A very distressing incident this morning, I have no details other than the fact that a passenger died, apparently of natural causes, while travelling on one of our buses this morning. I have been driving a bus eleven years now and I have not heard of an incident like this on a bus before. Fifteen years ago when I was a driving instructor in London one of my colleagues at the driving school I worked at was in the middle of a lesson when the pupil complained she was feeling unwell. He swapped seats with her and drove to a nearby hospital where she unfortunately died.
Incidents like this are rare, fortunately, but they do bring home to us how fragile life can be.
3 comments:
I have plenty of old war stories, but this is not one of mine. A friend was slowly making his way over a high mountain pass in almost white out snowstorm conditions when a passenger died on his bus. If he stopped the bus, he risked being stuck in the snow, so he had to keep going for over an hour until he was out of the worst of the storm and at a lower elevation. When he finally came to a town with a hospital he got off the road, but the man was long gone by then.
When I was younger and even dumber than I am today, I carried a man who had overdosed on heroin off of my bus. He was breathing and his girlfriend begged me not to call the police. I left them on a bench in a bus stop. I can't picture myself doing that today.
I usually read your posts in a blog aggregator. This is the first I've seen of your new look
I can recall a Plymouth based National Express driver several years ago who had a passenger die on his coach on the way back to Plymouth from somewhere up North. He was advised quietly by another passenger. He calmly pulled over on the motorway and used the emergency phone to contact the Police. He then pulled off into the next services and explaining that there was a small problem with the coach asked his passengers to go into the services and get themselves a drink. He would tell them as soon as the coach was fixed. Shortly afterwards an ambulance arrived and the dead passenger was removed from the coach. He then collected the other passengers and continued with his journey. Most of his passengers never had a clue what had happened.
Hell, I've seen lots of passengers fall into seizures while riding the bus.
AND, its not that uncommon for bus drivers themselves to drop dead in the middle of a shift!
You might want to consider joining the world wide bus news group:
http://finance.groups.yahoo.com/group/Bus_Emergency/
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