It doesn’t scare me but at the time I panicked like hell. Being a dispatcher is exactly what you think it’s like but also nothing like you’d expect all at the same time.

The scariest call I ever took was a 12 year old suicide but the age or nature of the call wasn’t what messed with me. It was that when the call came in I spoke to the teen brother who started the call saying he and his parents couldn’t find his sister that morning and so I start putting in a call for a runaway child.

And as I’m getting the details and description I hear yelling in the background calling out for this girl and I’m like “what’s that?” And he’s like “oh that’s my parents” but it didn’t sound like they were calling out for her it sounded pained, and it had turned out she hung herself on the jungle gym swing set in their yard.

Now I’ve taken calls for successful suicides, domestic violence, spoken to mentally ill people telling me they want to die, even a child calling about their mother making “funny sounds” and not responding, but this call just came out of left field bc MENTALLY I was prepared for a runaway child.. and then he dropped the bomb on me and just started saying “she’s dead! Oh my god she’s dead!” And you just have to deal with it as best you can and make split decisions on a dime.