I’ve always imagined my first article to be a darkly worded and painted glimpse of a season of my life that would captivate my reader making them subscribe to this page. Wanting to know how I was able to change it all around. But what I’ve learned is that being both a procrastinator and perfectionist makes for a horrible productive writer. And what I wanted to finish seven months ago has yet to be started. So tonight, I write what my mind spews from thought and let my fingers tickle my laptop keyboard as my wife sleeps next to me snoring in bed.
Life is heavy and un-expecting. It is all too good and bad at the same time. High-highs of college graduations, making your first big ticket purchase of a home, or the exhilarating rush when the girl you love admits to loving you too and she becomes your wife! Bearing you babies! The highs of these events are so often tapered and muted by equally opposing low-lows. Unbelievable lows of divorces, financial struggles and repossessions, deaths and those same babies being born with genetic defects and devastating prognoses. Shaded in between the two opposing ends of what I am calling the Life Event Spectrum are varying shades of colors. And what our hearts, what our minds and souls are burdened with is to take these hues, these various shades of dark and bright colors of life events and paint a masterpiece of a life worth living.
I moonlight as an EMT (Emergency Medical Technician) in between my studies, and over the years I have had a few calls that I can never forget. As a new EMT (as many First Responder personnel also feel), exciting and memorable calls to me were those of MCIs (Mass Casualty Incident), penetrating and blunt force traumas from rollover crashes, sports injuries, demolitions and construction accidents to muggings. The bloodier, the cooler, more exhilarating and adrenaline pumping. But as I continued to practice medicine, I slowly began to understand that each of those “cool” cases was an unfortunate person, not just a “patient” or “case’’, but person that I had the opportunity of sharing a moment in time with. A fraction of a time of their life that I can invest into, speak life, plant a seed that can hopefully germinate much after I drop them off in a crowded, cold hospital emergency department never to see them again. Now, calls that I will never forget aren’t those of jagged exposed bones and eviscerations but those of heartache, those of souls lost and minds tortured. Needing relief to mental pain that though intangible is no less devastating.
One such a call was a middle aged, middle school music teacher who experiencing a low-low end of her Life Spectrum, cut both her wrist in an effort to commit suicide. I will never forget the brown of her eyes as she sobbed uncontrollably, staring down into my eyes apologizing in between gasps for what she’s done. While I knelt in front of her on one knee, looking back up applying pressure with my two gloved and bloodied hands to both her wrists. As the firefighters left the scene and my partner and police officers were gathering information for their reports, I spoke of her cat. And how friendly he was rubbing his body against my boot. Through her heartache, she managed to smile as I worked to control her bleeding, then bandaged, elevated her arms, and transitioned her for transport.
My partner drove for that call, while I held a conversation with her in the back of the ambulance, praying internally all the time for the perfect words to uplift her spirit. Our encounter ended twelve to fifteen minutes later in a psych-eval room of an emergency department. Where I had the privilege of sowing this seed after she hugged and thanked me. I placed a hand on her shoulder and said, “ I will never forget; once during my many years of depression, someone told me to ‘Always remember that seasons are seasonal’”. A seed spoken to me when I too was at a gloomy low and attempted multiple suicides. A seed that took several years to fully germinate to my full comprehension and appreciation of the wisdom.
If you find yourself reading this article, not on the bright colors of happy and exciting high-highs of your Life Event Spectrum but rather closer to your sad, lonely, solemn dark low-lows, remember the wisdom I was given so many years ago, that “seasons are seasonal”. Both the curse and blessing of time, is that it affords change that vacillates us between seasons from lows to highs and eventually right back down again. Knowing this, is the wisdom and importance of hope. For without hope, it is impossible to believe that things can and will get better than the present shade you are experiencing.
-FailureTested