Riverpiratemedic

Rookie Ease up on yourself. You'll thank yourself for it in time. EMS practitioners are by far, the worst offenders of being one's own worst enemy when it comes to looking back and wondering what could have been. After 21 yrs in EMS (17 + as an ALS practitioner and 18 as an EMS educator) this I know; trauma patients die. A lot. And mostly in spite of what we do. Five years ago on Memorial day weekend, my brother in law suffered a cardiac arrest in the driveway. He was 43. I was with him the day before when he was complaining of palpitations and like all of us would, strongly advised him to go to to the ER. Not strongly enough. I, like you, beat myself up over it, over and over until the weeks turned into months and the months to years. In the process I began to lose my faith in my abilities as an ALS practitioner, insomnia set in, then came a couple of med errors, (strangely things continued to get worse despite my avoidance of the real issue), my long term relationship failed (not related to this incident), and my desire to care took flight. I was the poster child for EMS related stress and Accumulative Stress Disorder. I existed as a shell of myself for a little over two years, until I became seriously ill. The illness was the last straw and I ended up on stress leave. Four months later I walked away from my twenty year career without blinking an eye. After a year and a half of unemployment, some menial jobs for minumum wage, and five months on welfare, I returned to prehospital health care. I kicked my arse for a long while for not getting the help I needed when I needed it. Don't make the same mistakes many of us have made, Rookie; everyone makes a mistake or two, and most of them are not life critical. Some mistakes are, but I doubt yours was. Given the chance to do the call again, knowing what you know now, the outcome would be the same. Trauma patients die. A lot. If you need to speak with someone professionally have your service provider make the arrangements. Speak with someone outside of your service / agency. And stop beating yourself up over something that would have happened regardless of what you, I, or anyone else would have done. Also keep in mind; you weren't the only one on scene; if whatever it was had been obvious, someone else would have caught it. I don't have all the answers, just a lot of experiences of things not to do again. I wish you only the best, and then some. Take care of yourself, Paul