View: Death A heartbreaking reality of a paramedic

Did you know that May 18th to the 25th is considered a paramedic as a paramedic as a paramedic as a paramedic?

It's okay if you haven't done it. I didn't do it either – at least not when I wore dark blue and hunted siren into the worst days of people's life. Before that, I have probably introduced paramedics to the same vague category as most people: Ambulance drivers. Emt guys. Hospital persons.

It began in 1974 as an EMS week (Emergency Medical Services), a government gesture that flared up and burned out just as quickly. It disappeared like a good idea in a meeting room full of budget cuts. It was only in 1992, when the American College of Emergency Physicians existed mouth-in-mouth, was it brought back to life. Since then, a week in May has been carved to nod towards paramedics. A warm recognition for those who carry the border between life and death.

If you now expect a story with fireworks and heroic shots, you will be disappointed. But if you let me, I'll tell you a true one. For a day I still wear in the beaten memory bags.

We were sent after cardiac arrest. Medium -age man. Public location. No further details.

When we arrived there, he had sunken his wife in the passenger seat of the modest four -door limousine. Face gray. Breath away. She screamed – but not the kind of scream that you listen to in films. Her was hollow and cracked like a person who tried to prevent the disappearance. Films never quite make the screams right. No matter how talented the actor or actress. At the end of the day they act – these people don't.

We pulled him out. Did everything we were trained. Compressions. Drugs. Shocks … hope. We worked on him as hard as possible on the way to the hospital. My partner and I were back and a policeman drove the rig for us. Always an adventure as a police are used to driving with a little more strength and mobility. When you are thrown around while trying to insert needles, breathing tubes and administer time-critical medicines, there is no typical Tuesday-unless you are a medic. In this case it can be.

When we arrived to the hospital in the city center, we maneuvered the man on our stretcher to corridors, where other patients were stacked in a forgotten warehouse of The Damned like boxes along the pastel corridors. You can feel how the Inquisition of Peering Eyes attaches to the back of your neck while you roll past. But you are busy, so you don't show it except to feel it.

We brought it into a dream space and handed it over and explained our interventions on the way.

But on this day hope and skills were not enough.

A doctor took over. Called it. Just like that. And then the body – no one more – was covered by a thin characterless sheet metal and the hustle and bustle, and the entire sound was breastfed. He was dead and we were tired.

Me? I was tired from the dead. I've had a bad period lately. Gave the nickname to be a “black cloud” from my partners. This means that those who work with me are reluctant to do so because we had certainly received a few big calls. Or sad. Many sad.

When I typed our documents and retired the history of death, a doctor came by and distributed pizza slices. A little friendliness for the doctors who still came across the hallway with patients on stock exchanges and IVs who hang on portable poles. No real place to sit. Not to process real time. Just a hallway and another call is waiting. This is commonplace in our hospitals. Slides and the dead coexisters, sometimes as one and a bad doctor who try to end paper stuff and to breathe in a bit of food before the next run.

I took the disc. It smelled good – like Grease and Basil and the perfect unpeit peu of the distraction. I just wanted to bite when I saw her. The woman. The widow.

She would just come through the doors. Her face was stained and wet. Eyes red. The type of pain that no mirror should ever reflect on her again. The way that comes from death. She saw me and ran towards me.

“Where is he? Where is my husband?” She clung to my arm, shook it and let the pepperoni and onions flee and fall on the floor.

“Ma'am …” I pointed out that she followed me in the quiet room. A small room with a heavy door in which bad news is delivered to the left behind. “Ma'am – we did everything we could, but I'm so sorry – her husband died. He is gone.”

I delivered the death report with a damn piece of pizza, which was still held in my hand.

I was no longer hungry.

I went to the garbage can and let it fall into the black.

Exactly not to blame. It wasn't even sadness. It was a little calm. Heavier. Like the realization that, while I had to go to the next call, I would be in it for the rest of her life. This is difficult with which you can deal with. But this idea is one that I have often confronted throughout my career as a medicine.

This is the part of this job that nobody really tells you about. How can you? Death does not make sense, but the absence of what it leaves does not. And that is only heartbreaking.

We – paramedics – cannot stop. We cannot process most of the time. There is no half in the life of strangers. You enter your documents, wipe your hands off with disinfectants and climb back into the truck. They clarify from the hospital and the radio chirping again. Another call. Another scene. Another person whose world will change forever.

This is the job. To be repetition of inhumanity with such a repetition that speaking no longer seems viable. You just appear and do the best you can. Until you can't.

I diagnosed PTBs in 2017. I have never returned to work. After countless hours in the therapist chairs and clinics for professional stress violations, it was decided that I was not returned. My uniform now hangs in the shadow of my closet. My name writer collects dust. But every time I picked it up, it is still weighted by the weight of memory and loss.

Paramedics are not superheroes. We are only people. Tired, often hungry, sometimes grumpy. We carry trauma in invisible travel bags and hope that it did not appear on a Tuesday.

So this week for paramedics servicesPresent If you know one, thank you. And if you don't, that's okay. Remember when you hear the whining of a siren, someone sprints to hurt while you wear your own.

This week I will pause to think. To remember.

To those I loved, lost and worked together …

I will remember you.

This week.

Every week.

Matthew Heneghan, a secondary -Lach -Arm -Armsolvent Matthew Heneghan, is an author, podcaster and public speaker.