Thick Skinned

"For those who protect it, life has a meaning the sheltered will never know." - unknown


If you were to ask my wife what she thinks about me being a firefighter/EMT, one of the things she'd probably tell you, because theres no easy way to explain it, is "He's fucked up" or "cold hearted" Now some who know me may agree with that for different reasons, what she is referring to is my psyche, more specifically the "cavalier" additude I have towards the uglier parts of the job. More specifically, how after seeing blood, guts, death and dismemberment, I can come home and eat, or go back to sleep, or just carry on with my day like nothing happened.
You see, people always ask the same few questions..."Have you ever saved anybody?"....."Is it hot?"....and "What's it like?" All of them inquiring about the exciting and dangerous parts of the job, but never give two thoughts about the ugly side of the job. The dark and grim events in life for which we have a front row seat.
I honestly don't think I could even begin to tell you how many dead people I've seen, or even how many I've watched die, and by that I literally mean watching a persons life slip away and cease right in front of my eyes. As horrible as it may sound, it's all part of a any given day on the job. It could be weeks or months before your faced with a call where you can't make the save. Then there are the times when the grim reaper stows away on one of the rigs so he can ride around with you to get caught up on his quota.
Truth is, you never know what your going to find on scene. Sure, there's the more obvious patients. Usually it's something like a cardiac arrest call. Where you expect to run in & see the person lifeless & kinda pale laying on the floor. Or, if you get called for an MVA (motor vehicle accident) your going to find at least one wrecked vehicle, maybe more and you can almost always count on someone having at least some "lawyer pain" (the "agonizing" pain that changes in severity & location from the time you get on scene to the time you hand them off at the ER) Or say a traumatic injury call where you expect a lot of blood, or a bone sticking through the skin. You almost always have an idea of what you'll find, but your never 100% sure, and to really keep you on your toes, there are even times when you arrive on scene and find something totally different than what you were called for.
For example, a call for a "severe" nose bleed only to arrive on scene to find your patient had tripped and face planted onto a set of concrete stairs. So, yes his nose is in fact bleeding, what someone failed to mention was that it's also smashed. Along with his broken jaw, missing teeth, gash on the forehead and so on.
Then there are the calls that seem as if they'll be nothing more than an expensive taxi ride to the hospital but skips turning bad and goes straight to worse. I remember taking an call for a nose bleed, it was an Alpha response, meaning no lights or siren, the lowest priority call. I shoulda known nothing good was gonna come out of it either, I was driving & my tech (the person handling patient care) was a total idiot....but its a nose bleed so how bad can it be, right?
We arrived on scene to find an elderly female with an obvious nose bleed. She wanted to be transported, so we did, and wouldn't you know it, 5 min into the trip to the hospital, "SURPRISE" she go's into cardiac arrest. So just because a call seems like it will be routine doesn't mean it will be.
If you haven't figured it out yet, death is undoubtably part of the job, and it pretty safe to say that people in this field probably see more dead people and death in one year than most people do in a lifetime....literally. Sure it may sound a little harsh, but that's the truth of it. We are trained as firefighters, EMTs and Paramedics to save lives but we also understand that sometimes they're just too far gone and its just out of our hands.
There are the calls that always seemed to kinda piss me off. Those are the ones where you are able to keep the patient alive or even bring back to life, in the back of the ambulance, and usually your bustin your ass doing everything you can to save them. Then you get to the hospital and roll them in side with a heart beat, only to see the Dr. call it (pronounce them dead) not even 5 min after you get there. You want to grab him by his stethoscope and yell "Hey Doc!! What the Fuck!?"
You bust your ass and put in all that hard work to get some poor bastards heart beating again and then poof, its all for nothing. And you really do bust your ass. Ask any medic or EMT, after a good call where you have to seriously work the patient and time is of the essence, you are whooped. It's like this physically tiring emotional high, thinking that all your work will pay off this time only to find out it won't. It's a bit disheartening, but pisses you off more than anything, well at least me anyway.
Then there's the calls that stand out for different reasons. One example was an accident with rollover and ejection. (person thrown from vehicle) this poor guy, in his 30's lost control & rolled his pick up truck & was ejected. When he was thrown from the vehicle, he landed on top of the Jersey barrier, then plopped down onto the road. As we arrived on scene, we found two nurses performing CPR. Because patient care was started, we're obligated to continue. But we could tell it was a lost cause. By the way his head was positioned, it was fairly obvious his neck was broken. I happened to be in the fire side of things for this call, do we helped the ambulance crew load him up & get going, he was pronounced (dead) almost immediately upon arrival at the trauma center.
Back on scene, while cleaning up debris & looking for some patient identification, we came across A Military helmet. We then found his wallet in the cab of the truck, right next to a airline ticket stub that was paper clipped to some photos and discharge papers. Turns out he had just flown into the states after a tour of duty in Iraq. Here was an American soldier who had seen combat & couldn't have been back in the states for more than 12 hours, and now he was dead.
And somewhere, was his family, patiently waiting to hug him because he had made it home safe from War, only to find out they would never get the chance.
And then there are calls you get where you know it's just gonna be plain ugly, but you still aren't sure what to expect. Persons hit by a train fall into this category. I responded to a few of these over the years, and they're all different, gruesome as hell, but different.
One I went on turned into a lighting detail and a body (parts) recovery. According to the train engineer, he was tooling along at about 40 mph when he noticed something between the tracks but couldn't tell what it was, then, at the last second, "it"sat up.
We spent about 2 1/2 hours looking for pieces, parts & guts, chasing away the raccoons & other critters that were eating said pieces, and marking what we found with lite flags so the coroner could collect & identify (as best he could) what it was we found (you never realize how long the intestines are until they're laid out in the dirt) After everything was marked & documented, we placed everything into red biohazard bags, the placed those in a body bag. The largest "hunk" we found was a section of upper leg. It was still attached (sorta) to half the pelvis and lopped off just below the knee. We also spend a good 30 minuets explaining to the State Trooper why we couldn't find the head. Imagine taking a watermelon and throwing it in front of a speeding train. POOF! Instant disintegration. Except for the chunk of his scalp and a few teeth that we're stuck to the front of the train, the rest of the head had pretty much vaporized.
Over the years, I've seen just death from about every "common" way you can think of. I think the easiest way to explain the different ways I've seen death come would be to say the only "common" way I have NOT witnessed death is by stabbing. You also notice certain things, things you kinda wish you hadn't, for example, brains smell horrible, burt flesh is even worse, bone is actually off white tanish grayish kinda color and 98% of the time when they die, they shit themselves. I would guess its safe to say you really cant appreciate any of that unless you've seen or smelt it in person. And the smells are such that they practically stick with you all day and leave a taste in your mouth.
And with all of that and then some,we wake up the next day, strap our boots on and do it again. Not because we're sick in the head, but simply because someone has to do it, yea it's a bit cliché, but it's the truth. Your probably never truly going to understand why we do it, or what it's like unless you experience it, and even still you may not. It's just simply not for everyone.
As you can imagine based simply on what you've just read, we really do see truly horrible things. Dealing with what you come across as different for any given first responder. Some handle it pretty good & take it in stride, others, not so much. Each individual is different. Me, I deal with it by being thankful I can go home and hug my family, and, remembering that the dying die, the dead stay dead and I am not God. And even sometimes, once the stress of what I seen have built up inside me, a good hard cry is enough to reset the system.
So how does one continue to step into the horrors of life day after day? Simply put, once you've spent so much time around death, you simply just get used to it, but, in the process, you definitely learn to appreciate life a little more.