" Paramedic here . … the Call for people who have already pass away can be peculiarly creepy . I am very comfortable with demise , but there have been a few times where I swear to god , I meet them twitch , and I almost lost it . "
word of advice : This post contains mention of felo-de-se , maltreatment , and murder .
First responders have one of the toughest and most important jobs out there. They’ve saved countless lives while being put through unimaginable situations, and they deservewaymore credit for the hard work they do day in and day out.
So, we recentlyaskedEMTs, paramedics, and 911 dispatchers of theBuzzFeed Communityto share their wildest experiences while on the job. Here’s what they had to say:
mention : Some responses were draw fromthisReddit ribbon byu / WhimsicalxxButcherand thisthreadbyu / ChristPuncher79 .
1.“I’m a 911 operator. I received a call at 3 a.m. from a woman who was home alone. She told me about a week earlier that a vehicle parked in her driveway and a man came to the door saying that he had run out of fuel, despite the fact the vehicle was idling. She had told him to leave, and he did. Now, the same vehicle had shown up in the middle of the night. As we were talking the vehicle drove away. I told her to check all of her windows and doors. All of a sudden, she gasped and every hair on my body stood up. She yelled, ‘Oh my god, there are hand prints on every window!!!'”
" Turns out , whoever it was had circle the menage peeping in . I still get the willies whenever I intend about it . "
— 41 , Ohio
2.“My first DRT (demand-responsive transit). Motorcycle vs. truck. I arrived to find the biker about 30 feet from the bike, his shoes scattered about 20 feet away in different places. He had jeans, no shirt, or helmet. Smelled like a brewery. The truck driver was obviously upset, talking to the only police officer out on this dark road. As we got the stretcher and approached the body, someone came down the road to investigate. They ran back inside. Suddenly, multiple drunk, shoeless people began pouring out of nearby trailers, screaming about ‘killing a motherf****r.’ They came down the road like a nest of drunk hornets. The one cop stood there with his arm out toward them, bless his heart, trying to protect the truck driver.”
" We did n’t assure the body onto the coping stone or even get him in the bagful on scene . We tossed him on there like a carrier bag of murphy and run like hell . Last I saw , that one cop was standing in the road with his arm out while they all ran towards him . "
— Anonymous , North Carolina
3.“In my 30s, I was an EMT in rural Arizona. One evening, I responded to an auto accident. The driver had been drinking and was quite drunk. We loaded him into the ambulance, and with lights and siren, we started the 15-mile trip to the nearest hospital. About halfway to the hospital, the patient decided that he wanted to go home. Despite my best efforts, he managed to unbuckle the straps holding him onto the stretcher, push past me, and unlock and open the back door of the ambulance. He was hanging halfway out of the ambulance as I wrapped my legs around the stretcher and grabbed onto his belt. I screamed at the top of my lungs for the driver to stop as I watched the highway speed past us. The driver finally heard me and stopped.”
" We radioed the police who responded to our site;the policeman convinced the affected role to rag in the ambulance the residual of the way to the hospital . The ironic part was that when we unloaded the affected role at the hospital , he refused to permit the medico examine him unless I stick around and held his hand . Needless to say , after this experience , I require some clean underclothing . "
— 65 , Arizona
4.“I went to pick up a guy who had wrecked a dirt bike into a ditch late night on a weekend. He was critically injured, lights and sirens transport indicated. My partner was finishing packaging him. I was administering morphine. My partner was about to get in the driver’s seat and put the lights and sirens on when a state trooper appeared out of nowhere and jumped into the ambulance. He straddled the stretcher and started screaming at the patient, who was in bad shape and also on morphine. I told him we were trying to leave with the lights and sirens on. The cop was completely out of his mind, his face one inch from the kid’s face, threatening to look up his military commander and destroy his life because he wrecked a bike while drunk. My partner and I were completely helpless to stop this cop attacking our critically injured patient out in the woods in the middle of the night.”
" We just had to wait until he was done threaten and verbally shout the patient for no known reason . He was able to retard exaltation because no matter what they tell you in NIMS ( National Incident Management System ) , in real spirit , the furious person with the gun is always the incident air force officer . "
— Anonymous , USA
5.“When I was a 999 call handler, I had a woman call and say her mother-in-law had called her and said the caller’s husband had ‘done something stupid’ and that was it. I knew in my gut it was something awful, but I had no way to upgrade the call. She was just around the corner from home, so I stayed on the line and heard as she discovered her husband had attempted to take his life. No CPR had taken place, so I had to try and talk this poor mother-in-law through CPR.”
" It ’s really unheard of to pick up the event or second take place ; we normally pick up just after it ’s happened . It was awesome . He did n’t make it . "
— 30 , UK
6.“I was a 911 dispatcher for four years. One night dispatching, I took a call from someone whose stepdad was drunk and chased them through the yard with a shotgun. I got the address, started officers, and while talking, the victim said he left his yard and was hiding behind a car in a driveway down the road. It was my sister’s house, with my nephews inside. All I could think was if the stepdad found him and shot at him, the bullet would go right through the front of the house and kill them. Longest eight minutes of my life. I had to keep the caller calm and safe while panicking for my family.”
" The stepdad was cop for attempt murder . Trying to keep the poor kid hidden while require him to get away from the sign of the zodiac was such a terrible pick to have to think about . "
— 37 , Michigan
7.“Former 911 dispatcher. I have so many stories, but one call that has always stuck with me was a call from an elderly female. She suffered from dementia and had a caretaker, but she would call frequently due to confusion. She also wasn’t always able to speak very well (I’m not sure if that was from dementia or some other ailment). One day she called, and all she said was hello, but then, she must have set the phone down. Our policy was to send an officer out since she called 911, so I stayed on the line to see if she would come back on or if the caretaker might pick up. After about 20–39 seconds, I hear her caretaker screaming obscenities at her, telling her to ‘shut the f*** up’ and to ‘get with the f***ing program.'”
" I also learn him imperil to take her food away from her ( I retrieve she was n’t exhaust as quickly as he wanted ? ) , and I bank I find out her say , ' Ow ! ' at one point . I document everything in the call , but never found out the outcome other than there was an Adult Protective Services cross - report filed . It was so incredibly lamentable to hear how someone her family hope to take fear of her was treating her . "
— jalli
8.“I recently had an open line 911 call, where the person that called was the victim of a home invasion. He was smart enough to call 911 and hide the phone so we could hear everything that was going on. I heard him begging for someone to just take the money and leave, saying, ‘Please don’t kill me; I’m an old man…’ And I heard another male voice in the background swearing, telling him he was going to shoot him in the face. It was the longest phone call of my life — I thought for sure I was going to hear this poor guy get murdered on the line. I was afraid to say anything because I didn’t want the suspect to know or hear that the victim had called. Thankfully, our officers got there fairly quickly, surrounded the building, and caught the guy trying to go out a back window.”
" He got arrested , and the old man survived with only pocket-size combat injury from being punched several times . seemingly , the defendant was passing high-pitched and was a friend of a caretaker of the older person . The caretaker had mentioned the older man had money conceal in the house . "
— u / Punkerduckie
9.“I worked in an ambulance for 10 years as both an EMT and paramedic. I’ve been in dispatch for the past three years. I gotta say — it’s a different animal. On the ambulance, when I arrived on an emergency scene, one of my priorities was controlling the scene, so I could do what I needed to do. I had lots of ways to do so and tailored it to the situation at hand. In dispatch, all I have is my voice to help control the situation. It’s a different skill set for sure.”
" One call that sticks with me is a char called because a dog attacked and mauled her son . She had grabbed her boy and jumped into their car in their driveway to escape the hound . It was still bark outside the vehicle . … It was very toughened to listen to her try and hold herself together while waiting for aid to come . People do n’t call us on their just daytime and do n’t always like it when we start out asking question . We hear to them take their last breath , comfort them after being raped , and tell them help is coming when they run out of their roue pressure meds and think their blood pressure is high . All in a twenty-four hours ’s work . "
— u / danbulance22
10.“I was an EMT in New York for a small town volunteer ambulance corps for a few years and then an EMT in Massachusetts at college for a few years. I responded to a call at college on a Halloween night shift. Someone had found or seen this college-aged girl passed out in a bush. She was probably the drunkest I’d ever seen a (semi-)conscious person: she couldn’t answer questions at all, couldn’t keep her head/upper body up at all, and kept vomiting on herself. But what upset me the most was that this girl had probably been out with her friends and somewhere along the way, they justlefther.”
" I just could n’t wrap my psyche around the scenario where someone’sfriendswould consider that this was an all right condition to leave her in — at Nox , sh*t - confront rummy , in a place where she ’s golden someone even saw her . "
— uracil / emthrowaway2
11.“I also responded to a call that probably came in as ‘male acting strangely’ or ‘mental distress’ or ‘unknown’ or something. I got there, and there was a middle-aged, maybe slightly older couple and the man was having a stroke or TIA (transient ischemic attack). He needed to go to the hospital, but he was fighting us. I had to restrain him (and this was no easy task I was in late high school at the time and this was an adult), while someone else put him on oxygen or tried to get him on the stretcher or something. As we’re dealing with him — and everything’s taking longer because we can’t get him to cooperate and he’s throwing off his oxygen mask and fighting us (physically) the whole way — we learn that: while he’s not capable of answering our questions and is speaking to us frantically in another language (can’t remember what it was), it turns out that he actuallydoesspeak English. He’s even a doctor.”
" It was terrify to see that someone who , in their right mind , wouldknow the peril of his situation , cooperate completely , and speak to us in English , but was incompetent of doing any of those three thing because of his condition . "
12.“Paramedic here. I can’t pinpoint one specific ‘creepy’ call, but I have to agree that the calls for people who have already died can be especially creepy. I am very comfortable with death, but there have been a few times where I swear to god, I saw them twitch, and I almost lost it.”
— u / RewindTimeee
13.“EMT/firefighter here. In an ambulance, my patient would sit up and would ask, ‘Who’s that kid sitting there?’ There was nobody there so I felt creeped out. Then, with the fire department, we got a note on our CAD (computer-aided dispatch) saying this guy was suicidal and was planning to ram any ambulance or engine while running from the cops. So, I was really nervous, thinking at any moment a car would hit us head-on.”
— u / K1ng_N3ptune
14.“When I was a new EMT, we went to one at this family’s house; the husband woke up in the middle of the night with difficulty breathing. His vitals were all over the place, and he had an AAA (abdominal aortic aneurysm). Lung sounds were rails, like all classic symptoms. The family was going to meet us at the hospital — he was alert and talking with us (although difficult) during the trip, and when he arrived, he went into cardiac arrest, and we were helping the nurses work on him.”
" His family did n’t get to say goodbye ; it all happened so fast , they walk into the ER and learn everything . It was right before a vacation , too . I feel really speculative for them "
— u / dartini
And finally…
15.“We did have one call where we picked up a patient who claimed they were being tracked by the US government. Of course, the nursing staff and everyone involved assume that it’s just some kind of psych patient case. He spent time talking about documents that he previously had access to and how the government didn’t want him to release the information to anyone. He yelled and screamed as we put him on the cot about being sane and that we were being brainwashed. As we loaded our patient into the rig, he said we’ll be followed to the next facility. Jokingly, my partner asked what was going to follow us, to which he replied with ‘a black Lincoln Town Car.’ As we left, almost immediately there was a black town car behind us.”
" It stayed behind us for the roughly 15 - minute transportation and only vanish as we got within a few blocks of the new facility . Dropped the patient role off , and all he had was a smug , I - secern - you - so look on his face . "
— u / disturbdlurker
TheNational Suicide Prevention Lifelineis 1-800-273-8255. Other international suicide helplines can be found atbefrienders.org. TheTrevor Project, which provides help and suicide-prevention resources for LGBTQ youth, is 1-866-488-7386.
The National Alliance on Mental Illness helpline is 1-888-950-6264 (NAMI) and provides information and referral services;GoodTherapy.orgis an association of mental health professionals from more than 25 countries who support efforts to reduce harm in therapy.
