But she’s survived.
We’re steered through to the front room, but in the hallway we pass the kitchen and I see the husband sitting at a table – handcuffed, naked, looking terrified. He’s shivering, surrounded by police officers but, despite what he’s just done, I feel a momentary pang of sympathy. He looks vulnerable and confused. Is he mentally ill? I wonder.
Then we get to the poor woman in the front room. She’s lying naked on her tummy underneath a quilt that one of the officers has placed over her. She’s conscious, managing to talk to one of the officers. She’s not even crying. But I’m horrified by what I see. It’s a ghastly, blood-spattered horrorfest. He’s lashed out at her over and over again all over the top half of her body, her head, her shoulders, upper arms. She’s probably got about 20 wounds: some are minor, just glancing blows, others are really deep gashes, several inches long, on the back of her head. You can see the white skull glistening through one gaping wound. And they’ve bled so much you can’t really see the colour of her skin, it’s so saturated with blood. It’s a shocking sight: Jim obviously thinks so too – and we’re used to looking at things that would make most people throw up. This is starting to make me feel upset. How can a man do this to the woman he lives with and presumably loves?
In fact I’m not very far from tears as I bend down to talk to Eve. ‘Are you in any pain, anywhere?’ I ask her gently.
‘No,’ she says, then adds pleadingly, ‘Please tell me what’s happened to Joe. Is he OK?’
‘He’s fine,’ I tell her because the police have already told me about Joe, her nine-year-old son. He heard the noise below but remained upstairs throughout the attack: he thought it was a burglar in the house. So he called 999, not realising it was his father who was the assailant. But in all the chaos, no one thought to tell this woman that Joe was safe and uninjured. A typical mum, she’s thinking of her kid first.
Jim and I set about doing what we can. We manage to wipe her eyes, nose and mouth clear of blood and get some huge dressings over the wounds. We wrap her in a clean sheet, blanket on top, and carry her out to the ambulance. The police have closed the kitchen door so that husband and wife can’t see each other – or the horror that his crazy attack has inflicted. We race to hospital with blue lights and sirens on and there the doctors and nurses quickly take over. Eve is taken to theatre for her many wounds to be stitched. It will take hours for someone to sew her up.
Our bit is over, but this is not the sort of job you’d forget in a hurry. Jim and I debrief in the ambulance afterwards, a little bit of therapy for us. We need it. We agree she’s had a narrow escape. By sheer good luck, police had got there within a few minutes of the son’s call. ‘Supposing the kid hadn’t been around, Jim, how bad would that have been for her?’
‘Yeah, and it’s lucky the boy didn’t see it – or get hacked to bits himself,’ Jim reminds me.
Later that day I’m back at the hospital and I track Eve down in the ward. She’s sitting up in bed, swathed in bandages, looking a bit like an Egyptian mummy. All you can see are her eyes, nose and mouth. Even her ears have been badly cut and are hidden under heavy dressings.
I introduce myself and we start talking. In my mind, I’d assumed she was a long-term victim of domestic violence. Had her husband ever been violent before? I asked. I will never forget her answer.
‘Darling, my husband is the kindest and sweetest man you could ever know. He’s never hurt or even threatened to hurt either of us before.’
‘But what happened today?’ I say, not sure if I can quite believe what she’s telling me.
‘I just don’t know,’ she says sadly. ‘It’s not like him to behave this way – something’s gone really wrong with him. I don’t know what’s wrong. But I’m worried.’
How awful. Instead of being worried for herself, she’s concerned about him. Then she fills me in on the full story.
Eve woke up quite early that morning to the sound of what she thought was her husband just pottering and clattering around in the kitchen. But he was being exceptionally noisy, so she went downstairs to take a quick look at what was he was doing. She found him there, a loving husband of 12 years, stark naked, eyes glazed, pots and pans in disarray all around – holding their meat cleaver. Sensing immediately that something was dreadfully wrong, she turned to flee. But then he set on her, flailing around with the cleaver, hacking her again and again. Screaming her head off, she somehow managed to get herself into their front room and shut the door to keep him out. Meanwhile their son, Joe, heard the racket and sensibly phoned for help and he was spared the sight of the bloodbath downstairs. By then the husband had got into the front room by forcing the door open. He started to try to slash her again but the police turned up quickly and managed to restrain him.
I don’t forget about Eve’s story. And several months later, while parked in the ambulance outside the Emergency Department, a woman approaches me. I have no idea who she is until she gives me her name. It’s Eve, virtually unrecognisable from when I last saw her, in her dressings and bandages. She looks perfectly normal now. Was her husband now in prison or a psychiatric hospital? Please don’t let him be out and about.
‘Darling, he’s dead,’ she tells me. I’m stunned.
‘He had a brain tumour,’ she explains. ‘They only found out when they took him in for tests.’ It turns out the awful attack on Eve was the first real sign that the man had a serious problem. After that his condition deteriorated very quickly – he’d died within weeks of attacking her.
I hug Eve and tell her how sorry I am. You can see she’s quite brave, this woman, but life has dealt her a bitter blow. To lose your husband unexpectedly is bad enough, even if he hasn’t nearly tried to kill you before. But to know that your child might easily have lost both parents if events had gone the wrong way, must be truly devastating.
My first really serious incident after finishing paramedic training is at a tall office block in the centre of town. Two firefighters are already on the case, up on the canopy which hangs over the building’s front entrance. All we know is that a man has jumped – or been pushed – from an office window. Somehow he’s managed to land on the canopy. No information about which floor he fell from – or why he may have fallen. At this stage no one even knows who he is.
We reach the first floor and, lugging our equipment, climb out of the window to get ourselves on to the canopy. The man is lying on his back.
‘Looks like it’s all over,’ comments my colleague Keith. The two firefighters are leaning over the man, furiously working his chest, carrying out basic CPR (cardiopulmonary resuscitation) to try to restart the heart, without success. They hear Keith, but say nothing. I look around: no sign of any blood at all. All very odd. Wordlessly Keith and I take over from the firefighters.
Now I’m starting to compress the man’s chest. But I can tell that something is very wrong. ‘His ribs are all broken,’ I say. ‘They’re not offering any resistance when I push.’ Then, kneeling at the man’s head, I start to try to get some oxygen into his lungs. As I begin to squeeze the bag, blood spurts out of his ears all over my trousers. This is bad.
‘Why are we doing all this? It’s futile,’ I hiss at Keith. He’s a senior paramedic, knows the score.
He shrugs. ‘Until we know a bit more, it’s best to keep going, Lysa.’ He’s right. We
