To the rescue: what inspires volunteer life-savers?

http://www.theguardian.com/society/2014/dec/13/to-the-rescue-what-inspires-volunteer-life-savers

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Lorraine Galvin, 34, lives in Wexford, Ireland, with her four-year-old daughter. A university lecturer in digital media, she is a helm with Wexford Royal National Lifeboat Institution, with whom she has volunteered for 15 years.

When I was 17, our rowing club sent me and four friends out into Wexford harbour early one March evening. With no life jackets, flares or communication devices, we were badly equipped, in an old-fashioned wooden boat. The waves kept tipping us and eventually, an hour in and a mile and a half out, we capsized. I was a strong swimmer, but too shocked to attempt more than a few strokes. We didn’t know what to do, so we just clung on to the vessel. I didn’t think we were going to make it. I was expecting a wave to take us at any moment.

We ended up lying on top of the boat and kicking our legs for two and a half hours until we reached safety. Thankfully the strong tide had turned, otherwise we’d have been swept into the Irish Sea.

Realising, so young, that you are mortal is an awful sensation. I struggled to come to terms with the trauma. The intense feeling that there had been no one there to save us stayed with me. That’s why I joined the Wexford lifeboat rescue when it was established a year later.

My most dramatic rescue was one October night when I went out in pounding rain and a force 9 gale to rescue a man who had been blown into the harbour from his small boat. Our inflatable lifeboat was getting hammered by constant waves and filling up with water, but by the light of a helicopter we managed to find him.

I received an award for saving the lives of three men whose boat was stranded on a sandbank and being wrecked by two-and-a-half-metre surf bumping down. It feels wonderful to help people. There’s no greater sense of achievement than working as a team of three, saving lives. The crew – all volunteers – are like a family, working closely together and relying on each other for survival.

We get called out at least once a month. It can be boats breaking down, swimmers in trouble or bridge jumpers. When my pager goes off, I’ll abandon my class, as it’s agreed we will be in the water within 10 minutes.

The night before my hen weekend, I was up in the early hours with a bridge jumper. He entered the water and didn’t want to be saved, so we had to hold on to him in the water, with the crew in the boat, talking to him to calm him down, until he became too tired to struggle. Only then could we lift him into the boat. It’s hard to go back to sleep after: there is so much adrenaline.

I’m separated from my partner and have a young child, so these days I can’t always go out at night. When she hears my pager go off, she always says, “Quick, quick, Mummy – someone needs to be saved.” When I had her, I did think twice about volunteering, but my training means I’m confident – there’s always a sense of calm in the lifeboat because we train so much.

I’m constantly aware of the power of the sea and have a deep respect for it. It is something nobody can control; you can only prepare for it. The lifeboat feels a natural place for me.

John Stepney, 56, lives in Drayton Parslow, Buckinghamshire, with his wife and two teenage daughters. He is an IT consultant and UK chairman of the Nationwide Association of Blood Bikes, with whom he has volunteered for eight years.

Snaking through traffic-jammed Leicester Square, avoiding rickshaws, stretch limos and drunk clubbers at 1am, or ducking as a large barn owl swoops across my path on a dark, deserted Oxfordshire country lane, I’m always so aware of what I’m transferring on my motorbike. It could be spinal fluid extracted from the base of a child’s skull, to be urgently checked by a laboratory for meningitis. There is only so much of that in the body – you can’t just go back and get some more if you drop it. This is a very serious business but as most of our work is done in the early hours, many people don’t know we exist.

On standby a couple of nights a week, I carry anything a hospital needs outside regular working hours for the clinical treatment of a human being, from rabies serum to x-rays, and of course blood. I’m used as part of a massive bleed protocol, which means there is someone in surgery and they are unexpectedly losing more blood than current stocks can maintain.

Legislation states that we are allowed blue lights, but we can’t break the speed limit or go through red lights. On an emergency run, it can be frustrating to sit at traffic lights at 2am, but we can’t adopt a cavalier attitude. If I’m carrying factor VIII clotting agent from the regional haemophilia centre to a local hospital’s paediatric ward, a child’s life is dependent on my safe arrival.

For my most challenging run I had to resort to my Land Rover Discovery, as at 9pm on a winter’s evening the ground was covered with six inches of snow and the M40 was blocked by abandoned cars. A Slough hospital was down to its last two units of red blood cells and needed some delivered from Oxford. It also needed platelets for a patient on the operating table. I was then called to collect a blood sample from a collapsed patient in A&E, which needed to be tested at Stoke Mandeville in Aylesbury. The whole run took six hours.

Covering the counties of Northamptonshire, Oxfordshire, Buckinghamshire and Berkshire, 150-mile round trips are expected. Blood bikers don’t claim anything – all the costs, such as fuel, come out of our own pockets.

When I catch a glimpse of a premature baby in an intensive care incubator as I deliver donated human milk, or I’m in front of the bed of a sick cardiac patient whose heart output trace I’m collecting, it makes it very real.

Volunteering can be tiring but it’s hugely rewarding and humbling – I’m amazed by the focus and dedication of the other people in the team, who all have full-time jobs, too. My kids do think it is a bit odd that I don’t stay in and watch telly like other dads, but there’s nothing much on these days anyway.

Emmanuelle Pennarun, 26, is a freelance translator living in Withington, south Manchester. She has been an event first aid volunteer for the British Red Cross for three years.

Seven or eight years ago, while I was still living in my home country of France, my friends and I came across a middle-aged lady who had fallen down the stairs in a block of flats. She’d stopped breathing. I didn’t have any first aid knowledge and didn’t know how to react. We called the police and an ambulance, but I felt I couldn’t do much else. It might not have changed the outcome, as her injuries proved fatal, but I felt that I could have done something more if only I had some medical knowledge. That day really stayed with me.

Three years ago I did a one-day British Red Cross course. I wanted to get more involved, so I volunteered with the charity and now offer first aid at school rugby matches, marathons, music festivals and more. Each event brings its own challenges. Sporting injuries are usually to do with ankles, knees and shoulders, whereas at a music festival it’s often about drugs, alcohol and dehydration. If someone is really unwell, I’ll arrange for them to be transported to a walk-in medical centre. Usually, at a festival, I just have to help them out while they are being sick and get them to drink lots of water. Then I make sure they have family or friends who can pick them up and take them safely home.

I’ve seen many seriously ill patients in the past – at the first event I volunteered at, I dealt with an 18-year-old rugby player with a suspected spinal injury – but my most serious case was during a Liverpool to Chester charity bike ride. I was at the finish line when one of the cyclists told me a man in his mid-40s was unwell inside the Mersey Tunnel. The police raced me there.

The patient, a mile and a half inside the tunnel, had collapsed off his bike and was unconscious and not breathing. Another couple of volunteers and I used CPR, three defibrillation attempts and a machine called a supraglottic airway device to give him oxygen in an attempt to resuscitate him. It all happened so quickly, I didn’t really take in what was going on – my training just kicked in.

The man’s heart restarted and he began to breathe, but we kept him on oxygen until the ambulance crew arrived 10 or 15 minutes later. It was only as I stood by and watched them take over that I registered what had happened. I felt shaky and very concerned for the cyclist. A more experienced colleague tried to reassure me, saying that we had done all we could, and had done the right thing because the patient was alive when we handed him over, but I still didn’t know if he was going to make it.

I found out later that the man was discharged from the coronary care unit after five days. It was good to hear he was OK and to have that closure. He was extremely grateful. The ambulance paramedic praised us, saying we were the crucial link in the patient’s chain of survival. It is quite rare to come across a cardiac arrest, thankfully, but it felt amazing to have actually saved someone from death.

On the other end of the scale, I enjoy the special bond I make with members of the public. If someone is unwell, but not bad enough to go to hospital, I can spend several hours monitoring and reassuring them. I’ll chat to take their mind off the situation or help track down their friends if they’ve lost their mobile phone.

I’m pretty devoted, so spend two hours each week training, then up to 24 hours every weekend covering events with other volunteers. As we spend so much time together, I’ve formed some great friendships.

I’m not a doctor, so I can’t fix everything, but it is fantastic to be able to help someone in distress. Even if I’ve just managed to relieve their pain or comfort them, people are always so thankful. Everyone should learn a bit of first aid.

Alison Cooney, 46, lives in Taunton, Somerset, with her husband, 18-year-old twin boys and 13-year-old daughter. She runs her own hair and beauty salon, and joined the Exmoor Search & Rescue Team four years ago.

I support the police by looking for missing and vulnerable people in remote locations. It could be a mother suffering from postnatal depression or a rider whose horse has been spotted without them. I go to places the emergency services can’t reach, which suits me as I wanted to volunteer outdoors.

As well as covering Exmoor national park, I’m called out to urban areas such as Taunton, Barnstaple and Wellington, where we regularly search riverbanks. We often look for elderly dementia patients, who are unsuitably dressed and unaware that they are lost. Their health would deteriorate quickly if left out in the elements.

As a hairdresser, I had zero knowledge of all this, so it took nearly a year to train, in everything from navigation skills and search techniques to using radios and the protocol around helicopters. Now my search equipment is always in my car and I’m on call every single day.

Many people we look for have mental health issues. Others go off to remote locations because they don’t want to be found. There are usually clues as to where the person was last seen – perhaps they’ve abandoned their car somewhere or headed to their favourite beauty spot. If a missing person is possibly armed or likely to be violent, a police officer will accompany us.

Last winter a young anorexic girl went missing and her car was found parked in some woods. It was night-time, and she was very poorly – she needed to be found quickly. Working in teams of four, we used a search dog to help.

Thankfully, we found her. We took her on a stretcher to a safe area for the air ambulance to take over. There is no other feeling like saving a life. It is the reason I volunteer.

The adrenaline rush of my first call-out was unbelievable. I had graduated from a trainee to a full team member, and I was constantly waiting for the phone to ring. It happened at about teatime on a hot May evening. A man with a deteriorating medical condition was lost in a forest. His family had reported him missing and the police had traced his rough location via a recent cashpoint transaction and by tracking his mobile phone.

I was nervous. It’s suggested that someone drives with you, because so many thoughts go through your mind. Are they going to be dead or alive? What am I going to find? But as soon as you are out searching, the training kicks in and you go into a different mindset. You have to concentrate, so you don’t miss anything significant.

I was relieved I wasn’t in the finding team as the man hadn’t survived. Nothing really prepares you for how you will feel until you actually find somebody. If there isn’t anything you can do, there is a sadness. But no matter what their story, you try to remain objective and not get emotionally involved. You don’t have to help carry the body out if you choose not to.

We do get searches for teenagers, a similar age to my own children, so I naturally relate it to them. After any such call-outs, I’ll always give my kids an extra big hug when I return home. It confirms how important my volunteering is. If my child went missing, I’d want as many people as possible out there looking for them.

Herbie Ricketts, 52, lives in Thornton Heath, south London, and has a 17-year-old son. He is single, lives alone and works as an electrician. He has been a listening volunteer with the Samaritans for 16 years.

I’ll always remember my first day on duty. Despite months of training, it was nerve-racking: only then did the true nature, and unpredictability, of the work I was doing hit home. Each caller is as individual as their circumstances, but until I became a Samaritan, I didn’t realise such a large number of people take their own lives.

The caller who really resonates was the first who told me he was suicidal. He was a young man, and he said he was stressed and depressed. He’d been too frightened to talk to the people around him, which is common. People are told they’ve got nothing to be upset about, or to buck their ideas up. Or, if they are already labelled as having mental health issues, the threat of being sectioned or heavily medicated looms if they use the s-word, so they tell no one. How do you make sense of your feelings if you can’t tell someone? Just allowing people to say what they honestly feel helps them find a different perspective.

I couldn’t offer him practical advice but I could support him emotionally. I helped him come to terms with his situation and make sense of some of the horrible feelings and terrible emotions he was experiencing. Offering anonymity and being nonjudgmental allows vulnerable people to explore their thoughts without fear of repercussions. I was there for him in that moment, but after a couple of hours it had passed. I left him in an emotionally safe place, ensuring he knew I wasn’t rejecting or abandoning him. I let him know we were still there if he needed us, explaining that it might not be me on the other end of the phone but another Samaritan who could also support.

Suicidal people will ring with so many issues: abusive relationships, drug use, loneliness, redundancy or debt. If you look at it from the perspective of, “How can I solve this?” you can become, like them, overwhelmed. Every cell in your body wants to offer solutions, but as a Samaritan I’m not there to sort their problems out. I’m not sweeping them under the carpet; I listen and will support them when they can’t see any further than tomorrow.

I’ve had callers go quiet. You have no idea if they have fallen asleep or lost consciousness. When the phone goes silent, we stay with that caller as long as we possibly can, which could be two or three hours. But we have no way of knowing what has happened – we can’t trace the call because we provide anonymity.

The shifts are up to four hours long. They can be emotionally draining but sometimes you come out elated, because you’ve had great contact with someone. When it doesn’t go so well, I offload to my colleague, so I don’t carry home a heavy heart. Being a Samaritan has enhanced my life no end. I’m calmer. I’m an empathetic and supportive listener, which has enhanced my relationships. But being a wonderful Samaritan doesn’t make you a wonderful parent or wonderful partner – I wish it did.