Category: Family

The Chair

The Chair

On Location

My first real job out of college wasn’t in medicine, or anywhere near an ambulance. It was in lighting — the kind that makes concerts glow, trade shows sparkle, and corporate galas look like the Grammys. The company was called On Location Lighting Systems, or OLLS, based out of northern Kentucky just south of Cincinnati.

That place was equal parts magic and madness. The shop always smelled like sawdust, gaff tape, and dust from road cases that had been halfway around the country. I was mostly broke — just out of school, living mostly on PB&Js, takeout food, and overtime — but for the first time, I felt like I was part of something creative. I was the shop manager, which meant I handled all the rental gear going out and coming back in, did minor repairs, kept the chaos somewhat organized, and still found myself out on shows and short tours whenever they needed an extra pair of hands.

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A Mental Health Odyssey – Still Here

A Mental Health Odyssey – Still Here

Gratitude and Light in the Dark

When I wrote A Mental Health Odyssey, I honestly didn’t know what would happen. Hitting “publish” felt a little like standing naked in the middle of traffic — raw, exposed, and bracing for impact. I wasn’t sure if anyone would read it. I wasn’t sure if anyone would care. And if they did care, I half-expected whispers, judgment, or polite distance.

What I got instead was the opposite. Messages from colleagues in EMS who admitted they’d been in the same hole. Supervisors who could have looked the other way, but didn’t. Members of Marina’s congregation who reached out with warmth I didn’t see coming. Even people I barely knew told me they saw themselves in my words. It felt like people started handing me candles in the dark, one by one, until the room didn’t look so terrifying anymore.

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A Mental Health Odyssey

A Mental Health Odyssey

I’ve written before about my struggles with mental health. I’m diagnosed with major depressive disorder, generalized anxiety disorder, and social phobia. Many are surprised to learn this about me in contrast with my chosen profession of EMS, where I am routinely confronted with high-stress situations and interfacing with the public and unknown groups of people on a regular basis. At baseline, I’m a pretty easy-going guy. Through a combination of a lifetime of therapy and the right medications, I am able to live a happy life, and function well at work, providing professional, courteous care to my patients, and working well with my peers and supervisors. Over the past year and a half or so, I lived and worked through some very difficult changes in my mental health. They affected me, my family, my work life, my home life, everything around me changed as a result. I am writing this (very long) blog post to share my journey into, through, and out of one of the worst times of my life.

Please be forewarned that I share very personal information and thought processes, some medical information, and thoughts pertaining to suicidality/self-harm in this post.

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Out with the old…

Out with the old, and in with the new, they say, right? It’s a small thing, but the red penlight on the right has been with me for the better part of 15 years. I think it maybe was a gift when I graduated from paramedic school. It’s been in my sleeve pocket or shirt pocket on literallyevery single EMS call I’ve gone on since then, and has assisted me with assessing thousands of patients. It recently started malfunctioning, and despite having survived several trips through the wash, untold rolls under the stretcher wheels, drops down stairs, and being forgotten in ambulance footwells, patient homes, and on sidewalks, somehow it always managed to find its way back to me. Tonight it finally gave up the ghost, and I replaced it with a new blue one of the same model, a Streamlight Stylus Pro. (why in the world would I look for a new model after such good service from the original?)

I know many of my colleagues trust the disposable penlights handed out by the service they work for, but there’s something meaningful and tangible to me of having my own diagnostic tools available and at the ready. I think my wife rolled her eyes a little when I expressed some sadness at the idea of moving on from ol trusty rusty here, and I get it. It is, after all, just a thing, an inanimate object that I have assigned meaning to over the years. It has no feelings or thoughts and won’t know that I have replaced it with a cleaner, shinier, better-working version of itself. And yet…. there’s a tiny part of me that will miss ol’ red, it won’t be the same penlight I’ve had for all these years in my pocket. There’s something to be said for consistency, and I find great comfort in it. Anyway, can’t help patients with a broken penlight, so I must move forward and start another 15 year adventure with blue here, and see what kind of trouble we can get ourselves into!

Thanks for reading my ramblings. If you got this far… are there any tools or gadgets you hold on to despite their obvious replace-ability?

Revisiting Mental Health…. Again…. and Again…

I wrote about the Code Green Campaign back in 2016 in my post about calling a code on our mental health. I was talking about how some of my “ghosts” haunt me, revisit me, remind me of some of the worst calls I’ve ever been on. It happens to me frequently. At night. During the day. When my mind wanders. When I run into an old partner. When I run the same type of call. When I’m training a new hire and they ask a question that reminds me of a patient with the same type of symptoms. I guess since I’ve been “doing this” for 15+ years, I’ve run enough calls that I’ve got more than a few bad memories stacked up inside my head, and some of them bubble up to the surface occasionally. Sometimes I can just shake it off. Sometimes they stick around, and I sit with it for a while and think about how the call went. How it made me feel then, and how it makes me feel now. Sometimes I think about what lessons I still carry with me as a result of the call, because I try to never let a “bad” call be in vain. A very dear mentor friend of mine told me that every death in the field should be a gift in some way to a field provider, that we should still be able to learn from it, and grow stronger as providers and be able to better care for patients and their family members as a result of having gone on that call, even if we weren’t able to have a positive outcome for that particular patient. I also write things down in journals, so I can look back and reflect on them. I talk to friends and coworkers. I talk to my family, sometimes more than they would like, I think. Probably most importantly, I talk to a therapist. Not as often as I should, but I have built a trusting relationship with a clinically trained therapist who specializes in working with public safety employees, and I know that I can reach out to her when needed, and that’s a valuable tool in my mental health toolbox. So why am I revisiting this topic again, today?

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The People Who Make Up My Life

My wife joined my life journey unexpectedly, and has remained a steadfast and constant source of compassion and comfort.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how people move in and out of my life. Quickly. Slowly. Suddenly and abruptly. Gradually or almost without noticing. The amount of time they spend in my life, in my physical presence seems completely unrelated to the amount of time they remain in my conscious and subconscious mind for days, weeks, and years after we part ways. Did they become a part of my life because I was born into a family they were already a key part of, as with my Gramma, and so I never knew a world without her as I grew up, forming every early memory and becoming the person I am today with so many of her fingerprints all over my way of thinking, of being, how I interact with people, how I think about the world around me? Or were they a coworker who became like a family member to me, a brother or sister, who I could trust with my life in a heartbeat, and who would trust me with theirs just the same? Were they a patient? Brought into my life by maybe the worst part of theirs, expecting me to solve their most dire problem at a moment’s notice, together for perhaps only minutes or an hour, and gone again just as fast.

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I owe some of you an apology…

Throughout my EMS career, I’ve often wondered why a certain subset of people call 911 so often. Seemingly minor concerns are blown way out of proportion, and, throwing logic and reason to the wind, they demand that the patient be taken to a specialty ER for examination by a specially trained physician.

Who are these people? What subset of the patient population could I be referring to?

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Bringing New Life Into the World

storkI don’t often share much about my personal life through this blog, but I am elated to share with you, my readers, that my wife and I are expecting our first child, a boy, due in January 2018! Admittedly, this is a very happy, hectic, exciting time in our lives, and I can’t help but think back on some of the times that I had the opportunity to share in the beginning of a new life in my EMS career.

I’ve had the privilege of assisting with the delivery of 4 babies in my career. I know plenty of medics who go their entire careers without a single field delivery. I guess I’m just lucky? I do feel that it’s a privilege. Very few calls are so high-acuity, with the potential for SO many things to go wrong, as a childbirth. At the same time, very few calls can be SO thrilling and amazing and emotional when everything goes right and you end up with a healthy baby to hand over to Mom. Thanks to the miracles of modern medicine, doctors are much better at predicting due dates and monitoring pregnancies as they progress, so field deliveries have become much less common than they were in decades past. However, sometimes things catch you by surprise, sometimes mothers (for some reason) elect to forgo prenatal care, and sometimes it’s just chance that a mother winds up delivering a baby at home or in an ambulance. For the record, if I never have another field delivery in my career, I’d be OK with that. It’s a stressful, messy, high-acuity call, and having been a part of 4 of them, I can say that I truly do appreciate the miracle of life.

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Musings on a decade in EMS

You know that song by Faces, Ooh La La, that has the chorus that goes “I wish that I knew what I know now, when I was younger“? That’s how I feel about some parts of my career in EMS. I realized today that I’m about 12 years into my EMS career, and about 7 of those years spent working full-time in EMS. A decade or so of working in public service has shown me a lot of amazing things. I’ve seen people cause each other great pain and harm, and I’ve seen the truly amazing side of humanity – people coming together to help total strangers on their worst day. I’ve responded to MVCs, fires, overdoses, cardiac arrests, asthma attacks, heart attacks, strokes, a wildfire, floods, a tornado, and more falls than I can count. I’ve worked for city, county, and private EMS services. I’ve worked as a volunteer, a part-timer, and as a career paramedic. I’ve been on ambulances, squads, chase cars, engines, rescues, and trucks. The one thing that stands out about every single place I’ve ever worked, and every call I’ve ever been on, are the people who’ve been by my side on each call.  Continue reading “Musings on a decade in EMS” →

Knowing When You’ll Die

mt-neboFirstly, I’d like to apologize for not posting to the VEB blog for a couple months. The holidays kind of ran away from me and I have been particularly busy at work. Thank you for remaining a reader and subscriber, to those of you who are still with me. This post is a sermon I delivered at my synagogue back in October. Some of the references in this sermon are from the Hebrew Torah, (or the “Old Testament” as many of you may know it) and are easily found using Google if you need a refresher or are unfamiliar. For the most part, it’s not particularly religious, it’s more philosophical, and I talk a bit about EMS in it as well, so I hope you enjoy it. A number of people have requested that I share this online for re-reading or being able to share it elsewhere. If you do share it, please remember to credit back to me at this blog or by email. If you have any questions, comments, or feedback, I always welcome them at dave@ventricularescape.com or by leaving a comment below the post here. Thanks again for reading – and Happy New Year!

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