Recently, I moved to a different area within the same service. I fancied somewhere a bit more rural, away from the smoke. And, just maybe, with a bit less stress. After my final shift working out of my old station, I parked up the ambulance, hung up the keys and went home. That was that.
Ambulance people are defined by the work they do. But one day you’re Joe Bloggs the paramedic, the next you’re out of the service and no longer that person. Who are you now? Where does life take you from there? I call it career bereavement. And often when ambulance workers retire, they’re suddenly stuck in an armchair all day, mulling over twenty or thirty years of trauma, with no one to talk to and all the horrible stuff they’ve dealt with swirling around their heads.
A few of my retired colleagues have come to me for help, including one chap who had moved abroad and I assumed was enjoying his retirement in the sun. One day, he phoned me in tears. He told me about his nightmares and that he felt betrayed by the ambulance service. He was one of the loveliest, most respected guys I’d ever worked with, and he thought he’d been part of this special organisation, something like a family. But when he retired, he realised he was just a counter in a game, swept off the board and forgotten. That might be fine if you worked in an office for thirty years, but not if you’ve been exposed to the things he was exposed to in the course of his career.
I spent a few hours on the phone to him and we’ve kept in contact since. I send him snippets of gossip from the station, so that he feels like he’s still part of the gang. I hope he takes some comfort from that. But the ambulance service shouldn’t be allowing people to feel neglected. This guy gained his mental scars serving his country with the ambulance service for decades, so why is the ambulance service not supporting him in his retirement? Recently, the manager who suggested a job on the frontline of the ambulance service might not be for me took me aside and said, ‘I was wrong, you’ve opened my eyes.’ But another manager told me that by raising awareness of mental illness, I was creating problems. He thought my campaigning was counter-productive, because it was making staff question themselves. I understood his point. There is a fine line. Can you offer too much support, so that people who don’t have a problem convince themselves they do have a problem? Maybe you can be too insistent:
‘Are you okay?’
‘Yes, I’m fine.’
‘Are you absolutely sure you’re okay?’
‘Yes! Stop mithering me about it!’
Maybe there is something to be said for being stoic and plodding along, like in the old days. And maybe there are psychiatrists who would say that some things are best left buried. But it’s not something I was able to do.
There are colleagues who haven’t spoken to me since I went down with PTSD and started talking about it. Maybe they think that mental illness is something that shouldn’t be discussed. Maybe they think I’m a loon. There were certainly people who thought I was milking the situation and enjoying the limelight a bit too much. One colleague said to me, ‘I’ve been in this job twenty-five years and I’ve never been given opportunities like you have.’ I replied, ‘It’s not about me getting to meet the royal family. It’s about highlighting the lack of support for mental illness in the service – the service you work for! It’s about the thousands of people we’ve been able to reach and help.’
If there are a couple of people who think I’m milking my PTSD and what I’m trying to achieve is a waste of time, I can live with that. Most people love what we’re doing; the naysayers are few and far between. The stigma of mental illness is being reduced on the shop floor, in that people are generally more accepting and open about the subject. We’ve got people talking, which is great. Senior managers and politicians have to take recommendations on board and join the discussion. Only then will major legislative changes be made. But it’s going to take time for that attitude to work its way up the food chain.
When I first started campaigning, the bosses really got on board with it. But as soon as Mind wound up their Blue Light Programme and my work with the royal family tailed off, so did the ambulance service’s enthusiasm. A phone number for a counsellor pinned to a notice board is not nearly enough.
An attempt to set up a network of emergency services across the whole of my region, so that they could share knowledge, also foundered. The hope was that if one service created something that worked, they could share their idea with the others. A few of the services who really wanted to improve their mental health provision bought into it, but not everyone shared their enthusiasm. It was disappointing, but I wasn’t surprised. I guess it’s something that still makes some people feel uncomfortable.
Indifference and scepticism are sometimes difficult to deal with. But – and this is a sentence I thought I’d never write – I found that poetry helped. While I was in America, I attended a couple of poetry readings in bars and discovered ‘If’ by Rudyard Kipling. It seemed like a good lesson in how to be a genuine person, which is what I was striving to be. Every now and again, when I’m feeling a bit unsure of myself or the direction I’ve taken, I’ll pull it up on my phone and reread it. There are certainly a few lines in there that any ambulance person can relate to, not least, ‘If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you, But make allowance for their doubting too.’
______
I’ve not become immune to the things I see, but I’ve become more hardened to them. They call that post traumatic resilience and growth. Being laid low by PTSD was a horrible time in my life, and sometimes when I think about what happened it scares me. But the crumbling brickwork that undermined me has been cemented solid. I’m no longer having counselling and I feel a lot more robust and able to deal with the trauma I’m exposed to. And it’s made me a better person. I’m more aware of my feelings and the feelings of people around me, and I draw strength from helping people through difficult times, whether they be current or former colleagues, people from other emergency services or other walks of life completely.
The story about the seven-week-old baby at the beginning of this book happened fairly recently. It is yet more proof that you never get used to dealing with jobs as harrowing as that. But you can learn how to soften the blow. After trying and failing to save that baby, I filled out the necessary paperwork before talking to the doctors and nurses in A&E. I found that therapeutic, and I think they did, too. Back at the station, I discussed it with my colleagues. They were genuinely interested from a technical point of view, because they wondered what they would have done in the same situation. I took a lot of comfort from just chewing the fat. Before my downfall, I might not have even mentioned it.
I made sure to tell my partner on the job, who was fairly new and had never dealt with anything as harrowing, that she didn’t have to bottle up what she’d seen, that she could have a chat with me any time and that there were other people who could help. I was also able to tell her that, despite being laid low by the things I’d seen in the past, I was still doing the very best I could.
I hadn’t slept for twenty-four hours, so you’d think I’d have staggered through my front door and crashed out on the sofa. Instead, I stared at the ceiling, haunted by the screams and laments of the baby’s parents. And when I finally drifted off, I had a nightmare, in which I saw the baby dying all over again. I can still see that baby now, even when I’m wide awake. I doubt I’ll ever forget her face. But now I feel strong enough to deal with the memory.