Last week, something triggered memories concerning a number of patients. (I grouped these particular patients together due to the tragic ways they died.)
The flood of memories haven't stopped. Even today, just one particular word spoken by my therapist brought forth a recall of one more patient to be added to the group. That brings the total number of patients to six...And to be honest, I expect memories of more patients from this particular group to pop up. But for now, the sights, sounds, smells and touch of those six are currently jockeying for my attention...
The biggest issue I'm dealing with at the moment, is getting the horrific images out of my mind. This past week, I tried to keep myself busy in an attempt to not relive every single second of being with those six individuals. As everything replays in my mind, I am amazed at the amount of information I am able to recall. I see a continual play-by-play, of all six calls, beginning with the tones going off and the dispatchers providing information pertaining to the call we were about to respond to...everything, and I mean everything, is so vivid. It's all in video form...start, pause, rewind, fast forward but never stop...or delete.
There isn't just one emotion involved with remembering these six. I'm feeling angry and sad just with the recall but I'm also experiencing the emotions of being on the call itself. It's almost like an out of body experience...part of me experiencing the present emotions, while simultaneously experiencing the past emotions. I'm not sure which to understand or deal with first...
I'm finding the more exhausted I become, the more these memories creep in. It's as if they are attempting to wear me down and then to find ways to surround me and further sneak in and take over. It's a tactic from the battlefield playbook...wear your opponent down, advance and attack...
But, that's the way it is sometimes on this journey...things seem to be going well and suddenly a word, phrase, song, landmark, smell, event, etc can bring things back; things that I thought I had buried deep enough to suffocate its hold on me.
The only way forward is to talk about them and then find some healthy way to put this all behind me...a way to acknowledge the existence of not only the emotions, but of the six patients, and to discontinue the hold they have on me. Then as I walk into the future, I will finally be able to talk about all this and not get swallowed up with emotion. I don't ever want to forget the six, I just don't want the triggers, or the emotions that go with them, to bottle me up.
I should have talked more about this today with my therapist. She asked me if I wanted to talk further on this topic from last week, but there was a part of me that didn't want the words, that I know I need to say, to move past my lips...There is always a constant fear of losing control and falling apart...and so, I didn't speak up.
It will be an amazing thing, to one day be able to remember these six, for the people they were and not associate them with the horrific images they left for me and my coworkers to carry all these years later. The only way for me to get past this is to continue doing the work I need to do. It is so important to have open and honest conversations, share stories and work with trained professionals to move forward and not remain in the past...better days will come.
~Parker
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