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Indifference and a death on the roads

Feb 23, 2012 Letters

 

 

Dear Editor,
What a tragedy of errors.  In the dark of night a young man holds out his hand to hail an ambulance on its way to the hospital with a casualty, mistaking it for a bus.  The driver of the ambulance mistook the young man for a cow and the man died as a result.
The ambulance did not have its siren on, but did it not have headlights, bright enough to distinguish a man from a cow?  The family then faced a measure of indifference from the silent hospital staff, capped by the insensitive remark from a man who turned out to be a doctor – “he finally got owner” – the body treated as ‘a thing’, an inanimate object, wrapped in plastic.  No respect for the dead – or the living, eg the young man’s mother.
Coincidentally, I had just read of a 41-year-old epileptic chap in the UK being drowned in a few feet of water in a pond, while feeding ducks, as staff responsible for helping  people out of water looked on, unable to act because of health and safety rules.  These staff could only deal with water which reached up to the ankle.
On instructions from above, they had to wait for the Fire and Rescue Service staff, the people qualified and entitled to remove victims in water about three feet in depth.
When that staff arrived, they had to use a pole to measure the depth, and the chap, floating face downwards about 20 feet away from the bank, was not removed until about 30 minutes later, the watching crowd powerless to help.
Imagine the agony.  He was fished out dead.
Reminds me of the poem “For want of a (horseshoe) nail…the kingdom was lost”.
These poor departed souls must mean something to someone.  “Do as you would be done by”. Some training and revision of such pernickety rules seem to be required.
Geralda Dennison

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