For six months in 2023, I worked as an ambulance call-taker at Triple Zero Victoria, then known as the Emergency Services Telecommunications Authority (Esta). I had always been deeply curious about the job and my own experiences taught me that one kind, reassuring voice – or its opposite – can change the way you process terrible experiences.
I expected the job would imbue me with a sharpened sense of what’s important, a greater sense of purpose and worldly understanding. Though the lessons were relentless, crashing in with the force and frequency of guillotining waves, they were of a practical rather than existential nature: what a person’s breathing sounds like when their oxygen levels are critically low (like a plastic bottle being crushed in the palm of a hand), what to do in the event of a suspected heart attack or when a baby is born not breathing.
Now, when I start to worry about an unsettling symptom, I run through my old triple zero medical protocols and calculate whether I’d qualify for an ambulance. The answer is inevitably “no”, and in this way, I’m able to calm myself down. It’s not an emergency.
The changes that did begin to take place within me were not the kind you readily advertise. My progressive ideals started to wobble and my heart quickly hardened to suffering – a consequence of constant exposure to the worst effects of addiction, crime and mental illness. It’s much easier to maintain a clement view of humanity when the saddest, harshest elements of it are not nipping at your heels for 10 hours straight.
During my five-week training course, a police dispatcher who was multi-skilling to ambulance joined my class for a few days. Taciturn in the classroom, at lunchtime he gave my group some frank advice.
“You can’t do this job for too long,” he said, gesturing at the old-timers in the room and their withdrawn Dorothea Lange faces, “or you’ll wind up an absolute husk.”
What he meant was that the hard carapace a call taker must develop often comes at the expense of a person’s softer angles. Triple zero call-takers are unique among frontline workers in the volume of emergencies they contend with; a doctor, nurse or paramedic doesn’t generally turn over a job in a matter of seconds, but a triple zero call can wrap up in as little as three minutes.
As a new recruit, I was placed at the top of the call queue, meaning there was no time to catch my breath between jobs. In a period of half an hour, I might manage a stroke, suicide, overdose and allergic reaction. There was no way to survive other than by growing a thick shell – and it was hard to know exactly where the line between self-preservation and disassociation fell.
To try to minimise the risk of burnout, call-takers were given a 30-minute break every hour and a half. It seemed excessively generous, until you’ve spent your first hour and a half on the phones.
I used my breaks to walk brisk laps of the artificial lake next to the building, fending off attacks from territorial birds in spring; one brash myna stole a protein bar clean out of my hands, another delivered a firm peck to the back of my head. It felt an apropos metaphor for the job itself.
I was taken aback by the physical demands of the role; call-taking is no less exhausting for its sedentary nature. In the early days, my adrenalin surged sickeningly with every call and even as my nerves started to settle, a lights-and-sirens emergency would send the cortisol careering again.
Any kind of heightened call I would feel in my body – an abusive call in my stomach and bowels, an unresponsive patient in my thumping heart. One night, demolished by eyestrain, adrenalin and the late hour, I had a severe attack of vertigo. A team leader promptly summoned a mobile intensive care ambulance paramedic – AKA the most highly skilled of the lot – to check me over, a gratifyingly over-the-top intervention and a balm for my hypochondriac heart.
For every part of the job I loved – the deep satisfaction of swiftly coding a job and seeing the ambulance en route to the address, of hearing the voice of my caller begin to calm as I guided them through first aid – there were five more I hated. The necessary but crippling level of scrutiny and criticism. The grinding gravity of it all; I started to feel my desperation for levity as an almost chemical longing, always trying to swivel my chair in the direction of laughing colleagues.
Pest callers dialled in as many as 300 times a day. No triple zero call was ever dismissed as a prank, the assumption being that even pest callers occasionally find themselves in genuine medical strife, and call-takers could never end a call until they’d taken a full list of symptoms and appropriately coded the job.
People often assume I left because of a bad call, but really, I left for the same reason most people leave their jobs – poor pay, lousy hours.
On public holidays and days of extreme heat – the most reliably hectic for emergency services – I feel both a deep flush of relief that I’m no longer there and immense gratitude to the people who still are. Triple Zero Victoria was poleaxed during the worst months of the pandemic, critically short-staffed, and many lives were lost.
I’m not forever changed by the experience of working at triple zero. But I am forever appreciative of the gritty, formidable people at its coalface.
