PART III

To fail to help someone is hard for a Paramedic. There is a guilt factor that sits in your head for an undetermined amount of time. “Should haves” and “could haves” and “the didn’t do it” factor play over in your head. At times, you regain pulses, maybe just long enough for a parent to say goodbye. If that’s all we accomplish, then that’s a lot. What you say to a parent is never enough to ease pain and suffering, but when they see you do everything you can, it speaks volumes. We have minimal training in how to deal with the family of a deceased child. This is a skill that only a voice of experience and compassion knows.

The loss of a patient is difficult enough, but when it involves a child, sadness, guilt, depression as well as PTSD are all common feelings. Any provider that tells you they are accustomed to it, or it doesn’t bother them, isn’t telling the truth. Although repetitive exposure to these types of incidents hardens you and changes the way you look at things, none of us are immune to the emotions. These calls sometimes take the toughest person to their knees in tears. Some wake up at night with a playback of the incident and some don’t realize the effect it has on them at all.

Anyone can be trained to perform a task, anyone can be asked to get into a truck and respond, but it is not until you get out and make contact that you understand what we go through. This job is different because if we make a mistake the chance of it affecting someone’s life is real, the chance of them dying because of it, is real. We don’t get to do it over. We have to live with the results.

There are several other stressors we encounter. Picture being dispatched to calls for assistance, arriving you find an elderly male that has died in bed sometime during the night. Next to him is his wife of 50+ years, she looks at you and you can see the sadness in her eyes after you tell her that he has passed. Switching gears into a compassionate provider is a hard transition for some. Now picture doing this several times a month, a year and over a very long career. The loss of life, pronouncing somebody dead and making a decision to not work on the deceased for medical reasons and presentation is a difficult decision to make. We walk away while loved ones are left to deal with the sadness, the sorrow and logistics of losing a loved one.

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