Confessions and Ghosts

 

For those of you who have known me for a while, you know that if I get rattled, especially at work, I’ll rarely show it.  I laugh things off, make jokes and do magic tricks, its how I cope, most of the time.  Sometimes though, things carry with you.  I’m not immune to what I do.  I do bring things home with me and I have my “ghosts”.  I’ve been realizing more and more recently that it is getting harder and harder to hide everything, whether it is an injury or just feeling out of sorts.  Lately, things have really rattled me.

 

When I talk about ghosts, I’m not talking about a haunting spirit in the traditional sense.  My ghosts exist within my mind.  They’re the images and voices of calls (both while on duty and occasionally while assisting off duty) that don’t let you forget.  I still remember the face of my first patient, over 5 years ago, I can still tell you his vital signs, what happened and the fear I felt.  In the end, he had a few bumps and bruises, but his ghost haunts me.  I can still see his face, I can still feel the panic and fear that comes with the “First call”.  He doesn’t haunt me often, and its not an overly negative experience, its just the “First”.  I’m not quite so lucky with others.  Over the years, as expected in this line of work, I have been a party to death.  There is something very eerie about knowing that you are “Bearing Witness”, you’re watching somebody’s last breath, you were the last person they saw.  These things stay with you for the rest of your life.  Pleas of a dying young man, not wanting to leave his mother alone, the silence of a child lost far too young, the heart wrenching agony of a family that lost their grandmother.  These things don’t ever go away. 

 

I don’t walk around all the time with strange feelings and voices.  Quite far from it, actually, most of the time these things are about as far from thought as they could get.  Every so often though, something happens that reminds you.  You begin to remember these things, the ghosts come back. Sometimes when you close your eyes to sleep, you see the faces and hear the cries.  Its not an easy thing to deal with.  Eventually you get used to it, eventually the voices are quieter, the faces fade, but never truly gone.  As old ones fade, new ones appear, every year brings something new.

 

I recently had an uncanny experience.  While transporting a patient who was terminally ill, I realized that he bore an incredible resemblance to one of my relatives.  He looked and sounded like a cousin of mine (who is also of somewhat ill health) and it rattled me.  Seeing the doppelganger of a relative lying on your cot can bring into question your whole existence and purpose.  I wish I was exaggerating the impact that an even like this can have, but sadly, for a number of days afterwards I was questioning my choice of work.  In the end I let it pass from my mind, but these things never go away completely.  Shards of every call and experience accumulate in piles deep within the psyche. 

 

It has been a few weeks since I began to write this, and as I re-read to finish it, I still feel similar feelings, though not as deep, but I do begin to wonder if all of this is just a dream, or if I’m just crazy.