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.
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?
Welcome to the new home of my EMS-related thoughts and rantings! For those of you who followed me on The Nightshift Squirrel, thank you so much for making the jump to this site. I’m not entirely sure what happened to the guys I was working with on that site – they’re still active on facebook, but have completely stopped updating the site and have stopped responding to my emails and messages. So, rather than just continue to manage their facebook page for them, I’ve decided to step out on my own. I plan to recruit a couple other EMS and public safety type folks to contribute here, as well.
For those of you who are just joining us out in TV land, WELCOME!! Thanks for joining me. This should be an exciting adventure. I plan to post as often as I can, but in all reality, the life of a paramedic is an unpredictable one, and some months I might post several times and other months you might not hear from me. If YOU would like to contribute, please email me at dave@ventricularescape.com and I’ll happily add you as a contributor to the blog or the facebook page, whichever you’re interested in.
Take a look around – I’ve reposted my favorite blog posts here, and I plan on migrating over some of my other, older entries, too. Stay tuned!
Ventricular Escape Beats 