A Note from the Writer: I wrote this piece almost eight years ago after a particularly traumatic call. I was reminded of this column recently as a friend recounted the story of responding to a fellow police officer’s house for a possible suicide attempt. – HN
The Art of Drownproofing: Requiem for a Care Provider
by Hal Newman
I responded as back-up to a call for a 50-year-old patient in cardiac arrest. While rolling I thought I heard the dispatcher say the patient had been found with a plastic bag over her head. I remember thinking to myself “that can’t be right.” The dispatcher didn’t repeat the message and I thought it was because the medic crew was thinking the same thing I was and didn’t question the information provided.
I rolled onto the scene just a few moments after the crew and followed the sound of their voices into the apartment. I passed a somber group of folks gathered in the hallway around the front door. “They’re in there,” a middle-aged man with an L.L. Bean lumberjack-style shirt and a tear-stained face said to me. Heard Jen tell Boris, “No how. No way. EMS1 will be in here in a sec to confirm.” Then to Dispatch, “We’re going to need the police here. Cancel the ambo crew.”
I walked into a bedroom to find the crew looking at the body of a fifty-something-year-old woman recently deceased. She was dressed in stylish pyjamas and was wearing matching sleeping covers over her eyes. Her fingers were blue and her hands were frozen in mid-air as if she had shaken hands with Death when he had arrived. There was a plastic bag covering her hair-crinkled and crumpled and standing straight up like some macabre white plastic chef’s hat. There was an empty bottle of vodka next to the bed and several empty pill bottles scattered among the bed covers. Two sealed envelopes had been found by her brother (the L.L. Bean shirt) who had discovered the scene and had pulled the bag from her face before calling 911.
We sealed the apartment. Shooed the brother and the building manager and the guy from the apartment across the hall out of there. We waited on the police officers who took our report and then asked us to wait outside. They emerged a few moments later with some of the dead person’s identification. “Her name was —— …” There seemed to be a wave of air that came out of nowhere and hit me right in the gut. I felt an enormous weight slam into my shoulders that forced me down to my knees. I heard myself mutter, “Sweet Jesus.” And then I was kneeling on the carpet in the corridor fighting the urge to hurl vomit and bile out of my mouth.
Jen and Boris were by my side in a heartbeat. “Hal, are you all right?!” I was unable to answer at first-too intent on listening to all of the air rush out of my lungs through my clenched teeth. “Yeah. I’m okay.” Wrong answer. I tried to get back up to my feet but my sense of balance had been thrown into temporary disarray. “OhmyGod. I just spoke to her on Friday afternoon.”
She was a colleague of mine-an experienced emergency care provider who worked for a parallel health care organization. We interacted on a regular basis and had forged a strong bond during the Montreal Ice Storm Disaster of 1998. I had seen her practicing the art of caring with elderly clients forced into a shelter by the combination of darkness, cold, and ice. She had been particularly effective with the Holocaust survivors who had retreated into some tormented memories none of us could penetrate. Her combination of compassion and gutsy courage had gotten through to folks living a nightmarish flashback of forced evacuations all those years ago.
My pager went off right then while I was struggling to regain vertical mode. The message read, “Shall I send out a SMART alert?” (SMART is an acronym for our Stress Management Response Team). I radioed Dispatch, “Yeah. For me.” I was really upset that I hadn’t recognized her… as if I somehow should have realized it was her even though I had no idea where she lived. As if one might expect to encounter a friend dressed in her death-best outfit. It was an irrational reaction to a surreal scene. The lead police officer came over and asked if I was okay. “Yeah. I’ll be alright. A couple of wicked bad dreams and I’ll be ready for the next tragic response.”
I cleared the scene and then drove over to that parallel health organization where I broke the news to her colleagues. It was a rough scene. Naomi Cherow, part of SMART, arrived a few minutes after me. Naomi took the lead and walked the staff through a very tough evening of sadness, anger, and lingering unanswerable questions.
I went home and had a couple of wicked bad dreams.
The next night I had a couple more.
Then on the third day a baby boy drank chlorox and by the time I got home I was focused on ensuring all the methyl ethyl bad stuff in our home was securely locked away from the prying fingers of our daughters. No more bad dreams. Although I did have a dream wherein I saw my late colleague sleeping peacefully on a sofa in one of the Ice Storm evacuation shelters. She was surrounded by elderly Holocaust survivors. I could tell they were survivors because of the numbers tattooed on their forearms. One of them said, “She’s our angel.”
I don’t understand suicide. Never have. I can’t imagine anything that could drive me over the threshold of the living and into the valley of the dead. With no opportunity to hook a u-turn and head back home if the experience didn’t pan out the way I thought it was going to go down. It must be a torturous decision to make. I don’t know what drove my friend to the edge of the void and then into the vast beyond of emptiness. I only hope she is at peace wherever her soul has gone.
Be well. Practice big medicine.
Hal
Hal Newman likes to tell people that he has taken up knitting. Newman knits meaningful networks of people, ideas, organizations, concepts and corporations in order to produce extraordinary opportunities to advance policy, social action, or business development. So, rather than having to ‘work a room’ [no matter how large the room may be] trying to find the right contact, Newman provides his clients with choreographed meetings with the person [or organization] they need to meet.
As an EMS director, Newman learned first-hand the challenges of evacuating holocaust survivors and geriatric special needs residents from peril to safety and provides strategic counsel for emergency management clients in both the United States and Canada.
He is a dedicated community builder who recently retired his paramedic certification and exchanged it for a coaching card to lead his twin seven-year-old daughters’ soccer team. Newman studied journalism at Bethany College and emergency health services systems analysis at University of Maryland. Hal is currently Managing Partner of Team EMS Inc., and Managing Editor of Big Medicine.
Email Hal at hnewman@tems.ca.
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