Emergency, what service?

Joey can’t breathe. Libby and I are up late on the Saturday evening of what has been Joey’s fifth birthday. He has woken and we can hear him down the hall as he coughs tightly before falling silent. I mute the TV and listen hard, the silence hissing softly in my ears, a floorboard creaks and he appears behind the sofa, pale as the moon, unable to cry and I share the sudden rise of his terror. Libby picks him up and I open a window for the dark cool of the night but he seems to be getting worse. There is nothing more scary than a child who can barely breathe, the space between, when it seems like they may never take another breath. We have seen this before when he was two, it’s only croup but Joey reacts badly to it, so do I. The panic scratches in my chest like a bird stuck in a chimney. In the kitchen we boil water for the steam, add a few drops of olbas oil, dab a little vicks on his chest, I even spray an asthma inhaler in his general direction but nothing works. A hee haw accompanies every hard won breath, he sounds like a donkey giving a Ted talk. I stare at his vacuum packed ribs, watch the stuttering of his throat, I can’t bear this. 999.

‘Emergency, what service?’ Calling an ambulance on a Saturday night should be an invitation to frustration but as I hang up the phone the doorbell rings and the paramedics are already outside. Gary and Emma are professionals, cool, kind and collected, just what you need in an urgent situation. We still apologise for calling them though, but they assure us their presence is not a waste of valuable resources, besides their last job had been ferrying a drunk woman to A and E after she had hailed them in the street like a taxi. AMBULANCE! They quickly bring us up to speed, we have done everything right, except of course inhalers don’t work on croup. Idiot. Gary says Joey will be fine but he should have a special medicine that they don’t carry so a trip to hospital is probably wise, it is up to us but if they leave and have to come out again their response time will get longer as the night wears on. Hospital it is then. Libby goes with Joey and I stay at home with our other two soundly oblivious sons.

In the ambulance Emma puts Joey on a nebuliser while Gary chats with Libby about the joy of boys, his six year old is reading Harry Potter he tells her, he is very proud of him but was a little concerned when he asked if he could read Game of Thrones next. Gary falls into thoughtful silence, Libs smiles, but is distracted, the siren is not turned on and she proceeds to the sound of her son’s laboured breath. It makes her feel a little sympathetic suffocation, there are no windows in the ambulance, it is a bit like being inside a very large fridge, one where the light stays on when the door is closed.

At the children’s hospital all is quiet, Gary says it’s mayhem in the General, unlike adults children don’t go out on a Saturday night and get falling down drunk. Joey is a little scared of the medicine, his hooting echoes around the empty ward, it has to be taken orally but the doctor doesn’t want to cause him further anxiety, so an attentive nurse, picking up on his birth date, offers him a small present if he takes it. He accepts the deal like a good little shopkeeper’s son. The doctors and nurses are incredible and so is the wonder drug, Joey’s symptoms melt away and within half an hour he is breathing almost normally. A little while later, Libby calls me at home, I awake slightly guiltily in front of ‘Once upon a time’ on netflix. Everything is good, she tells me, we are coming home. I grin with all the relief of the reprieved.

Outside the hospital as Libby and Joey wait for a taxi, the attentive nurse runs up saying she almost forgot Joey’s present, Libby can see a very large box badly hidden behind her back, that can’t be it surely, she thinks. It is. Joey’s eyes widen as he sees the cars, loops and jumps of a hot wheels set. It was a donation, the nurse says, just right for a brave little birthday boy. Joey isn’t arguing. Libby feels something good filling her up.

On the way home in the stationary taxi the cabbie apologises for the delay, there is some fracas in the town centre, he explains, the police are controlling traffic. There is the clunk of central locking and glowing red spots appear on the doors. Just a precaution, says the cabbie. Ahead Libby sees the familiar staccato of bright blue light, there is a crowd of rowdy people around an ambulance. Gary and Emma are pushing through them helping a bleeding man into the back. Next to his mother Joey sleeps.