In EMS and Fire, we deal with things that most people don't understand. We all have those stories that are so disturbing that we will never tell our spouses, parents, siblings or children. We've all seen things that most others would require serious therapy for. I wondered for a very long time if my ability to see those things and not be bothered by them meant something was very wrong with me. What tells me that I'm alright is the fact that I still can't imagine coming onto a scene and seeing someone I love like that.
Last week, I saw the face of a man I worked with on the news. Only two of the five local channels had picked up the story. We all know what to look for when we're trying to figure something out solely from the news, and I very quickly deduced what was likely. It twisted my stomach into massive knots. An off-duty cop assigned to an Air Rescue paramedic unit is found alone in his hotel room, dead, and the word is that no foul play is suspected - and the man is too young and seemingly too healthy for something like a pulmonary embolism. Very little is being said. If a death turns out to be suicide (unless it also involves murder), suddenly the media shuts up, and they did.
Several days later, I got to my station and my fear was confirmed. This man I'd worked with for over a year, whom I had a great deal of respect for and whose advice I'd sought, had committed suicide.
Being that I suspected it, I didn't think it would hit me as hard as it did.
I've lost track of the number of EMS calls I've gone on where someone was talking about suicide or had attempted suicide. Lately, I've been running on a lot of completed suicides. The people left behind when someone takes their own life all start out with that familiar stunned emptiness in their eyes. The longer I remain on scene the more their reactions differ. I've seen people shut down, open up, collapse, cry, scream, and had to restrain a few when a body was being removed. I've viewed bodies to determine whether or not it would be prudent to allow family members to see them before they're taken away (it's almost never a good idea, even when they OD).
None of that can possibly steel a person to withstand the news that a person they cared about ended their own life. I daresay it only makes it worse. I've been on those calls where someone is talking about suicide or has attempted it, and a friend or relative is standing there, irritated, saying, "they're just trying to get attention!" They only took a handful of pills, they say. The cuts were just superficial.
What I wish I could tell those people sometimes is that they need to wake up. Those kind of incidents are often the best indicator that someone needs help. Getting mad at them most times does no good. Offer to go with them to get help, talk to them, call 911 if you have to - but nobody knows how many completed suicides I've gone on where someone was left feeling hollow and alone, trying to figure out if there was some subtle sign dropped, wishing they'd seen something so obvious so they'd still have that person there.
I've been to that edge myself. It's been eight years now, but I looked over that edge and the experience has left me a very different person. Even now I still remember the feeling that things in my life would never get better, nobody could understand or fix things, and talking would not help. I felt deep depression and fear, then - nothing. I actually came to a peace that I had accepted the idea of dying. I won't say exactly what happened, but to this day I do not fear death. What I do fear is having to face God and answer for something like that.
Because of that experience, I feel like an enormous hypocrite for asking the question everyone is asking right now - "WHY?". He had a big heart, a handsome smile, and a concern for his patients that others I know have lost in the same amount of time in our profession. He had three beautiful, respectful kids who adored him. What on Earth could have been so intensely painful that he would remove himself from this world and rob it of the better place it would have been with him in it? What propelled him to give up so soon?
His family and closest friends will ask themselves for a very long time if they missed something that could have served as a warning that he was teetering on the edge. His adorable girls will wonder why daddy didn't love them enough to stick around. Everyone will feel guilt and an empty desperation that is unique to suicide survivors. I have learned that those things are absolutely unavoidable. It's natural for those things to happen. It's brutally unfair, though.
In our line of work, what we do sometimes weighs heavily on us. To all of my fellow Fire/Rescue/EMS addicts and to all of the cops out there, I give you an admonishment that I cannot make more heartfelt: take care of yourselves.
Wednesday, October 27, 2010
Wednesday, October 13, 2010
Don't Ever Come to My House
Those were the words I heard most often in EMT-B school aside from "BSI, scene safety". Instructors and their aides do not wait until you have certain knowledge; from the second week, they were throwing scenarios at us on a daily basis to test us for knowledge absorption (they only waited until the second week because we spent the first week filling out paperwork and answering questions). At first, it consisted of an instructor pointing to a random student and saying something like, "okay, your buddy there is choking. He's got his hands on his throat and he's making no noise. What are you gonna do?"
That evolved three weeks later into another instructor running and screaming that high-pitched girl scream all the way through the room, up to the front, swept up in front of my partner and howled something unintelligible except for the words "not breathing" - and extended an infant-sized mannequin (yes, "manikin" is INCORRECT) to him. My partner froze, so I grabbed the fake child and started checking breathing and pulse and then began CPR.
(Now that you have that image in your head, imagine the instructor is a 6'9" wall of muscle-bound manliness doing the most amazing and ear-piercing girlie shriek ever attempted. I couldn't hear well for a week.)
By the final three weeks of class we were running fully-orchestrated scenarios, complete with our instructors friends, spouses and kids playing the victims. Throughout all of it, every single time someone would either freeze or do something absolutely idiotic one of the instructors would say, "please, if I call 911, don't ever come to my house."
I told you that story to tell you this one.
Just over a year ago, I got called to a child drowning. Drownings are extremely common in my neck of the sparse woods, 99% of them involving children. Usually they occur in pools, but I've seen kids drown in bathtubs, buckets, latrines and sinks. (NOTE FROM THE EDITOR: this is where I remind you that a child is eight times as likely to drown inside the house than to ever be even injured, let alone killed, by a gun - so it behooves you to watch ALL kids around water. I now return you to your regularly scheduled bloviating.) I've been to a few drownings at this point and they never get easier. I think they're easily the toughest calls we ever run on. Every single time there's a parent, grandparent or babysitter devastated beyond rational thought saying over and over, "I just turned around for a minute..."
This one was a little closer to home. I recognized the address, though I couldn't place where I knew it from at first. When we pulled up I realized it was the home of one of my friends from EMT school. We'd spent some time studying there. At the time, his older sister had just gotten married. I was about to find out she now had two children. It was the youngest, a one-year-old, who'd been pulled from the pool.
He hadn't gotten an EMS job. He'd planned to hold out for one of the local fire departments in Arizona, and that was the last I'd heard of him until this day. When we got to the backyard, he had just stopped performing CPR. As I stood there, the infant started spitting out water and mucus and my friend rolled the little boy over to let it all out. I stood there, shocked, my mouth hanging open, while my partner immediately got to work suctioning the baby's mouth. He had to remind me to start getting the Stryker ready.
We packaged the baby and headed for the nearest hospital, where my friend wrapped me in a bear hug (I'm obviously NOT like my six-foot-tall counterparts) and tearfully thanked me for responding so quickly. He then stepped back, laughing for the first time through his tears, and said, "you totally froze like a deer in headlights! What happened to you?"
Not knowing what else to say, I replied, "I guess I wasn't expecting to see you already doing my job!"
He poked me in the arm and said, "if I ever call 911 again..."
I interrupted, "yeah, yeah, yeah!"
And he finished, "you better have a bottle of Jaeger with you, you jerk!"
That evolved three weeks later into another instructor running and screaming that high-pitched girl scream all the way through the room, up to the front, swept up in front of my partner and howled something unintelligible except for the words "not breathing" - and extended an infant-sized mannequin (yes, "manikin" is INCORRECT) to him. My partner froze, so I grabbed the fake child and started checking breathing and pulse and then began CPR.
(Now that you have that image in your head, imagine the instructor is a 6'9" wall of muscle-bound manliness doing the most amazing and ear-piercing girlie shriek ever attempted. I couldn't hear well for a week.)
By the final three weeks of class we were running fully-orchestrated scenarios, complete with our instructors friends, spouses and kids playing the victims. Throughout all of it, every single time someone would either freeze or do something absolutely idiotic one of the instructors would say, "please, if I call 911, don't ever come to my house."
I told you that story to tell you this one.
Just over a year ago, I got called to a child drowning. Drownings are extremely common in my neck of the sparse woods, 99% of them involving children. Usually they occur in pools, but I've seen kids drown in bathtubs, buckets, latrines and sinks. (NOTE FROM THE EDITOR: this is where I remind you that a child is eight times as likely to drown inside the house than to ever be even injured, let alone killed, by a gun - so it behooves you to watch ALL kids around water. I now return you to your regularly scheduled bloviating.) I've been to a few drownings at this point and they never get easier. I think they're easily the toughest calls we ever run on. Every single time there's a parent, grandparent or babysitter devastated beyond rational thought saying over and over, "I just turned around for a minute..."
This one was a little closer to home. I recognized the address, though I couldn't place where I knew it from at first. When we pulled up I realized it was the home of one of my friends from EMT school. We'd spent some time studying there. At the time, his older sister had just gotten married. I was about to find out she now had two children. It was the youngest, a one-year-old, who'd been pulled from the pool.
He hadn't gotten an EMS job. He'd planned to hold out for one of the local fire departments in Arizona, and that was the last I'd heard of him until this day. When we got to the backyard, he had just stopped performing CPR. As I stood there, the infant started spitting out water and mucus and my friend rolled the little boy over to let it all out. I stood there, shocked, my mouth hanging open, while my partner immediately got to work suctioning the baby's mouth. He had to remind me to start getting the Stryker ready.
We packaged the baby and headed for the nearest hospital, where my friend wrapped me in a bear hug (I'm obviously NOT like my six-foot-tall counterparts) and tearfully thanked me for responding so quickly. He then stepped back, laughing for the first time through his tears, and said, "you totally froze like a deer in headlights! What happened to you?"
Not knowing what else to say, I replied, "I guess I wasn't expecting to see you already doing my job!"
He poked me in the arm and said, "if I ever call 911 again..."
I interrupted, "yeah, yeah, yeah!"
And he finished, "you better have a bottle of Jaeger with you, you jerk!"
Monday, October 4, 2010
THAT Guy
We've all been on those calls where a member of the public walked up and interrupted our work to ask what was going on. We've all wished we could be smarmy with them, sometimes wished we could be outright rude. After all, it's obvious that when there's an incident, we don't have time to answer questions.
Not long ago I was on one of those calls. Multiple fire units - engines, ladders, rescues and two BC's - are on scene from two cities' fire departments. When I first arrived flames had eaten up one side of the house and were now shooting well into the early-evening sky (this was a pretty big house, though, so the fire had a way to go). The situation was controlled quickly and the main fire was put out in good time. As is customary, police roped off the neighborhood so that moochers wouldn't try to show up and defraud the victims out of their insurance settlement or belongings inside the home once we were all gone.
That doesn't stop people from coming from all over the neighborhood to gawk. Often we have to ask police officers to come and escort them out of the fire ground. I have even seen some geniuses try to drive over our main 5" hose lines to get in close and see the action. To them, I often wish I could say, "please, if you really wanna know what it's like, join the fire department yourself." Movies like Backdraft (terrible film - Ladder 49 was WAY better, even if parts were unrealistic) don't help with all the glorification of fire itself.
Anyway, I'm at this scene, the fire is out, one BC has left and now one engine and the ladder are leaving. Three engines remained, however. Floodlights are still on the scene. I've had to ask several people myself to back away for their own safety. Most of the folks have figured out that the show is over, fire's out, there's really nothing left to see - then, that guy shows up.
We all know who THAT guy is. He's the one who has candle-moth syndrome times ten, who will stare at a scene with his mouth hanging open and a glitter in his eye that says the only words going through his mind are, "wow...cool!" He's the one who never has an intelligent question to ask, but will ask any dipshit question that comes to mind just to be able to tell his buddies later that he got his information from "the source". He's the dude everyone dreads when he wanders into a scene to check it out with a dumb grin on his face. THAT guy is the one you can never see coming, but you can feel his life force creeping up on you like a flashover...you get that gnawing feeling in the pit of your stomach as the temperature rises, see the smoke rising from every surface in the room, then SHIT! There he is!
THAT guy showed up in the form of a college-aged kid, stoned out of his squash, waltzing down the middle of the street wearing nothing but basketball shorts (he wasn't even wearing shoes). He walked right up to lil' ol' me, standing in front of one of the engines with an SCBA in each hand, with several guys packing up hose lines in the distance, and asks, "doooood...what happened?"
Hoping I could get him to leave, I flashed my best face-the-public smile and said, "we can't really discuss the particulars with the public right now. Sorry!"
Oh, it only went downhill from there. THAT guy got this grave look on his face and said, "holy fuck - it was a murder, wasn't it?"
I refused to let so much as an ounce of disdain register on my face. I looked at the small river running down the street along the curb, looked back at my subject, and with a stock-straight face I replied, "nope. Boating accident!"
Not long ago I was on one of those calls. Multiple fire units - engines, ladders, rescues and two BC's - are on scene from two cities' fire departments. When I first arrived flames had eaten up one side of the house and were now shooting well into the early-evening sky (this was a pretty big house, though, so the fire had a way to go). The situation was controlled quickly and the main fire was put out in good time. As is customary, police roped off the neighborhood so that moochers wouldn't try to show up and defraud the victims out of their insurance settlement or belongings inside the home once we were all gone.
That doesn't stop people from coming from all over the neighborhood to gawk. Often we have to ask police officers to come and escort them out of the fire ground. I have even seen some geniuses try to drive over our main 5" hose lines to get in close and see the action. To them, I often wish I could say, "please, if you really wanna know what it's like, join the fire department yourself." Movies like Backdraft (terrible film - Ladder 49 was WAY better, even if parts were unrealistic) don't help with all the glorification of fire itself.
Anyway, I'm at this scene, the fire is out, one BC has left and now one engine and the ladder are leaving. Three engines remained, however. Floodlights are still on the scene. I've had to ask several people myself to back away for their own safety. Most of the folks have figured out that the show is over, fire's out, there's really nothing left to see - then, that guy shows up.
We all know who THAT guy is. He's the one who has candle-moth syndrome times ten, who will stare at a scene with his mouth hanging open and a glitter in his eye that says the only words going through his mind are, "wow...cool!" He's the one who never has an intelligent question to ask, but will ask any dipshit question that comes to mind just to be able to tell his buddies later that he got his information from "the source". He's the dude everyone dreads when he wanders into a scene to check it out with a dumb grin on his face. THAT guy is the one you can never see coming, but you can feel his life force creeping up on you like a flashover...you get that gnawing feeling in the pit of your stomach as the temperature rises, see the smoke rising from every surface in the room, then SHIT! There he is!
THAT guy showed up in the form of a college-aged kid, stoned out of his squash, waltzing down the middle of the street wearing nothing but basketball shorts (he wasn't even wearing shoes). He walked right up to lil' ol' me, standing in front of one of the engines with an SCBA in each hand, with several guys packing up hose lines in the distance, and asks, "doooood...what happened?"
Hoping I could get him to leave, I flashed my best face-the-public smile and said, "we can't really discuss the particulars with the public right now. Sorry!"
Oh, it only went downhill from there. THAT guy got this grave look on his face and said, "holy fuck - it was a murder, wasn't it?"
I refused to let so much as an ounce of disdain register on my face. I looked at the small river running down the street along the curb, looked back at my subject, and with a stock-straight face I replied, "nope. Boating accident!"
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)