For six months in 2023, I worked as an ambulance call-taker at Triple Zero Victoria, then known as the Emergency Services Telecommunications Authority. 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.
