Author Matthew Heneghan

The Nightmare Diaries:

As a paramedic, you often carry far more than just the weight of a stretcher. Things come home with you. You don’t mean for them to, but they do. And sometimes, those things revisit your home many years after the fact.

I heard an old woman sobbing in my room this morning. It woke me from a dead sleep. Startled, sweaty, and a little frightened, I peered through the shadows of my room and looked for this poor old woman. Lingering just in front of my gaze, playing out like an ethereal vignette, was a recall of an elderly woman I had met years ago while still on the job.

I came to know her beneath a pale, grey sky at the start of a spring morning. She had called an ambulance because her husband would not wake from bed. While on the phone with dispatch, she had revealed that her husband was breathing. The dispatcher then attempted to coax the old woman on how to initiate CPR. The result being that with all her might, she pulled her breathless husband from bed. At least, doing so to the best of her abilities.

When my partner and I arrived, we entered into the home to observe an elderly man partially flung from bed. His torso rested on the floor while his legs remained intertwined with the blankets and duvet cover, grasping him like the tentacles of a scorned octopus. A weary, grief-stricken old woman stood near to him staring agonizingly toward Radnor and I.

I walked with haste into the bedroom and with Radnor’s help, carried the lifeless, clammy body of the old man into the living room. We worked on him vigorously. Throughout the ordeal, just beyond line of sight, my ears could hear this old matriarch sob and wail. She watched as we placed tubes in his mouth, intravenous lines in his arms, stickers and pads on his chest. With every compression, she would wince audibly. She stood nearer to the wall once back-up units had arrived. And when all was said and done, our efforts all exhausted in vain, I walked over to this crying silver-haired sage, and informed her that her husband was dead.

Cries that come from the newly bereft are of the most harrowing you will ever hear. So harrowing, in fact, that more than a decade later, and carried over the sinew of time and space, an old woman’s pleas can still be heard echoing on the breeze outside my window.

These are among the worst wake-ups I endure. I am unable to easily dismiss her rancid ululations as mere remembrances. I hear them in the present as clear as I heard them on the day my hands touched her departed husband’s inelastic chest. The prickles of his chest hair poked sharply through my gloved hand only to leave a sensation that persists to this very morning. Invisible scars of those who have touched death.

Time for a tea and a quiet place.

…A well lit, quiet place.

“The journey through sorrow is a path to wisdom, each step a lesson learned.”

— M. Heneghan