Splashed Saddness

This is taken from a blog called "Life Under the Lights" about EMS. The article is entitled: Splashed Saddness - A Look at Negative EMS Emotions. While this is not the entirety of the artile, this is a nice excerpt that made me laugh (particularly the last part). Basically, there are three different stories from the writer, all of these are calls that he has run in his career. I find the comparison of the reactions between the two groups (laypeople and EMS folks) to be very accurate. Now, after reading this, perhaps you will understand part of why I am weird. (If you want to read the entirety of the article, here is the link.)

· A 16yo male takes his 24yo soon-to-be brother in law out into the city for the 24yo’s bachelor party. On the way home, they’re both just obliterated after drinking all night. The 16yo boy is driving home and is going way too fast to notice the semi hauling gravel that pulls into the right hand lane of the 4-lane road they’re driving on. The kid notices it at the last second, swerving just in time to impact the passenger side of the car against the back of the semi trailer. The impact shears off the left side of the 24yo’s skull, popping out the left side of his brain and leaving it, mostly intact, in between the front seats of the car (I almost put my knee into it). The 24yo dies a not-so-immediate death (I don’t want to get into it. Hopefully it was mostly painless). I pronounced the 24yo dead and took care of this very intoxicated 16yo. He was barely able to comprehend the terror of the situation and was covered in blood and brains that formerly belonged to the man his sister was going to marry. He was unhurt but I ran him into the hospital anyway. How could I leave him there immersed in the terror of that scene, in the terror of what he was more or less responsible for?

· A 19yo male comes home from the military and his friends throw him a house party. During the party the 19yo takes his 18yo male friend down to the basement of the house to show the friend a new pistol that the 19yo brought home with him. The friend takes the gun to look at it and playfully twirls it around his finger ‘Old West’ style in an attempt to be cool. When he does, the gun fires, shooting the friend from the chin through the top of the skull. When I got to him, he was still breathing and had a strong pulse however it was mostly his brain stem that was controlling the reflex. Most of his brain was splattered on the basement floor. We worked him, transported him to the trauma center, and I believe that they were able to harvest his organs.

· A man and his wife of upwards of twenty years are just bumming around the house on a nondescript weekday. It’s about lunch time and they’re going to eat at home before they go to the wife’s doctor appointment. The wife gets up to make sandwiches, gets to the counter, and slumps to the floor. She never woke up. We worked her very hard, but her heart had just decided that it had reached its allotted number of lifetime beats.

The above short summaries of calls that I’ve been to are sad. There’s no joke that can make them not sad. If you read this, there are two reactions I expect from you here:

· For non-medical people: You’ve related these stories to yourself. You may be crying. You’ll think about them and your heart will go out to the unfortunate people involved. You’re sad.

· For EMS People: Don’t these sound like good calls? They were. Yep, they were sad and I felt very bad for the people that were involved. Good calls though. What’s for lunch?