The Aftermath

I sat in the EMS Room, attempting to collect my thoughts, numb at the world, lost in what had just happened so quickly, I second guess my math and my drug calculations and check them over and over again to only come up with the same numbers. I face the onslaught of questions from everyone who passes "What happened?" "Are you okay" "Did you get the tube" the typical questions that everyone in EMS asks, but today they're different, they sting. I can't concentrate anymore and I retreat with my preceptor to a quiet family room to attempt to finish my PCR. This lasts for a few minutes until they're bring grieving mom back to a room, and all I hear are the heart breaking screams of a mother who just lost her son. I'm heartbroken but angry at the same time, theres suspicions of abuse here, how can I be sympathetic towards her if this could have been a case of neglect and abuse, I walk way again looking for a quiet spot but find none. I finish up my paperwork and look up to see the Assistant Director of Trauma standing at the doorway, he talks of the fine job we did, asks if we're all okay, and tells us to come talk to him at the end our shift. "You guys did a great job, fantastic IO" he says, but how fantastic was it? The child still died, did we do that great of a job? This isn't the outcome we wanted. We go through the onslaught of questions from Hartford PD, we're asked to give a statement and then told we don't need to, I won't get into that frustration, since thats been resolved.

We attempt to go back on the road 4 1/2 hours later, return to a state or normal operations, we try to laugh and pig out and forget about what happened, but deep down all 3 of us are facing our own enemies. Every time I open the back doors I'm instantly sent back to seeing this child in my arms, I sit in the back of the truck staring down at the stretcher, and I see him lying there. I try to fight back the tears and go on with my shift, we do 2 more routine ALS calls, luckily nothing taxing and our shift starts to wind down. We meet with the Assistant Director of Trauma that morning, in fact we wake him up, but he doesn't mind, he offers us Coffee and sits us down in his office. We talk about the call and our feelings, the need to be open with people, and the need to get help to move on with our lives. He talks about how fine of a job we did, and we talk amongst each other how smooth the call went, it couldn't have gone better, amazing scene time, amazing intervention times, total time the Pt was in our care was only 14 minutes. He calls us professionals and tells us to take pride in what we do and how we faced this call, he says he has no doubt in his mind we are amazing providers and if he fell victim to illness would want to look up and see us looking down on him, doing our best. We leave the hospital and head into the office, we meet with one of our supervisors who does a quick Critical Incident Stress Defusing session with us, step one in the Critical Incident Stress Management process, he offers us the night off and I take it.. .

I go home, and immediately crack open a beer, sure its 7am but to me its late, I sit down on the couch and talk to my girlfiend who came over to sit with me that morning before she went to work, I talk about the call the best I can, I then crawl into bed, and out of pure exhaustion I fall asleep for hours...