damn right I am, and proud of it.

Anyway, I’m rambling a bit. I wanted to tell you about this one night last week. During the run up to Christmas we get busier and there’s more opportunity for overtime. It was too late to get paid before Christmas for any last minute gifts, but there are plenty of bills in January when the credit card bills come home to roost. If there’s one things that gets me and Jules, my girlfriend, fighting it’s the amount she spends on shoes. I mean, I have 10 pairs including my trainers she must have more than twice that number and she’s always after more.

So… Karen and I were on shift and we got a shout for a girl that had been attacked in town near a pub, details were a bit sketchy but the police were in attendance and the rule is if the 999 call operator can’t ascertain details in 60 seconds they have to treat it as an emergency; blue lights, sirens, the works - and get there within 8 minutes. This night it took about 4 (it’s not a big town) and we took stock of the scene as we rolled to a stop and came out of the ambulance.

Although I do the driving, I’m normally the first to get to the patient. Karen normally keeps back and looks around to assess the scene before she goes charging in. She takes that health and safety thing to heart, making sure that we’re not the next guys needing an ambulance. I trust her to do that, I literally would trust my life to her, but… if there’s not anything on fire or exploding I’m going to look after the casualties first before I think about me. It’s not heroics or anything, it’s just familiarity with the environment, and knowing Karen has my back if I’m about to do something stupid.

Anyway, the scene was this; there was a woman on the ground; young, party dress, heels, not moving. There was a guy being beaten by a woman; she was giving him such a tongue lashing and smacking him left and right and he was just staring at the other girl and taking it. There were 2 police there, with no backup I could see and they were just trying to keep the looky-lookies away and not doing anything about the girls and the guy. There was something really off about the scene that gave me pause. I couldn’t put my finger on it but the dynamics seemed off. But, priorities first, the girl on the ground was the worst off, as far as I could tell. I looked over at Karen and she gestured me to go for the girl. She went to the guy, she’s so much better at talking people down from these big rows, so I left her to get on with it.

I couldn’t understand why the police weren’t doing that though.

As I went to the girl there were two girls with her stroking her hair and sobbing, pretty much distraught one of them was saying something like “it’s all our fault” over and over again, the other girl was very pale with eyes as big as saucers. I could tell she was going into shock and I got her to sit down fast before she fell over. There were some boys hovering around looking, there always are, they just need the right word to galvanise them into action so that they can be Sir Galahad.

“You!” I snapped out, pointing at one likely lad, who did a double-take and a “who me?” gesture, “Get a coat or something and keep this girl warm and sat down!”

He shot into action and wrenched off his mates jacket, his mate looked well padded enough that he could stand the cold for a while, and started to fuss over the fainty girl. With that I turned my attention to the prone girl on the floor. There was blood on the ground and she was covered with bruises, her dress was almost completely torn off and in rags. I couldn’t see where the wound was, the dress was getting in the way and clearly wasn’t doing anything to help her. I checked the three essentials; airway, breathing consciousness - she was breathing ok although some of the bruises were near her neck, it didn’t look as though she had been strangled. That was the A & B of the trio. She was moaning but unresponsive, semi-conscious then. I grabbed a couple of blankets from the stretcher and threw one over her as I checked her quickly to see if I could figure out where the blood was from. There wasn’t much, some was from her nose and mouth where she had been hit. I checked the rest of her body quickly for broken bones and the tell-tale wet sticky patch of blood. I worked under the blanket trying to minimise her exposure to the cold night air but I knew it made me look like some kind of perv feeling up a young woman. Her state of virtual undress didn’t help as my quickly probing hands were touching a lot of flesh.

And that’s when I realised, under the skimpy dress, the frilly black undies and the makeup was a young boy. I mean, probably early twenties, slight and feminine in appearance. I glanced up at Karen, our eyes meeting across the scene but I had no way to convey to her what was going on. She realised I had something I desperately wished I could tell her but couldn’t but she just nodded like the professional she is and got back to her charge. All this took a few seconds, but pieces were beginning to fall into place very fast, and I didn’t like the look of the puzzle that I was putting together.

In the meantime it began to register that the bloke was saying “She was a bloke! She was a fucking bloke!” over and over again to anyone who would listen as if explaining his actions. He was breathing hard and his eyes were wide like a startled racehorse, nostril flaring as he breathed out. The other woman was screaming at him “You killed her! You bastard! You animal!” as she finally broke down into sobs and slumped to the pavement in front of him.
The police finally seemed to have discovered an ability to get involved, now the screaming banshee had calmed down. They started to question the bloke but he wasn’t making too much sense. Karen quickly finished checking him out but it was clear from her body language there was nothing physically wrong with the great ox, despite some woman beating her fists on him, he just shrugged it off.

I lifted the prone woman onto the stretcher with Karen’s help, there’s a trick to it so two people can handle a person of almost any size, but I think I could have done it just by lifting her by myself, she was just skin and bones. Karen and I loaded the stretcher quickly and efficiently and got ready to leave. With something like this there’s only so much we can do in the field, quickly getting the casualty to the A&E (Accident and Emergency) department at the hospital is the key. The bleeding from her mouth and nose had stopped by the time we got there and she was breathing fine, but there were bruises everywhere and I wasn’t sure that there weren’t some hairline fractures. I had another suspicion too…

I shouldn’t have done it, I know, but I took it upon myself to have a quiet word with the older bobby before we left…

“Are you going to take him into custody?” I asked softly while his colleague tried to get some straight answers.

“For what?” the policeman asked.

“What?! Did you not see how badly beaten that poor girl was?”

“Girl? I thought it was a bloke in drag from what the other guy said?”

“Does it really matter if she has a willy or not? This is the new millenium for heavens sake! What could she have possibly done to merit that? Worn a dress?”

The policeman looked a bit sheepish.

“Look, send a trained female officer with rape experience to the hospital as soon as you can…”

“Rape?!” the policeman shouted.

“For the love of… keep it down you idiot! That poor woman has been through enough and you should be protecting her, not shouting your mouth off!” I forced out as quietly as I could manage. “Just promise me you won’t let him talk his way into leaving before you get a SOCO down to help you get evidence and statements.”

The police officer’s eyes widened and he nodded agreement as he began to call it in on his radio.

“OK” I called out to the three girls who looked to be the casualty’s friends, “One passenger can come with us, who will it be?”

“Me” called out the girl who had been hitting the guy and she ran to join us as we closed the doors to leave.

We left the scene with blue lights and sirens and rushed the casualty to hospital, It took 3 minutes and 47 seconds of intense concentration and then we were unloading her into A&E. Karen and I didn’t get much chance to talk then. I won’t bore you with the tedious details of all the paperwork we had to fill in for bringing in a semi-conscious patient. It was nearly an hour before we were back in the ambulance and ready to roll again. I admit, I was hoping to find out more details of the girl who was attacked and what the outcome was, but it’s not like in the TV shows where it’s all wrapped up neatly at the end of the show, I may never even know the name of the girl. At least the police sent a specialist officer to the hospital. The girl had regained consciousness before we left and I think I saw her other friends arriving as we left. Hardly a happy ending but I took it as a hopeful sign that they would help her through this horrible time.

As we were heading back to the ambulance HQ Karen turned to me and said very earnestly; “Thank You."

“Huh? What for?”

“For taking such good care of one of my sisters.”

“She was your sister?”

She smacked me on the arm. “You great lummox! You know what I mean!”

“I didn’t do anything for you, Karen. I did it for her. No one deserves what he did to her” I said simply.

“Still...I know it must have been hard for you, working with me during my transition…”

I shushed her. “Karen, you’re the best partner I’ve had since I joined the service. Man or woman it’s still a privilege to work with you.”

She blushed as I went on “I didn’t understand at first, so I’m sorry if I was rude when I first found out you were transitioning. It was a shock and I had to rethink a lot of my assumptions. I thought I knew you, and it turned out I never knew you at all. But since you started your journey, I like to think I’ve gained a little self-knowledge too.”

“Oh Mike, you’ve been wonderful, and so patient with me. I’m so glad you stuck with me, we make a pretty good team, don’t you think?”

“The A-team, and you know it. Don’t go fishing for compliments, you little minx!”

Karen started sniffing and misting up “Oh you…”
She pulled herself together and said firmly “Mike, your acceptance of me as a woman is the best gift I’ll get this year, thank you for everything.” Then she gave me a peck on the cheek as we pulled into the HQ.