Deidre White will never forget the first time she heard Sam Kidd's
voice. "He was sobbing and crying, and I could tell he was only about five
years old," she recalls. "It took me a few minutes to calm him down before
he said his mother wouldn't wake up."
White spent more than 20 minutes on the phone with Kidd, who ran back and
forth between the phone and his mother to report her condition. "I sent him
to see if she was breathing, then to try to find her pulse. He was amazing,
really. Once we started working together, it's like he forgot he was
scared."
Emergency medical crews were able to revive Sam's mother before taking
her to the hospital, where she recovered fully from an adverse reaction to
a combination of prescription medications. "By the time I got off the phone
with Sam, about 10 people were gathered around -- and when the EMT said she
was OK, they all cheered and patted me on the back," White says. "It didn't
hit me for a while, but before I knew it, I was just crying like a baby. It
was so emotional."
White's success story made her a local heroine for a while. She was
on the TV news and in the papers. A week later Sam gave her a big hug and
a huge bouquet of roses. "Those moments make 10 years of working worthwhile,"
says White. "All those people you help but never see, they're all wrapped
up inside that one kid. It's like everyone is saying thank you, not just
him. Usually, you just have to take it on faith that people appreciate what
you do and how you do it. To be thanked once in a while is a great feeling."
While the moments of excitement are memorable, the life of a dispatcher
is often about staying alert through long periods of boredom. "If you get
complacent, you'll get burned," says White, who trains new dispatchers.
She recommends dispatchers change shifts or work environments, or retrain
every few months, to avoid falling into a rut. "You have to be ready at every
second. It can get very stressful, always being ready like that, but you have
to do it. I tell my trainees to take care of everything before their shift
starts, and if they can't take care of it, to forget it until the end.
You can't have someone with a wandering mind on the phones. It's
a recipe for disaster."
The situation is the same for Graham Herte. "Long times where only the
routine calls come in and then -- BAM! -- something you never expected," he
says. "If you're caught off guard, you lose valuable seconds. When that
phone rings, you have to sit up straight and be ready for anything."
Herte has helped deliver babies over the telephone and has often calmed
children reporting emergencies. "For some reason, a lot of calls are from
young children, and they need to be reassured that everything is going to
be OK, even if you don't know that's true. You have to calm them
down before you can get information from them and help them. It's a little
bit of psychology. You have to seem calm, even if you're panicked,
too. You have to keep your voice nice and steady and smooth, even if in reality
you're going crazy trying to call out the ambulance and get the hospital
on the other line for help."
Herte knows about the stress of the job. "It's difficult not being
able to see the people you're helping, and sometimes you don't know
how things ended up. I scan the papers pretty closely looking for news of
someone I may have had a call from, but usually you just have to take it on
faith that they made it through."
Herte speaks English, French and German fluently -- he had no problem finding
dispatching jobs as he moved around the country. "I worked near Alaska for
two years once, in a cabin with a wood stove. Now I'm in a multimillion-dollar
facility with computers that can tell us where calls are coming from. It's
a big change, but the same things are true in both places: A good dispatcher
is someone who listens and can think quickly, without hesitation. I suppose
confidence and experience are part of it, but just being able to do something
without second-guessing is so important.
"It could save a person's life. What's more important than that?"