https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/feb/03/paramedic-memoir-ambulance-jake-jones-emergency-services-can-you-hear-me

‘Jake Jones’ explains what’s revealed – and what’s hidden – in his memoir of private dramas on the emergency services’ front line

As a paramedic, Jake Jones sees a lot. Writing under a pseudonym, this serving emergency worker offers snapshots of people’s lives at the point of crisis in his engaging memoir, Can You Hear Me?

“When I started writing it, I wasn’t really in it,” he says. “I was writing episodes about patients – not just their clinical experiences, but their lifestyles, their social settings, their family scenarios and all the struggles that people have, because I feel that we get these insights into people’s situations which are quite intimate, really. It’s quite a privilege but it’s also eye-opening and I thought that a lot of those stories don’t get told.”

With poignancy, humour and compassion, Jones invites us into “the invigorating chaos of pre-hospital care”. The encounters are fleeting – average patient contact is about an hour – and the stories stop at handover.

The lottery of callouts offers a panorama of experiences: the mundane, the ridiculous, the heartbreaking and the tragic. From the desperate drug addict who urinates on the ambulance floor when denied a fix, to the woman who would rather call an ambulance than read the back of a packet of paracetamol; from Reggie, a frail and disabled 46-year-old man, lying in the dark on his bathroom floor for two hours after a fall, to Sharon, difficult to the core, but ultimately calling an ambulance because she is incredibly lonely. Jones evokes the controlled sprint to a heart attack victim on a football pitch and the desperate sadness of the call that “no one wants to receive”: the infant who doesn’t wake up.