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Katherine Howell now feels in print what she used to experience on a daily basis in the confines of an ambulance. Life-on-the-edge dramas over many years as an `ambo' took her close to emotional meltdown but, as Doug Parrington reports, she has turned a new page. Main photo: Wayne Jones
She knew what she had to do: confirm the cardiac arrest, call for back-up while running back to the truck and grabbing the defib and drug box and Oxy-Viva, then get back here and start saving the bastard.
She put the torch and portable radio down, squatted beside him and reached for his carotid pulse.
It is no accident that this extract, from the crime thriller The Darkest Hour, has a brand of authenticity that many authors might find difficult to achieve.
But Katherine Howell finds it easy. They are her words and her book.
After all, in real life outside the pages of fiction, she has smelled the blood, heard the faltering gasps of the sick, felt the squeeze of a trembling hand on her hand and witnessed the minutiae of life-and-death moments in the back of many ambulances.
For 15 years, she was a paramedic.
At times she has saved life, lost life and delivered life. Hundreds of people during those years have looked up from ambulance stretchers at her green-brown eyes and searched for reassurance that everything would be all right.
Usually it was.
For Howell, life as an `ambo' has been a rollercoaster ride, rising from wretched grief on some days to hilarity and gratitude on others and, occasionally, plunging again into anger and frustration.
She notes, with some surprise, that the first baby she delivered - a boy - would have turned 18 this year.
"Wow, just think, between my first year and now, he's turned into a man," says Howell.
Altogether, Howell delivered about 10 babies, either in houses or in the back of ambulances on the side of the road or in the driveways of hospitals, when the onset of birth caught the mothers by surprise.
On the other side of the ledger, Howell saw things that made her disappointed and disgusted in her fellow human beings.
She knows only too well that smell - a combination of...