Chapter 3 Excerpt…
I remember the call that cracked something in me. It wasn’t the most violent or grotesque. It wasn’t the kind of call that ends with blood-soaked gloves and a sense of finality. No, it was subtle. Quiet, almost. And that’s what made it dangerous. That’s what made it stick.
A child. Blue-lipped. Limp. In the arms of a mother whose scream didn’t come from her throat—it came from somewhere ancient and bottomless. She was crying out his name like the universe would listen if she just said it enough. Like God could be shamed into showing up.
He’d been seizing, she said. He stopped breathing in her arms.
I was the EMS Lieutenant with the fire department, a volunteer, even though I spent more time in that uniform than I did in my own skin. I also worked full time at the ambulance company, running rig after rig, call after call, sleep-deprived and hollowed out by shift work and repetition.
When I arrived, it was one of my ambulance coworkers already on scene, holding the child like something fragile and burning. He saw me, his face tight with fear trying not to look like fear, and said, “I’m so glad to see you.”
The kid wasn’t breathing.
“Give me that kid,” I said, without thinking. It was instinct. Muscle memory trained from years of CPR drills and real-world calls where the stakes were always real. I flipped the child onto his side and gave a hard back blow with my open hand—sharp, purposeful, the kind of strike you second-guess until it works. And it did. A shallow breath turned into a gasp, and then a wail. The kind of cry that normally makes people wince, but in that moment, it was the most beautiful sound in the world. The mother dropped to her knees sobbing. We carried him to the ambulance like we were cradling the future. A paramedic met us en route. The kid was going to make it.
That should have been the end of it. A win. A save. Something to log under “good outcomes,” pat ourselves on the back, and move on.
But I didn’t.
I couldn’t.
That night, after the rig was cleaned and the gear restocked and I had written the chart, I went home and laid in bed staring at the ceiling like it had something to say. I closed my eyes, and I saw that boy’s face. Not just the moment he came back, but the moment he was gone. That blue-lipped stillness. The void in his mother’s voice. And behind it all, something else—Fallujah. Dust. Gunfire. A scream turning into a siren.
Two different wars fused into one nightmare.
They don’t tell you that happens.
That the traumas don’t stay in their neat little compartments. That they don’t respect time or geography or logic. That memory, when cracked open by enough stress, doesn’t play fair. One minute you’re kneeling on a Lego-strewn carpet in a quiet suburban home, a mother screaming behind you as you work a code on her lifeless son—and the next, you’re not. You’re not in New York anymore. You’re back in the desert. Back in the heat and grit and metal-tasting adrenaline of another life.
The widow’s wail behind you morphs mid-scream. The pitch shifts. It’s Arabic now. Guttural. Animal. You know that sound. You heard it once outside Fallujah. A woman crumpled in the dirt beside a smoking Humvee, pounding her fists against the ground like it had wronged her, like it could give her husband back.
Your hands know what they’re doing before your brain catches up. Tourniquet. High and tight. Pressure dressing. You’re back in the rhythm, the one drilled into you back when everything still made a kind of sense—before the ghosts got names.
The soldier in front of you is missing half his leg. It’s gone at the thigh, shredded by the blast. You remember the heat more than the blood. The sun overhead, white and ruthless. The smell of copper, burnt flesh, and diesel hanging thick in the air. The medic bag is open, its contents scattered in the sand—gauze fluttering in the breeze like surrender flags.
You’re yelling for morphine, yelling for evac, yelling something—but it all gets swallowed in the roar. You press harder. You tell him he’s going to be fine, even though you both know that’s a lie. His skin is already going pale, lips tinged blue. You lock eyes for a second. Just a second. There’s fear there, sure—but also trust. He believes you. He believes you’ll get him home.
You didn’t.
The memory doesn’t end with resolution. There’s no fade to black, no slow exhale. It just snaps—and suddenly you’re back. Back in the living room. Back on the carpet. Back with the Legos digging into your knees. Your hands are still doing compressions, but for a split second you don’t know whose chest they’re on. The smells blur—desert dust and play-dough, blood and air freshener. The sounds overlap. The scream, the siren, the chopper, the mother—all of it crashing into itself.
They don’t tell you that can happen.
That the past can hijack the present without warning. That your body will remember things you’ve tried to forget. That your hands can’t tell time anymore. They only know trauma. Pressure. Bleeding. Loss.
And they don’t tell you how much guilt lives in that dissonance. How you wonder if the hesitation in your current call came from the ghost of the last. How you second-guess every second.
Was I too slow because I remembered him?
Did I miss a beat because I was back there instead of here?
You walk out of that house a little heavier. Not just because of the loss you couldn’t prevent—but because of the other one. The one buried beneath sand and years and silence.
The one you still carry like a tourniquet cinched too tight.
I’d been on the ambulance for about a year at that point. Still new, at least by EMS standards—still learning the rhythm of the rig, still memorizing the streets by muscle memory. But I wasn’t green, not completely. I’d already spent close to a decade running with the local fire department, chasing smoke and sirens, chasing that rush that comes before reality sinks in. I’d seen my share of twisted metal and charred bodies. But EMS was different. More intimate. Closer to the bone.
And by then, I was seasoned enough to know when something was going to stick. When a call wasn’t just going to ride home with me in the back of the rig but was going to unpack its bags and stay. Some memories don’t wash off—not with a hot shower, not with dark humor, not even with time.
Because that’s what we try first, isn’t it?
We head back to the station, exhausted and wired all at once. We drop our gear by the bay door, boots unlaced, uniform shirts clinging with sweat and adrenaline. We sit around folding tables with half-eaten pizza, the grease staining our incident reports. Someone cracks a Red Bull open. Someone else tells a joke that’d get you fired in an office job. We laugh too loud. We talk too fast. We make fun of death and disfigurement like it’s just another item on the call sheet.
It’s not cruelty. It’s survival.
It’s gallows humor, sharp and necessary—tempered in diesel fumes and the constant hum of overhead fluorescent lights. It’s a pressure valve. Because if you don’t let some of it out, even just a little, it builds. And then it breaks you.
But when the laughter dies down, when the pizza boxes are tossed and the bay lights click off, the silence settles in. Heavy. Dense. The kind of silence that amplifies everything you thought you’d buried.
That’s when the ghosts start talking.
They don’t scream. They whisper. Familiar voices echoing in the dark corners of my mind. Some I couldn’t save. Some I did, but their stories stayed anyway. A dozen different faces queued up like film reels, each playing their final scenes on repeat behind my eyes.
There was the old man in the recliner, pale and slipping fast, whose wife of fifty years clung to my arm and said, “Just keep him breathing. Please. Just until the grandkids get here.” Her voice cracked in a way that sounded like something inside her had already broken. I tried. God, I tried. But he died with his eyes open. I’ll never forget that stare—distant, hollow, as if he was already halfway gone before his heart quit for good. She kept holding his hand like he was still in there, whispering to him, rocking gently like they were sitting on the porch watching the sun set, not drowning in grief.
Then there was the overdose. A twenty-three-year-old girl slumped on the bathroom floor of her parents’ house. Glitter on her cheeks from the night before, mascara streaked down to her jawline, a syringe still dangling from her arm like a sick ornament. I remember her skin—pale blue, already cold. I dropped to my knees beside her. Compressions. Airway. Narcan. Again. Again. Her ribs cracked beneath my hands, and the glitter smeared into her blood until it looked like someone had shattered a snow globe full of trauma.
She didn’t come back.
And I rode that call in silence. All the way back to the station. No jokes. No banter. Just the thrum of the road under the tires and the sound of my own pulse roaring in my ears.
They don’t prepare you for how personal it becomes. How the lines between patient and memory blur. How their last moments become part of your own story whether you want them to or not.
And the worst part isn’t even the death. It’s the almosts. The “if onlys.” The “what if I’d noticed the signs sooner?” The “what if my medic pushed meds faster?” The “what if I’d said something—anything—that could’ve made a difference?”
You learn to live with the questions. But you never stop asking them.
There’s the teenage boy impaled on a steering wheel, eyes wide open like he was waiting for someone to tell him it wasn’t real. And then there’s the quiet ones. The suicides. The hangings. The gasping phone calls that end in silence before we ever arrive.
It’s waking up at 3 a.m., drenched in sweat, heart hammering like a trapped animal. It’s smelling burnt flesh when there’s no fire. It’s hearing silence and feeling it press on your chest like a collapsed roof. It’s rage that comes out of nowhere. Grief that won’t leave. Shame that sticks to your skin like soot.
I dream of fires. But not the kind you can put out with water. Fires in rooms with no exits. Fires in the eyes of the people I couldn’t save. Fires behind my own ribs—anger, guilt, fear, helplessness—all sparking against each other until I wake up choking.
I wore my uniform like armor. The patches and the badge like talismans. But the truth is, I was cracking beneath it. Held together by routine and caffeine and the next call, the next call, the next call.
There’s no pause in EMS. No intermission to process. The pager goes off, and you go. Doesn’t matter if you just zipped up a body bag. Doesn’t matter if you just watched someone die with their hand in yours. There’s another patient waiting. Another life dangling. You compartmentalize, or you fall apart.
And I did compartmentalize—until I couldn’t anymore.
There were nights I sat alone in the bay, long after everyone else was asleep, listening to the hum of the vending machine and the ticking of the overhead light. And I’d replay the day’s calls in my head like a movie I couldn’t stop watching. Voices echoing. Sirens fading. The tone of a mother’s scream. The smell of metal and blood. The weight of a child in my arms.
No dialogue. Just thoughts. Just memory. Just ghosts.
That’s what no one tells you. That sometimes, the worst part of this job isn’t what happens in the moment—it’s what you carry with you afterward. It’s how death follows you home, not as a ghost, but as a weight. Heavy. Constant. It sits beside you at dinner, whispers in the shower, lingers in the pauses between conversation. It seeps into the quiet moments—the ones that used to bring peace. Now they just echo.
It changes the way you see the world. The way you walk through it. You start to notice things other people don’t. The way someone’s chest rises—too fast, too shallow. The way a mother holds her child’s hand in a grocery store—tight, like she’s afraid to let go. You hear things too. Things that aren’t there anymore—monitors, sirens, last breaths. And silence? Silence becomes unbearable. Because silence means something’s coming.
This job doesn’t just change you. It rewrites you. Slowly. Relentlessly. It chisels away at who you were, piece by piece, until all that’s left is someone who flinches at laughter that feels too carefree, someone who can’t fully enjoy joy because he’s always scanning the horizon for the next call. Someone who measures sleep in 90-minute windows between tones. Who memorizes the sound of every door hinge, every beep, every bad outcome. Someone who doesn’t know how to turn it off—even when the uniform is in the hamper.
I know now that what I felt wasn’t weakness. It was grief. Not the loud, cinematic kind. But the slow-burning kind. Delayed. Compressed. Unspoken. A grief that curled up somewhere deep inside and waited.
But back then? I thought I was losing it. I thought I was broken in a way no one could fix. So I buried it.
I buried it under dark humor and sarcasm and caffeine. I buried it under bravado and quick comebacks. I buried it under “I’m fine” and “It’s part of the job.” I buried it under early mornings and late nights and every distraction I could find. I buried it so deep, I forgot what it felt like to feel anything at all.
Until I couldn’t anymore.
Until the dreams started clawing through the cracks—screaming, burning, falling dreams that made the pillow feel like concrete.
Until I sat in my car after a shift and stared at the steering wheel for an hour because I couldn’t remember how to go home.
Until I looked at a child and felt nothing but fear—not for them, but for myself. Because I knew what this world could do.
Until I looked at myself in the mirror and didn’t recognize the man staring back. Eyes hollow. Jaw clenched. Hands that couldn’t stop shaking, even when everything else was still.
That’s the truth no one tells you.
Not about the calls.
But about what comes after.
And how it never really ends.
And that’s where healing begins—not in forgetting, but in facing it. In saying the names. In writing the stories. In honoring the pain by not letting it define you.
I’m still learning. Still walking through the fire. But now I know I’m not alone.
And that makes all the difference.
PTSD isn’t just flashbacks. It’s rot. A corrosion that starts somewhere quiet, somewhere deep inside where no one else can see. It’s not loud at first—it’s subtle. A whisper, a shadow at the edge of your thoughts. A slow leak in the soul—a steady drip of poison that doesn’t kill you outright but taints everything it touches. It seeps into your laughter, your relationships, your sense of safety. It clings to the insides of your bones, to the place where muscle memory lives, and it stains your memories with smoke and sirens. It turns your silence into a scream—muffled, buried, constant.
Some nights I’d wake up gasping, drenched in sweat like I’d been pulled from a flood. My chest would heave like I’d just run out of a structure fire—bunker gear soaked through, SCBA failing, lungs burning with panic as the stairwell filled with black smoke. Sometimes I woke choking, clawing at my throat, convinced I was still trapped. I’d check the room for exits, count my breaths, try to ground myself in the reality that it was over—but my body didn’t believe it.
There were nights the dreams came with heat—oppressive, suffocating heat that crawled beneath my skin and settled in my lungs. I could feel it, blistering and raw. My skin would prickle with phantom burns, and I’d swear the sheets had caught fire. The air in my bedroom would thicken, heavy with the chemical stench of melting wires and scorched insulation. I’d wake thrashing, heart hammering, convinced I was still inside—trapped in some structure gone black, trying to claw my way out through smoke that swallowed every breath.
Other nights, it wasn’t the fire that dragged me out of sleep. It was absence. A void that crept in like cold air under a sealed door. That brutal, hollow quiet that only comes after the chaos. When the screaming has stopped. When the sirens fade into the distance. When the last compression is given, and someone mutters a time of death. When the adrenaline runs dry and the stillness hits like a gut punch.
That silence wasn’t peace. It was pressure. Dense and unbearable. It settled on my chest like a collapsed ceiling, stealing the breath from my lungs. I’d sit bolt upright, fists clenched so tightly my nails would bite into my palms. I’d stay that way for minutes, maybe more, stuck between two worlds—my heart racing as if I were coding someone all over again, ears ringing with phantom alarms, the memory of a defibrillator charge buzzing in my fingertips.
The dreams never came in a straight line. Trauma isn’t linear. It doesn’t roll in like a movie with a beginning, middle, and end. It hits like broken glass—fragments scattered across the subconscious, each one capable of cutting. One night it would be the scream of a mother as we worked on her lifeless son. Another night, the static of a mayday call crackling over the radio, followed by that unbearable silence when no one responds. The wet thud of a body hitting pavement. The rhythm of compressions that blurred into muscle memory.
And the smells—God, the smells. They had a way of finding me, even in dreams. Rotting flesh. Garbage filled apartments. Diesel exhaust hanging thick in humid air. Blood soaking into warm pavement, metallic and earthy. I’d wake with the scent in my nose, convinced it was still clinging to my skin, lingering beneath my fingernails, soaked into the seams of my uniform even though it had long since been laundered or thrown away.
Sometimes, it was a face. Not just any face—but the ones that stuck. The ones I couldn’t shake. A man, maybe forty, with half his skull missing, his eyes still open like he hadn’t had time to understand he was dying. A woman, pale and trembling, clutching my hand in a trauma bay as her pulse vanished under my fingers, slipping away with nothing more than a sigh. I still see them—not as they were in life, full of breath and laughter and hope—but in that final frame. That single, terrible image etched into the reel that plays behind my eyelids when I close them.
But the worst dreams—the ones that left me staring at the ceiling until morning light crept through the blinds—weren’t the blood-soaked ones. They were the ones where I failed.
Or thought I did.
Or didn’t know if I had.
Those dreams were quieter, more cruel. They came wrapped in doubt. They’d replay a call—not the gory details, but the moments in between. The hesitation. The decision to go left instead of right. The rhythm I didn’t catch. I’d lie awake after, wondering if I missed something. If I misread a symptom. If I could have said something different. Done something different. If a life might have been spared had I just been a little faster. A little sharper. A little more.
That’s the real haunt of it all—not the horror, but the questions. The ones that follow you long after the tones stop. The ones that don’t come with answers. The ones that whisper in your ear at 2 a.m. and ask, What if it was your fault? And sometimes, no matter how hard I tried to reason with it, part of me believed it was. Even when it wasn’t.
That’s the thing they don’t prepare you for. Not the scenes. Not the blood. Not the fire.
But the after.
The weight of wondering.
The break down that waits until the shift ends, until you’re alone in the dark, to crawl out and whisper that maybe you could’ve done more.
And then it does it again.
And again.
Until you start to believe it.
I kept dreaming of fires.
Not the kind you fight with hose lines and air packs. Not the ones that crackle and roar in textbook diagrams or burn clean through a building with predictable fury. These fires were different. They didn’t follow the laws of physics. They didn’t consume wood or drywall—they devoured me. They smoldered in places where no water could reach.
Fires in windowless rooms with no exits. Places that felt familiar, like old firehouses or patient bedrooms or the back of the rig—but twisted. Claustrophobic. Warped by something unseen. The flames weren’t orange or red. They pulsed behind the eyes of patients who stared straight through me, already knowing what I wouldn’t admit: that I couldn’t save them. Not this time. Maybe not ever. The fire burned in their silence. In their final exhales. In the slow slackening of muscles beneath my hands as I pumped on a chest that had already let go.
There were fires in the wreckage of my own mind, too. Smoldering piles of rage, grief, guilt, and shame—emotions stacked like dry timber, tangled like old wires just waiting for the right spark. One wrong move and they’d all catch at once, burning through the calm façade I wore like bunker gear that no longer fit. Every dream was another hallway I couldn’t get out of. Another alarm that wouldn’t shut off. Another pulse I couldn’t bring back.
You carry the dead with you.
Not just their faces, though those never leave. The blue tint of lips. The eyes that stare past you. The bruises you didn’t see until it was too late. But worse than the images are the questions. The decisions that replay in endless loop. The doubts that claw at you long after the scene is cleared, long after the paperwork is signed, long after the uniform is hung back in the closet.
It’s the mistakes you think you made. The ones you fear you made. The ones no one can confirm or deny. The “what ifs” are the heaviest load we carry.
You try to breathe through it. Try to empty your mind like they taught you in therapy. You close your eyes and count. Try grounding yourself. Inhale for four, hold for four, exhale for four. And sometimes—for a moment—it works. There’s stillness. A kind of fragile quiet.
But then you open your eyes.
And the room feels too small.
And your skin feels too tight.
And your heart starts to race all over again as the questions crawl back in.
What if I had started CPR fifteen seconds sooner?
What if I’d checked the airway one more time?
What if I hadn’t brushed off that bruise?
What if I’d spoken up louder in the ER?
What if I’d never signed up for any of this at all?
That last one always hits hardest. Because you know, deep down, that this job didn’t just change you.
It burned through you.
And some nights, lying in the dark, all you can do is stare at the ceiling and wonder what’s left that hasn’t turned to ash.
Nobody teaches you how to come down after the adrenaline.
They teach you how to assess, how to triage, how to make split-second decisions while chaos swirls around you. They teach you how to keep people alive, how to talk a mother through CPR, how to crack a rib without flinching. But they don’t teach you how to go home afterward. They don’t teach you what to do when the uniform comes off and the only thing left is your own mind, buzzing with the ghosts of sirens and screams.
They don’t prepare you for 3AM—when the world is quiet, but your brain isn’t. When the only thing running is the highlight reel of calls you wish you could forget. They don’t tell you how to sit in your own skin after a twelve-hour shift where you watched someone die and had to pretend it didn’t matter so you could keep going.
The war outside might end. The tones stop. The trauma bay goes dark. But the one inside? That war keeps fighting, long after the scene is cleared.
I’ve tried to outrun it.
God, I try. Every day, I try.
For years, I don’t run with my feet—I run with my schedule. I chase the clock like it owes me something. I volunteer for every overtime shift, say yes to every call, every time the radio crackles. I bury myself in the chaos, in the hum of diesel engines and sirens, in the weight of stretchers and the snap of gloves. I convince myself that if I just move fast enough, stay loud enough, maybe the silence won’t catch up to me. Maybe the memories won’t have the room to breathe, to claw their way back to the surface.
Then comes the double beep on the Nextel. That sharp electronic chirp cuts through the noise, and there she is—Kelli’s voice, steady and warm. Sometimes, it’s the only calm I feel all day. Just the sound of her voice, simple and measured, feels like a hand on my shoulder in the middle of a storm. Another call. Another chance to outrun the ache.
And then there’s Megan.
At first, just a partner—another set of boots in the rig, another voice on the radio. But it didn’t take long for that to shift. She became something more. Like a little sister in the passenger seat, A passenger princess, because she just doesn’t drive. Slouched in the worn fabric of a rig that’s seen too many miles and too much blood. We built something in those in-between spaces—between calls, between chaos, between the screech of sirens and the silence that follows.
We laughed in that cab like the world wasn’t falling apart outside the windows. Loud, reckless laughs that shook the heaviness off our shoulders, if only for a little while. We blasted old-school rock until the speakers crackled. Switched to new country when the road stretched too long. Bounced to hip hop with the bass rattling the glove box, letting the rhythm carry us somewhere—anywhere—other than where we’d just been.
She reminded me how to breathe when the air felt too thick. When my chest tightened and the weight of it all threatened to crush me. With her there, it never felt so heavy. The pain didn’t disappear, but it loosened its grip just enough for me to remember I was still alive.
And that kind of presence? It’s rare. A steadying hand in the storm. A voice that makes the silence bearable. Megan didn’t just ride beside me—she showed up, again and again, in the moments that mattered most.
And for that, she’ll always be more than just a partner.
But Megan wasn’t the only one who carried me through. In a job where the weight never really lets up, I had others—my crew. My constant. The ones who showed up for the calls, and for me, without question.
The Berkshire 6-Pack—my crew, my family. Not just coworkers. Not just badges and uniforms. We became something tighter than protocol, deeper than procedure. A rhythm. A pulse. Six heartbeats moving in sync, steady through the chaos.
We ate shoulder to shoulder at the table in the back of the garage, stained with coffee and stories. Rode through sirens and stillness, chased ghosts down dark roads and came back with pieces missing—only to help each other fill in the gaps. We bled together, broke together, and in between the tones, we patched each other up with dark humor, shared smokes, and the kind of silence that says more than words ever could.
We were anchors in a storm that never quite passed—tethering each other to reality when the waves of trauma, grief, and fatigue tried to pull us under. We didn’t just survive shift after shift—we held each other through it.
For Tara and me, for Jordan and Sammy, for Ray and Austin—we are the 6-Pack. Not just a crew, but a constellation. Fixed points in each other’s sky, helping us find our way back when the night gets too dark.
And no matter how far we drift, no matter how the world changes, that bond doesn’t break. It’s forged in sirens and soot, in laughter and loss. It’s forever.
But even with all of it—the voices, the laughter, the music, the family—it still isn’t enough.
I start reaching out. Slowly. Carefully. To partners—new and old. To friends who get it. The ones who’ve ridden beside me, who’ve heard the same screams in the back of the rig, who’ve felt the same weight settle on their shoulders after the adrenaline fades. Tara already knew. She don’t need me to explain everything. she lived it too. So I began to turn to her.
Tara is not just a colleague. She’s the person—the one who answers when the weight gets too heavy, when the sirens echo too long after a call, when the darkness creeps in uninvited and refuses to leave. She’s the still point in the chaos, the calm in the storm, the unwavering constant in a world that rarely slows down and never apologizes when it breaks you. She doesn’t need to speak to bring comfort—her presence alone has a gravity to it, like something inside her knows how to absorb your worst without crumbling under the weight.
She came into the field young—just 25 when we first crossed paths—but with a presence that didn’t match the number on her ID badge. There was something about her that felt older, seasoned in a way that couldn’t be taught in any academy or protocol class. It wasn’t bravado, not that loud, performative confidence some people wear like armor. No, hers was quiet and steady, rooted in a depth most people don’t find until they’ve been broken a few times. She listened—to patients, to partners, to silence—with a patience that most burned-out veterans lost years ago. Especially to the ones who didn’t “deserve” it. The addicts. The chronics. The frequent flyers. The ones who others rolled their eyes at. Tara leaned in. Stayed soft. Stayed human.
That’s what caught my attention early on: her capacity to care without condition, to show up fully present even when no one else did. There was no switch to flip off the empathy, no distancing herself from suffering. I took her under my wing—not because she needed guidance, but because I saw in her a spark worth protecting, worth nurturing. She reminded me of everything I didn’t want to lose in myself.
We shared laughter and silence, frustrations and triumphs. We fought the clock, the odds, the system that stacked weight on our backs and called it resilience. We picked each other up after the ones that gutted us, after the ones we couldn’t save, after the calls that left more questions than answers. We laughed at the ridiculous calls, the ones that felt like a sitcom written by someone high and slightly deranged. We learned when to talk, when to be quiet, and when to just exist in the hum of the rig between tones—two people holding space for each other when the rest of the world kept spinning.
There were highs—those rare, golden moments when the interventions worked, when the patient smiled, when you felt like maybe you did make a difference. And there were lows that scraped the soul raw, nights that lingered long after the gear was back on the shelf. But somewhere in that messy in-between, a bond formed. One of those unspoken, unbreakable ties forged not in ease, but in shared suffering, mutual respect, and the kind of understanding that can’t be put into words.
Over time, Tara became my anchor. We rode together for over a year—long enough for the job to leave its scars, long enough for the trauma to settle into our bones, and long enough to read each other like second nature. She knew the language of my silence, the subtle shift in my breath when I was holding something back, the tremor in my hand I tried to disguise with a joke. And I learned hers—the way her voice tightened when she was holding it together by a thread, the way she got quiet when a call hit too close to home. We balanced each other in a way that made the unbearable just barely survivable. When one of us cracked, the other knew how to catch the pieces without judgment.
When everything goes sideways—and it often does—Tara is the one I turn to. She doesn’t hand out clichés or try to fix what’s broken. She just is. A quiet presence, a steady shoulder, a fierce protector of people she loves. Her loyalty is quiet but absolute. She holds space for you without asking you to be okay. And that, in this line of work, is rare beyond words.
Even when weeks pass without a call or text, the bond doesn’t waver. It doesn’t need maintenance. It just is. Built on shared trauma, forged in blood and tears and absurd laughter, and held together by an unspoken trust that time and distance can’t touch.
In a world where most people drift in and out of chapters, Tara is a recurring theme—steady, true, and threaded through every high and low. She’s not just someone I worked with. She’s someone who saw me—at my best, my worst, and everything in between—and never flinched. She is, simply put, my best friend in EMS. Not in the casual way that people throw that word around, but in the “I’ll show up at 3 a.m. no questions asked” kind of way. The kind of friend who reminds you who you are when the job tries to make you forget.
That’s who Tara is in my story.
Not a supporting character.
A cornerstone.
But even anchors need anchors. And when the shifts ended, when the uniform came off and the weight still lingered, I leaned on the people who knew the version of me beneath the badge. The ones who saw behind the medic mask and didn’t look away. Some of those connections go way back—before the worst of it, before the cracks started to show. People who were steady long before I knew I’d need steady. People like Chelsey.
The OG—the one who’s been there since the Perth days, back when we were younger and didn’t yet realize how heavy this work would get. She’d roll in with GAVAC while I was still finding my footing, already steady in the storm before I even knew there was one coming.
She was one of the first I called when things started to crack. Not because I needed answers, but because I needed her—that voice of hers, calm and sure, like steel wrapped in compassion. The kind of voice that doesn’t flinch when the ugly parts spill out. The kind that doesn’t fill the silence with pity or platitudes, just presence.
Chelsey doesn’t try to fix me. She never has. She just listens. Holds space. Reminds me—sometimes with a laugh, sometimes with a quiet truth—that I’m not broken beyond repair. That I’m still OK, even when I don’t feel it.
She’s always been like that. Grounded. Unshakable. The kind of person who makes you believe, even on the worst days, that maybe you’re still worth the effort.
And then there were those who came after—new faces stepping into a world already heavy with echoes. Teaching them, guiding them, became its own kind of therapy. A way to pass along what others had once given me. A way to leave something steady behind.
Cora, She was the last person I fully trained before I left the company—a full-circle kind of moment I didn’t realize was happening until I was already on my way out…New to the job but sharp as hell, she stepped into the rig with wide eyes and steady hands, and I saw something in her—something that reminded me of why I started this in the first place.
We learned together in ways that went beyond the textbook. It was side-by-side, call after call, sweat and adrenaline and laughter in between. There were rough nights, sure. But there were also those moments of ridiculous humor that only EMS people understand—coffee-fueled shifts, bad gas station snacks, and inside jokes that were stupid but somehow sacred. She had this way of keeping things light without losing the gravity of it all.
Cora always listening—really listening—picking things up not just with her ears but with her heart. Watching her grow from a nervous rookie into a confident medic was one of the quiet honors of my career. I saw her find her rhythm, her voice, her strength.
And even though I was supposed to be the one teaching her, Cora reminded me of things I’d forgotten. Like how to stay grounded in the chaos. How to breathe when the world spins too fast. She never flinched at the ugly parts, never turned away when the stories got hard to tell. She simply stood there, with that calm presence of hers, holding space for whatever I didn’t have the words to explain.
She was my last trainee, but more than that—she became my reminder that the work we do, the bonds we build, the lives we touch… it still matters.
Even when we’re tired. Even when we’re broken.
It still matters.
The truth is, every partner leaves a mark. Some teach you how to hold the line. Others remind you why you started. And then there are the ones who make the weight feel lighter just by carrying it with you—who bring laughter into the cracks, who show up not just for the job, but for you. After Cora, I wasn’t sure I had much more to give.
Then I look back at one of the first partners I ever had—Mason.
A whole different kind of medicine.
Mason—God, Mason.
He’s the kind of partner who turns survival into something close to living. His humor isn’t just a distraction—it’s a lifeline. The kind that reaches into the wreckage of a bad day and pulls you out, just far enough to catch your breath and remember you’re still human.
We had our rhythm. Long-distance transfers that felt endless, engines humming beneath us, hours of road stretching out like some strange kind of therapy. The kind where conversations dipped between hilarious and heavy without warning. We cranked the music—anything and everything—from classic rock to ridiculous pop anthems that somehow became “our thing.” Fonda Stewart stops were our unofficial ritual, a pit stop for caffeine, snacks, and whatever inside joke was keeping us going that day.
And the calls… God, the calls. The chaos, the bizarre, the heartbreaking—we saw it all. We walked into scenes that didn’t make sense, situations that didn’t have neat endings, and somehow we made it through, usually with Mason tossing out a one-liner so perfectly timed it defused the tension like magic. That was his gift: finding the crack in the storm and letting in just enough light.
With Mason, even in the turmoil, the day could still feel bearable—sometimes even good. He had this way of bringing levity without making light. Of reminding me that yeah, it’s all heavy, but we don’t have to carry it the same way every shift. And when I’d forget how to laugh, he’d bring it back—loud, unfiltered, and absolutely necessary.
He made the worst days survivable. The long days passable. And the good days? Damn near unforgettable.
When Mason and I weren’t paired, I found myself leaning on others who knew the rhythm of the work—and the weight of it. The Berkshire 6-Pack always had a way of filling in the gaps when someone stepped away, and that’s how Sammy and I ended up riding together. It was during a bid swap, after her partner Jordan—another piece of our tightly woven crew—left the company. The shift lineup changed, but the heartbeat stayed the same.
Sammy.
Relentless in her empathy—like she carries a spare heart for the people who’ve forgotten how to feel their own. She never lets me forget that mine is still there, still beating, still worth something, even when I can’t feel it under the weight.
I think about that day often—the one I wasn’t there for. One of her worst calls. And I wasn’t beside her. I’d been sent home, pulled off shift. Left her hanging. It haunts me in a quiet, persistent way—not with blame, but with regret. I don’t know if she holds it against me. She’s never said. But I do. Because she was always there when I needed her. Always.
She had this gift—still does—for cutting through tension with humor so sharp it could slice through the darkest moment and leave laughter in its place. That kind of magic is rare. Besides myself, I think she’s the only one I’ve ever met who can do it like that. Make the chaos feel a little less catastrophic. Turn hell into something almost human again.
And if you ask her? She’ll tell you she’s 120 pounds—exactly. She told me so herself, grinning like it was the most important fact in the world. And somehow, in that moment, it was. It mattered. She made it matter.
Because Sammy doesn’t just show up. She stays. In the mess, in the silence, in the parts no one else wants to see. And that’s the kind of person you don’t forget.
And just like Sammy, there are others who don’t flinch when things get real—who meet you in the darkest places and don’t need you to explain. That’s where Rob comes in.
Rob and Austin—brothers in every way but blood.
They’ve stood beside me through the unraveling, through the quiet breaks and the loud ones. They’ve seen the worst of me—heard the silence I didn’t have words for—and they never flinched. Never walked away. They’re the ones who remind me of who I was before the cracks started to show. Not just the EMT, not just the survivor, but the man underneath it all.
Rob—God, Rob. Another veteran, like me. There’s a quiet understanding between us that doesn’t need words. He’s seen war in a different desert, carried different ghosts, but the weight is familiar. As a medic from Arizona, he came into our chaos with a steadiness that grounded the rest of us. He’s sharp—always pushing us to stay sharp, too. Teaching, guiding, laughing, swearing when necessary, and making sure none of us slip too far into complacency. He keeps us learning, keeps us leveled. And somehow, he makes it fun—like, really fun. Whether we’re running calls or kicking back on the boat on our off days, there’s a freedom in those moments. A reminder that life isn’t just pain and patches. It’s also laughter, lake water, and stories shared under open skies.
Then there’s Austin—the rookie, but with a heart that fits the crew like it’s been there all along. He came in wide-eyed, eager, ready to prove himself. But more than that, he came in willing to learn, to show up for the hard stuff. And somewhere along the way, he earned his place—not just as a partner, but as a brother. He’s got that fire, that raw potential, and every shift with him feels like watching someone becoming exactly who they’re meant to be.
When the final bid came through and Tara left for medic school, Austin stepped into being my full-time partner alongside Sammy. He was just 20—young, green, but steady and ready to do anything. I took him under my wing, and over time, our partnership grew into something deeper. It wasn’t just work—it was a bond. Close to a Father and son. But more like Brothers. A quiet understanding that we were in it together, come what may.
We made the most of the downtime, too. I still laugh thinking about the nights we sat around the ambulance bays, using the PA system like our own personal comedy stage and blaring the Dixie bugle horn like it was a siren, just to mess with the other crews. We turned boredom into tradition—laughing until our ribs hurt, making memories in the margins between the chaos.
And then there was the bat. The damn bat. We were mid-transport, somewhere between calls, when the thing flew straight through the passenger window and smacked Austin in the head while he was driving. He swerved and shouted, “I think a bird just flew in here.”
A small silence from the cab, and then Austin again with alarm in his voice, “It’s a goddamn Bat. A bat just hit me in the head.”
I probably screamed louder than he did. “IS IT GONE!”,
“Hell nah its on the window, like it’s wants to eat me.”
All I could think, was I was glad the patient was delirium due to dementia, and had no Idea what was happening. The bat, just as terrified as we were, took refuge by crouching near the windshield post on the passenger side—twitching, wings tucked in, like it was just along for the ride. Mouth wide open like it was ready to attack at any moment. We didn’t dare do anything that would provoke it not even when we reached the hospital, and even then, We just rolled all the windows down hoping in coaxing it out before we got back in. A bat in the ambulance was not originally on our EMS bingo card: BUT! bat in the cab—check.
Through every ridiculous moment, through every call that tested us, Austin stood tall. We faced everything imaginable together—blood, heartbreak, hysterics, and the kind of nights that don’t leave you. And when he finally got the green light to leave for Basic Training and Air Assault School, I felt that strange mix of pride and ache. Like sending off a piece of yourself, knowing they’re ready, even if you’re not ready to let them go.
We still check in with each other. Not every day, not always with words—but enough. Just to make sure we’re both still good. Still growing into what comes next. And somehow, that’s enough.
There are more. Too many to name. But these—these are the people I turn to when the guilt gets loud, when the ghosts get close.
I ask them for redemption—not with those exact words, but in the way I talk, the way I listen, the way I let them see me when I feel unworthy of being seen. And they give it, in their own ways. In their encouragement. In their reminders that I’m not the sum of my worst nights. That even in the chaos, even in the brokenness, there’s still good in me.
And somehow, hearing it from them makes it feel a little more true.
Then it was therapy. Not the quick-fix kind, but the real kind. The sit-in-the-uncomfortable-truth kind. The kind where I had to peel back the armor and look at what was underneath—every cracked piece of me I’d tried to hide.
It was ugly.
There are setbacks. Nights when the nightmares still come, when the guilt wraps around my ribs like a vice. Days when I don’t want to talk, don’t want to be seen. But there are also small victories—moments when I laugh and it doesn’t feel forced. Nights when I sleep without waking up in a panic. Days when I feel like myself again—not the uniform, not the rank, just… me.
I’m learning to breathe again. Not those shallow, survival-mode breaths, but real ones. Deep ones. The kind that stretch your chest and remind you that you’re alive—not just existing, not just reacting, but living.
The healing isn’t over. I don’t know if it ever truly will be. Some things leave marks that never fade, only soften with time. But I carry it differently now. I’ve learned that strength isn’t in how much I can bury—it’s in how much I can face and still choose to move forward.
The war inside me still flares up. There are days it tries to reclaim ground I’ve fought so hard to take back. But now, I know how to fight it—not with denial, not with distraction. With truth. With connection. With the quiet courage to say, “I’m not okay today—and that’s alright.”
Because healing isn’t linear. It’s not a straight shot from broken to better. It’s a spiral. A messy, complicated, beautiful spiral that weaves through pain and peace, through relapses and recoveries.
And in that spiral, I’ve found something I never expected—hope. Not the naive kind. The kind born of battle. The kind that says, “I’ve been through hell, and I’m still here.”
Still standing. Still breathing. Still healing.
And maybe—just maybe—that’s enough.
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