I can still recall every detail of the diabetic coma. The way his body shone with a ceramic whiteness, like he was somehow being vitrified before our eyes. Turning to rock. Swollen and dense and clammy. Each breath a rasping cry for help.

Normally when you turn up at a job, someone is waiting. But the entrance to this huge rest-home was dark, not a soul stirred. When finally someone answered the bell, they had no idea that’d we been called to a Priority One, that a patient of theirs was hovering near death.

By the time we found him we’d been joined by an advanced paramedic. Every metro shift has advanced paramedics floating about in control vehicles that can be called as backup.

And I watched as the team swarmed over the patient in the tiny room, attending to him with controlled, clinical ferocity. Airway cleared, oxygen mask attached, blood-sugar test jabs, bags torn open, drips inserted, blood pressure tested—all in this cramped room, all with perfect clarity. As they worked, I could see the ceramic pallor being flushed from the body by the refreshed chemistry of his blood.

Soon enough he regained what are truly the signs of life—he started to breathe with ease, his eyes became focused and responsive, he could answer questions. To me, this was a miracle of life literally returning—but the advanced paramedic allowed only that late-stage diabetic coma results can be “quite spectacular”.

This was about five years ago when I spent a few weeks riding in the trucks. I’d reported a story for 60 Minutes which showed St John resources being spread so thinly that people were dying. I discovered then that six minutes was the gold-standard response time for cardiac arrest—after which survivability plummeted—but that 75 per cent of St John’s responses took longer. But despite the difficulties of funding and resources, I was so impressed by the people on the ground that I wanted to find out more about the job. At its heart is the chance to transform the fortunes of the people you are called to help.

But the intervention is not always medical. Take the day we were called to some pensioner flats where a resident hadn’t been seen for days. Neighbours reported a bad smell. They feared the worst. As we sped through the streets I couldn’t help thinking it was a little late to be calling us. The neighbours showed us the door. We strapped on facemasks and let ourselves in. We could see the little unit was in perfect Bell Tea order, right down to the carefully stowed knitting by the Conray heater, the Woman’s Weeklys, the lace curtains. But something had gone terribly wrong. We were hit by a stench that even through a facemask required careful mouth-breathing, and the air was filled with blowflies droning like a Battle of Britain aerial raid.

They seemed to be coming from the bedroom. And that’s where we she was, lying on the bed, her arms emaciated, pencil-thin. She must have died in her sleep, I thought. And then her milky-blue eyes swivelled in their sockets and she raised a hand. So if she wasn’t the source of this awful rotten-corpse smell, then what was? On the wall above her bed were photos of a dashing young man in uniform, a wedding, a baby. Grown children. The milestones of life. Had her husband died?

Check the bathroom. Nothing. I opened the opaque shower door with huge trepidation, but again nothing. It turned out that she lived alone, and had been widowed for years.

Eventually we pulled back the bedsheet and there, cuddled next to her, were the putrid remains of her dog, its teeth bared in rictus. It must have died many days ago. She simply didn’t want to let go. Not ever.