Run Sheet
00/03/09
I'm thinking about death a lot lately, sometimes I do that. Maybe you'll find it morbid, but my job deals with a lot of death, ours and others. It makes me look at the concept of death, and causes a lot. I guess if I have one regret about being a Firefighter it's that I lost any shred of innocence shortly after I took on the job. I learned just how many people die in our neighborhoods every day, and how incredibly easy it is. I learned that it can happen at any time in any place, none of us are ever truly safe.
I was asked yesterday if I ever have nightmares about the things I've seen.
Funny thing is, I have a lot of nightmares, but only one of them relates to my job. The dream isn't about something I saw, but something I did.
Ten years or so ago, my hall was called to a two car MVA on a local highway. We're a paid-call department so I, like everyone on the crew responded from home to the firehall. Unfortunately the collision was halfway between my home and the firehall, so I had to stop and do what I could before the crew arrived.
It was awful, a two-car head-on collision, one car was overturned in the roadway and one was 30 feet away in a hedge.
In the overturned car were two teenage girls in really rough shape, in the other car was an elderly couple, also in rough shape.
I had taught first aid for a number of years by then, and was pretty good at my craft. One of the things taught a lot to emergency responders is called 'triage' This is where decisions are made about who is hurt the worst and who needs what resources. You decide on your priorities, and treat your patients accordingly, some get treated immediately, some wait. Unfortunately you need to weigh the needs of the few against the needs of the many. Unfortunately, sometimes the worst injured need to be written off so that others can be saved.
What this means is that this particular night I ended up faced with more critical patients than I could handle. I physically could not treat them all, and they all needed me. What bystanders there were were useless, it was a really chaotic scene.
I carried out my triage.
The two teens were critical, the couple in the
other car were too.
Of the couple in the other car, the wife was
holding on and seemed to be more stable than the husband, he was really
rough.
The two teens needed a lot of care, immediately, so did the other couple, but, bottom line, they were old, the kids weren't.
Decision made. Lady, try to hold on, Girls, I'm coming to help.
"Sorry sir, you're going to die."
The decision was made in a flash, and in the years since, I've looked at it from a hundred different angles, it was the right decision, I don't doubt it for a second.
But when it all boils down, right or wrong, I decided to let a man die.
The nightmare is always the same, I'm back there, in the rain, in the dark, leaning in through the shattered windshield, the cold sharp metal jabbing me in the ribs. I'm feeling the weak, thready pulse in that man's throat.
I look him in the eye again, again noting the dilated pupils, the blood in his mouth, I again hear the rattling, gurgling breathing.
Again, I whisper "Sorry sir, you're going to die" to myself. Only this time I know the enourmity of the decision I'm making, at the time it was all happening so fast that the hugeness of what I had done couldn't fully hit me until after it was over. In the dream, time stops and I know right away just what I've decided.
I get pretty tired of that dream.
Ain't I just a jolly ray of sunshine?