I will tell it exactly as I remember it, although traumatic memories like this can be deceiving.
What I do know for certain is that it was early afternoon on November 16, 2019, and I was standing in the entrance hallway of my family home in Shepherd’s Bush, the culturally and racially diverse hub of West London where my twin brother and I were born and raised. We were both preparing ourselves in front of the large mirror, preening and primping.
At 12:25 I texted the friend we’d met for lunch: “I’m leaving now.”
At 12:31 I sent a second text: ‘I’m currently dealing with a guy who passed out on my front steps. Crack.’
My brother had discovered him there, lying with his arms outstretched in front of our house. He was a large, unwieldy man, probably in his 30s, but prematurely aged by his bad habits. Dirty glass jars and drug paraphernalia littered the area around him.
By then, my brother and I had become accustomed to the rougher edges of “Bush.” Our mother’s street, with its pretty terraced houses, acts as a thoroughfare from the main street to the residential area of the area: a branch for drunks, addicts and criminals looking to do their business in private. Too often their occupation consists of relieving themselves, usually in the front area of our house, the first on the street, while my mother shouts at them from the window above.
At 12.33pm I called 999. The operator transferred me to the ambulance service and a woman who spoke to me bluntly and instructed me to run a series of tests on the man to check his vital signs. It was then that the truth began to reveal itself: there was no indication that he was still alive.
The operator informed us that an ambulance was on the way, but in the meantime we needed to move him from the stairs to a flat surface. It’s worth remembering that he was a big man, over 6 feet tall, and that he wasn’t going to be much help in helping us. With the help of a passerby, a man in his 20s who looked too clean and scared to be from the area, we decided to carefully drag him down the stairs to the basement of the house. Then the situation took another dark turn.
As a student of philosophy, I spent years grappling with questions of morality and the nature of altruism. Those theoretical questions were brought into sharp relief when the operator issued the following imperative: “Now, one of you will have to perform mouth-to-mouth resuscitation.”
Under normal circumstances, I enjoy kissing and I think most people, in general, would kiss a stranger to save their life. There is a romance in it, “the kiss of life”; the fact that human beings can restore life through an act of love. This scene, however, was not a Richard Curtis performance.
The guy’s eyes were blank and his face was swollen and mottled. When I got closer, I saw that he was bleeding from the mouth.
The three of us conveyed our hesitation to the operator by pressing our lips to his. That’s when he said something I’ll never forget: “It’s life or death: you decide.”
Although UK law does not legally compel a bystander to administer mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, the nature of a life-or-death scenario effectively removes any sense of choice, particularly when the operator delivers his words with such critical emphasis.
On the street above, some curious onlookers had gathered, craning their necks over the railing of my mother’s house. At the time I was writing for a famous British soap opera, but even we would have resisted such trite tricks. The moment demanded a hero.
I was determined it wasn’t me.
The fight that broke out between my brother and me was no different than the countless ones we’d had over whose turn it was to unload the dishwasher. And I knew he would make me do it, as he always did. By then, the once helpful passerby had calcified with fear and was no longer producing words.
I realized it was going to be me.
I’d like to say my thoughts were with the man lying in front of me, the life he’d lived and his family, but the truth is I was thinking a lot about myself, about whether I could face the guilt of not doing so. What does it mean to let a man die, if you had the chance to save him? Is there such a thing as karma? Would other people judge me?
Another overriding emotion was one of intense outrage. While serious drug abuse has always been a problem in my area, it had intensified in recent years. This incident followed a series of robberies affecting my family and an increase in other criminal and drug-related activity in the neighborhood.
And now this, a man so high and brazen that he sees your house as a convenient pit stop, a man who walks calmly through your door and sits down, smokes a nice crack, and then overdoses. He had behaved like a madman. Anyway, in the end the fear of potential culpability prevailed.
Neither my brother nor I had received formal CPR training, so the operator talked to us about it. What followed was one of the most unpleasant experiences I have ever had and one I hope to never have again.
I’ll spare you the details, but it lasted about 17 minutes, with my brother pumping his chest and me spitting out his blood, and everyone watching, including my mom.
Finally I heard sirens, the medical team arrived and took over (pictured above).
I was then found in the back of an ambulance, being examined. Amid the frantic commotion, I remember my mother rushing out of the house, empty shopping bags in hand and pale-faced, fleeing to the safety of Waitrose. Someone must have persuaded her to reconsider, as she accompanied me to the hospital, where I spent the rest of the afternoon undergoing blood tests. At 2.37pm I texted my friend to say I wouldn’t be making it to lunch.
Later that day, my neighbor came to inform me that, according to a paramedic he had been in contact with, the guy had survived. But any sense of self-gratification was overshadowed by having to wait for days for the results of my blood tests, during which I became convinced that he was going to die from some terrible blood-related disease.
What bothered me was that the hospital also refused to release the other patient’s results due to confidentiality laws. Despite my training in philosophy, I could not convince them why, on this occasion, it was ethically justified for me to have access to that information.
Three days later I received the go-ahead. Now I can say I saved someone’s life. But there is something deeply regrettable about what happened and it is a symptom of a social illness that NHS workers are acutely aware of. Like bathers who have taken a dip and found themselves paddling through excrement, we are now frequently reminded, often to our horror and revulsion, of the alarming degree of decay in this country.
I don’t know if the man would have been so lucky if the incident had occurred today: as of February 2024, the ambulance response time for a category 2 call (which includes suspected heart attacks) was on average 40 minutes and 6 seconds, which far exceeds the official goal of 18 minutes. Given this, bystander CPR is now even more critical.
If you have a heart attack, you better hope there are well-meaning people around you.
Getty Images, Mirrorpix, Alamy, Sachin Kureishi
