Did you know that May 18th to the 25th is considered Paramedic Services Week?
It’s okay if you didn’t. I didn’t either — at least not until I found myself wearing navy blue and chasing sirens into the worst days of people’s lives. Before that, I probably lumped paramedics into the same vague category as most folks do: Ambulance drivers. EMT guys. Hospital people.
It started as EMS (Emergency Medical Services) Week back in 1974, a government gesture that flared up and burned out just as fast. It vanished like a good idea in a boardroom full of budget cuts. It wasn’t until 1992, when the American College of Emergency Physicians gave it mouth-to-mouth, that it came back to life. Since then, one week in May gets carved out to nod in the direction of paramedics. A cordial acknowledgement to the ones who tow the line between life and death.
Now, if you’re expecting a story with fireworks and hero shots, you’re going to be disappointed. But if you’ll let me, I’ll tell you a true one. A day I still carry around in the beat-up pockets of memory.
We were dispatched to a call for a cardiac arrest. Middle-aged male. Public location. No further details.
When we got there, he was slumped in the passenger seat of his wife’s modest four-door sedan. Face grey. Breath gone. She was screaming — but not the kind of scream you hear in movies. Hers was hollow and cracking, like a person trying to keep themselves from vanishing. Movies never quite get the screams right. No matter how talented the actor or actress. At the end of the day, they are acting — these people are not.
We pulled him out. Did everything we were trained to do. Compressions. Drugs. Shocks… Hope. We worked on him as hard as we could on the way to the hospital. My partner and I were in the back, and a police officer drove the rig for us. Always an adventure as police are used to driving with a little more vigour and agility. Getting thrown around while trying to insert needles, breathing tubes, and administer time-sensitive medication isn’t your typical Tuesday — unless you’re a paramedic. In which case… it can be.
When we got to the hospital downtown, we maneuvered the man on our stretcher down corridors, past other patients stacked like boxes along the pastel hallways in some forgotten warehouse of the damned. You can feel the inquisition of peering eyes staple themselves to the back of your neck as you roll by. But your busy, so you pay it no mind, other than to feel it.
We got him into a trauma room and handed over care while explaining our interventions en route.
But that day, hope and skill wasn’t enough.
A doctor took over. Called it. Just like that. And then the body – no longer a person – was covered by a thin characterless sheet and all the bustle and all the noise was stilled. He was dead and we were tired.
Me? I was tired of the dead. I’d been on a bad stint as of late. Bestowed the moniker of being a “black cloud” by my partners. Meaning that those working with me were reluctant to do so, because we were sure to get some big calls. Or sad ones. A lot of sad ones.
As I typed up our paperwork, retelling the story of death, a doc came around and handed out slices of pizza. A small kindness for the medics still jammed in the hallway with patients on stretchers and IVs hanging from portable poles. No real place to sit. No real time to process. Just a hallway and another call waiting. This is commonplace in our hospitals. Hallways and the dead coexisting, sometimes as one, and some poor medic trying to finish paperwork and inhale any bit of food they can before the next run.
I took the slice. It smelled good — like grease and basil and the perfect un petit peu of distraction. I was about to bite in when I saw her. The wife. The widow.
She’d just come through the ER doors. Her face was blotchy and wet. Eyes red. The kind of pain that no mirror should ever reflect back at you. The kind that only comes from death. She saw me and bounded toward me.
“Where is he? Where is my husband?” She clutched onto my arm, shaking it, causing pepperoni and onion to flee and fall to the floor.
“Ma’am…” I gestured for her to follow me to the quiet room. A small room with a heavy door where bad news is delivered to those left behind. “Ma’am — we did everything that we could, but I am so sorry — your husband has passed away. He’s gone.”
I delivered the death notification with a doomed slice of pizza still held precarious in my hand.
I wasn’t hungry anymore.
I walked over to the trash can and let it fall into the black.
It wasn’t guilt, exactly. It wasn’t even sadness. It was something quieter. Heavier. Like the realization that while I got to move on to the next call, she’d be stuck in this one for the rest of her life. That’s a hard one to grapple with. But that notion is one I confronted many times throughout my career as a medic.
That’s the part of this job no one really tells you about. How can they? Death makes perfect sense, but the absence of what it leaves behind doesn’t. And that’s just heartbreaking.
We – paramedics – don’t get to pause. We don’t get to process a lot of the time. There’s no halftime in the lives of strangers. You hand in your paperwork, wipe your hands with sanitizer, and get back in the truck. You clear from the hospital, and the radio chirps again. Another call. Another scene. Another person whose world is about to change forever.
This is the job. To face inhumanity with such repetition, that speaking about it no longer seems viable. You just show up and do the best you can. Until you can’t.
I was diagnosed with PTSD in 2017. I have never returned to work. After countless hours in therapists’ chairs, occupational stress injury clinics, it was decided that I was unfit to return. My uniform now hangs in the shadows of my closet. My nametag collects dust. Yet, each time I go to pick it up, it’s still weighted by the heft of memory and loss.
Paramedics aren’t superheroes. We’re just people. Tired, often hungry, sometimes sullen. We carry trauma in invisible duffle bags and hope it doesn’t burst open on a Tuesday.
So, this Paramedic Services Week, if you know one, thank them. And if you don’t, that’s okay too. Just remember that when you hear the wail of a siren, someone’s sprinting toward pain all while carrying their own.
This week, I will pause to reflect. To Remember.
To those I have loved, lost and worked alongside…
I will remember you.
This week.
Every week.
Falkland resident Matthew Heneghan, a Salmon Arm Secondary graduate, is an author, podcaster and public speaker.
