Faces of Death

This posting is a departure from the travel theme. The traveling stories are really not that much fun to write anymore because they all sound the same. I find Facebook to be a better outlet for that. I'm writing this not for you, but for me. It is not about the blood and gore of so many EMS storytellers but it is about the human element, the part of working in health care that many people don't envision and doesn't make it onto many television shows.

As a paramedic I have seen more than my fair share of death. This is not unusual and certainly does not make me unique among my brother and sister paramedics.

We each handle these calls in different ways and have different reactions to the circumstances. Some laugh, some cry, some become silent, some find solace in dark and lonely places. Sometimes I'm able to appreciate the "better place" that the decedent is now enjoying but in other cases the person has left their friends and family prematurely with many unwritten chapters that will never be finished.

Over the last ten years there may be as many as 100 people that I've either tried to help or got there too late to be of any help. There is a somewhat smaller fraction of those in which different circumstances might have led to different results. A few patients have stuck with me over time, these are my Faces of Death.

• There was the 36 year old female who drove her small car off the road at 106 mph with four others in her car and a drug filled syringe hiding in her bra. My first week on the job, my first Mass Casualty Incident, and I pronounced three people dead.
• There was the 13 year old grandson of one of my partners who was driving a pickup on a country road, was ejected, and rolled over.
• There was the 8 and 6 year old siblings who innocently rode their bikes on a sidewalk with their parents on a walk who were mowed over by a drunk lady who then drove off. Both died.
• There was the 40 year old man who was ejected from a car which then rolled over him. Although the driver and this guy were extremely intoxicated, he was the new uncle of a baby I had just helped deliver hours earlier. At 3:30am in a drunken stupor he was going to meet his new niece. Now she will never know him.
• There was my first month as a volunteer EMT in Montana for a service that average one call per week over the previous 20 years. That first month we did CPR four times. One person I knew and had seen earlier that day, two others who had been married for many decades and were the parents of a coworker at my non-EMS day job. The fourth required major rescue efforts in a lake resulting in my two partners and I simply being unable to perform CPR due to exhaustion and what would be required to then get the patient to the ambulance for the 40 minutes drive to a hospital.

For most of these I do not remember the fine features of the persons face but I feel the need to know that the person mattered, had a purpose, loved, and was loved. To know that when this person died, someone cared. These things are how the world knew the person and how the person fit into the world. This is their face.

Now I have two more faces to add to the collection of faces. In my mind this collection resembles a collage of pictures, the faces are static but smiling, they are real, and they are symbolic. For someone, each of these pictures is represents the person they remember. These are my Faces of Death.

I wrote this entry and then read Talking Trauma by Timothy Tangherlini. I highly recommend it ( http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1578060435?ie=UTF8&tag=tec05-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=1578060435 ). Tangherlini has a short section that describes paramedic storytellers often forgetting the faces of their patients. I found it ironic considering this topic. In his research, he found many paramedic stories actually involved disfigurement supposedly because it helped paramedics to avoid focusing on the living human with the family/friends/loved ones while they worked to save the unsaveable.