04:30 in the morning; I can hear her screaming. It’s loud. It’s piercing and it’s violent. Sometimes I think the screams are the worst. Other days I might say the smells or the tastes. But right here, right now, cast in the pale hues of a new morning when everyone in the house is still asleep—it’s the lament of her voice.
PTSD is a complex bedfellow—it does not care what kind of evening you had the night before. It doesn’t give the grace of warning, and it does not give a flying fuck if you’d rather be sleeping at some ungodly hour in the morning. It arrives like a remorseless storm.
In those first few moments, the ones where I am sitting alone and covered in a cold sweat sitting on the edge of the bed trying desperately to cling to sanity… those are among the loneliest moments I endure. I feel like a castaway. A man adrift and far removed from the world around him. As I regain a semblance of clarity and understanding at what has taken place, I take solace in knowing that my Sheena is still asleep next to me. Gertie, our little brindle princess follows Sheena’s lead.
I try to practice gratitude in these times. I attempt to focus on the glee I feel for being here as opposed to there. The place where the screams come from…
For a long time, when I was working as a medic, the city began to feel like a vacuum of depravity and inhumanity. The screams I was hearing come from a woman that we happened upon by accident. My partner and I were driving around the city, sipping our stale, cold coffees when I noticed her from the corner of my eye. I told Mosby to turn the wheel and head into the rear lot of some industrial business. There, splayed out on some craggy steel steps was a woman that had been assaulted, bloodied, and discarded.
She was a woman accustomed to the streets, but in my mind that did not mean she deserved the fate that had found her. She was in bad shape. We did the best we could, but all the way to the hospital, all she did was scream and wail. Until she didn’t. She coded on arrival at the ER. They tried. Pumped her full of fluids, plasma, everything. Whatever kind of beating she took was too severe for us to undo. She died. I was in the room when the doctor called TOD (time of death).
I don’t know why I stayed in that room so long afterward. Maybe I was hoping someone would come for her. But no one did. I was her last contact with the living world, and even that encounter had been violent. She spit at me, tried to kick and bite me—not out of malice, but survival.
I stood there, unable to offer words of comfort. Even if I had, I wouldn’t have believed them. At that stage of my career, the world had shown me too much darkness to trust in its goodness. So I said nothing, letting silence fill the space as the nurses cleaned up.
Eventually, Mosby, my partner, came back in and nudged me on the upper arm. I turned and he was holding a coffee that atypically boasted with steam. Hot coffee. A rarity in a paramedic’s world. I took it and said thanks. Then we cleared from the call. I took one sip of that gorgeous black jiggle juice before the tinny voice of dispatch broke in through our speakers, condemning us with another run. Both he and I put our coffees down in the holders knowing that these too were going to grow cold and stale. But that’s the thing… the screams never stop. Do they?
PTSD doesn’t let you forget, but it doesn’t get to take everything, either. It’s a storm I endure, but in its aftermath, I find small, steady reminders of why I keep going.
Because even when the screams don’t stop, neither do I.
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