The Rest Of The Story

Depending on the audience, the story has different themes and touch points. At one point when I told the story, I focused on waking up to the alert on my pager and the dispatcher saying the words, “baby not breathing” and me muttering, “not again” as I jumped out of bed. In a different setting I reflected on how Marc, the crew chief, pulled out a pocket guide and looked up possible causes of infant cardiac and respiratory arrest as a way to keep himself from getting tunnel vision and missing something important. I might tell someone else how our scene time was less than one minute because of how we planned and executed the call, and tell yet another person about how the police officer that was responding to the call almost collided with the ambulance because we were on scene such a short time that he was still heading to the house when we were already driving away from it.  All of those things are true, and are each part of the story of that tragic call, and similar to many calls and stories in my career.

But there is a part of the story I rarely tell. For a long time, I refused to tell anyone. Then I shared it with a small number of people in very controlled settings.  It wasn’t until a few years ago that I was willing to really acknowledge what this hidden part of the story was, what it really meant.

The missing part of the story is how a couple years later, when my own daughter was an infant, I used to wake up in a panic in the middle of the night, jump out of bed and run around to her bassinet just to make sure she was breathing. I would stand there, still half asleep and brain fogged, and also somehow, on high alert with my heart racing and a subconscious fear of impending death, fighting to focus on her tiny chest rising and falling peacefully, rhythmically, just the way it was supposed to. I would watch until the fog cleared, until the heart rate dropped, until my subconscious returned to the present and acknowledged no doom was present. Then, sometimes I would just stand there for a minute, sometime for 20 minutes, until I could convince myself that nothing bad was going to happen. Eventually I would go back to sleep.  Maybe it would happen again in the same night. Maybe I’d get a few days in between.

The first label I was willing to apply to myself, regarding the trauma of my public safety career, was Compassion Fatigue. I heard that phrase somewhere in the early 2010’s and thought it fit well. It also allowed me to distance myself from some labels I didn’t want. I didn’t want to have PTSD, or PTSI, or whatever they call it. I didn’t want the label, so I refused to wear it.

Funny thing about reality, it exists whether you acknowledge it or not. It affects your decisions, whether you understand it or not. It changes how emotionally available and reactive you are, whether you believe it or not. It changes my sleep, whether I name it or not.

Whether I have PTSD, or PTSI, or compassion fatigue or whatever other label isn’t the point. It matters that I understand that the trauma affected me, changed me.  It matters that I understand that I am not powerless to this trauma, I can affect it, change it. When I acknowledge and understand that the trauma is real, that my experience isn’t measured by what someone else saw or did that was “worse” than mine, when I own that I have the power and obligation to be honest with myself and my support network about what is going on with my emotions and thoughts, I can make real and positive change.

I can learn. I can heal.

The increase in awareness about mental health for first responders is not a fad, mindfulness is not a buzz word. What we are seeing is a movement to understand and address the realities of the work we do and the effects that work, that trauma, have on us.  We don’t have to bottle it up and just be tough, we also don’t have to cry and lose our ability to do the job. There are ways for us to process the bad experiences and still do the good work. Incorporating mindfulness, emotional intelligence and mental wellness and resilience into our basic trainings, into our workplace culture and into our profession can change the future for those of us that did the job, that are doing it now and will do it in the future.

Funny thing about that story. It is one of the earliest stories in my career, but it still isn’t over. It is part of who I am now and part of how I am changing for my future. The call, the tragedy, the other calls like it, they are done and over. But the rest of the story, my story, is still being written.