For some reason I find myself back on that street, standing on the spot where the young girl died.
I haven't thought of her for years, a teenage girl being driven by her parents told them that she was feeling sick so they pulled over and parked up. She opened the car door, vomited, and just dropped dead.
I drive past that spot a lot and I remember the call but I don't really think about it, about her, about her family. It's just one of those places that you tend to remember, a little tickle of recognition as you go past it on the way to another drunk asleep in the street.
I haven't had a repeat job down that street, the ones either side are common places for us to go, but that street I've never revisited.
So why do I wake up from a dream where I'm just standing there. There are no people, no wailing parents, no ambulance parked behind my FRU, there is no patient.
So why am I there?
As I lay in bed the job goes through my mind. This job was before the latest changes to the resuscitation guidelines, if we had been using the ones we do now would she have survived? What caused her to just die like that, normally healthy children shouldn't die. How are her parents, do they mourn her every day?
In my dream it was the same time of day, sun going down behind the trees just dark enough that I wasn't sure that she wasn't breathing. The bottle of water was there, the one that her parents were going to give her after she finished being sick. I remember that bottle - if was the only thing left behind after I returned to the scene with the ambulance crew to pick up my car. Why is that in my dream?
And as close my eyes and think of the job I realise that I don't know her name. I was there at the end of her life, pounding on her chest in the back of a speeding ambulance in an effort to keep her alive, I was closer to her than her parents - but I don't know her name.
I must have known it once, if only to put on my paperwork, but now that name is gone. I can't remember ever knowing it.
She'd have been eighteen now.
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While I don't know why she died, there are organisations that raise awareness for such things - CRY and SADS

