Hello and welcome to 31 Days of Terror 2023 day number 6.

I have three spooky stories for you today and the first story was sent in by Kate, she discovered it while she was perusing Reddit and sent it my way, the link to the original story will be in the description of this episode, so let's go.

I used to work as an ambulance dispatcher and regularly dealt with some grim jobs. Rarely spoke to patients except get their location or gain access when crews couldn't locate or access.

One night we had an elderly woman who was uninjured on the floor and it took us a couple of hours to get a crew to her.

She was phoned on two or three occasions by a clinician to ensure she wasn't worsening.

She had her phone with her on the floor and answered at each time and was reported as in good spirits.

The notes said she kept apologizing and she felt silly and didn't want to make a fuss, bless her.

Our crew got to her front door and predictably couldn't get in but there was a key safe.

I called the patient and she answered. She was alert and sounded tired but very much with it.

I asked her for the cold hung up and radioed the cold to the crew.

They were in and beside her within a minute and they immediately radioed back to say the patient was dead and stone cold, as though she had been dead for some time.

It freaked me out and I rationalised at the time that an old lady on the floor would likely be quite cold anyway and she may have just died in the minute between speaking to her and the crew getting in.

However, I relayed this to the crew in the belief that if she had only just died that recently, CPR should be started and could be effective.

They, being the licensed healthcare professionals on the scene, decided against this but did hook up the ECG and found no trace on her at all.

I even went through my due diligence to confirm we were at the right address, correct job details, patient names and everything matched.

I called the phone number I spoke to the patient on and the crew confirmed it was on the dead lady.

It always sat oddly with me because even if I didn't speak to an old lady from beyond the pale, I at least heard her last words and we might have saved her life being there earlier.

Despite clinicians assessing her over the phone and her sounding bright and with it.

This is such an interesting story and for a number of reasons firstly, I think people who work as dispatchers,

as well as obviously people who work as first responders who paramedics, police officers, whatever, who get to a scene and things haven't gone the way that you would like it to go.

But also for dispatchers who are speaking to people and in this instance, speaking to a woman and then being told, no, she's already dead.

Like that level of guilt must be astounding, that level of if we had done something quicker, if this had happened, if that had happened, it must be astounding.

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