“The people who saved my life”

From the Times newspaper:

“A new TV series follows the work of London’s world-leading emergency trauma service. Last year they answered a 999 call for 28-year-old Danilo Martorana, who’d had a devastating motorcycle accident.

For Danilo Martorana and Giulia Scappina, July 31, 2021, was a day like any other. She went to work as a hairdresser; he went to work managing a group of bars in central London. Later, he called to say he’d be home at 8pm. She pottered about their small flat in northwest London preparing dinner. His commute took him 20 minutes, at most. At 8.30pm, he still wasn’t home. She called his phone: no answer. She called his colleagues: they didn’t know any more than she did. “By 9pm,” she says, “I was stressing out. It was way too late. I was still ringing his phone and he still wasn’t answering.” At 10pm, two policemen rang the doorbell.

“One hour before, we had a normal life,” she says. “We had plans, as every young couple do: holidays, spending time together... I was just waiting for him to come home. And an hour later…”

It was two months before Martorana, now 29, came home for dinner. He’d been involved in an accident that the paramedics refer to briskly as “motorcyclist versus car”. The car won. A doctor and paramedic flew in by air ambulance and he was taken to St Mary’s Hospital as a “code red” trauma, reserved for the most serious, life-threatening injuries. The police told Scappina, who is now 24, that she needed to go with them to A&E, where she had to make potentially life-changing decisions on his behalf. She thought perhaps he would lose a leg. The reality was that, by the time the police arrived at her door, he could already have been dead.

His story is just one in a dramatic new Channel 4 documentary series, Emergency. Cameras follow London’s world-leading emergency trauma service, set up ten years ago in response to the 2005 London bombings.”

Read the full article here and more about the production here.

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/the-people-who-saved-my-life-hgg9cdmhf