I got up early and went fishing with my son on a friends boat. I haven’t seen the sun rise in a long time. It was beautiful and gave pause. Didn’t catch anything though. Back home I did some yardwork and chores. I cooked dinner. I spent some time thinking about collisions. The sights. The smells. The sound of the ‘jaws of life’ crunching the vehicle open to expose the patient(s). The fear, anger and pain. The unresponsive or deceased. The car accident is an affront to the sanctity of the illusion of safety. That little moving fortress isn’t so armoured.

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As the THC tickles my mind I’m given to pondering once more. I survived a theme park yesterday. The crowds, the noise, the intrusions of my personal space, the line-up with the kid screaming like an injured baby in a car accident. I got through it. I held my rock, clenched my jaw, used my aroma therapy and indulged in some weed vaping. I generally avoided rides except for the ones in the kids area. A roller-coaster that mimics a death-dive toward the ground is not my idea of fun. I even kept it together when our alternate accident-avoiding route home took me past a call location. My wife noted my tension, but I didn’t want to discuss it. I took a few breaths and came back to where I actually was. In the car, going home with my family.

It was late in the shift and we weren’t supposed to be where we were in the city, but we were on a wild goose chase to get a headlight changed while still in service. A woman went into labour and delivered at 18 or 19 weeks. The miniature dead human she birthed fit in the palm of a hand. The apartment seemed full of family of every generation, and the mom was needless to say devestated. She asked to hold the baby, and she cried while she cradled it. After what seemed like an eternity it was deemed time to transport. We put the baby in a placenta bag for the hospital. I went home after the shift not knowing what to feel. It was a cruel fact of life, but the clinicality of that view didn’t work. It wasn’t just fact. It was someone’s emotional experience. Occasionally it felt like an indignity to a patient to be the stranger involved in such an intimate moment of their life. Sometimes the emotion needs stifled to address the practical but it doesn’t always feel good to do so.

Cope while I verbally poke your wound.

I still can’t fully describe the feelings. Sadness, but there’s another dimension to it. Whatever it’s called I’m facing my fear of it. I’m not impervious. I’m supposed to feel, and it’s not always going to be pleasant.

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I’m listening to the new Vargrav album. Blue glow-in-the-dark vinyl. Tomorrow I go downtown to the train station with my OT. I’m calmer than I thought I would be, but it hasn’t left my mind much today regardless. I dealt with a shopping trip to a calmer costco than my local one (they do exist). I have functioned under stress before, it’s just that the definition of and response to stress has changed. The train station is crowded, noisy, unpredictable, disorienting. Exposure therapy. The more I do the more I question my real capacity to cope with the difficult times of my job moving forward. Maybe that’s just a symptom of vantage. Left foot, right foot.

I’m listening to Gehenna after an interlude involving an EP titled ‘Blood Must Be Shed’. Tomorrow will come and I’m going to have to deal with it. I shit on myself when I can’t do things as well as I want to. I know I’m far from unique in that but I draw depressing conclusions rather than seeing a work in progress. The daunting nature of common activities like navigating a train station leads me to believe I will always be more dysfunctional than I had been. I’m getting better at coping with some of those activities but I’m always worried I’ll discover the peak isn’t at a higher elevation. What if train station is now the highest level of complexity I can cope with?

Listening to At The Gates now. Slaughter Of The Soul. This album smacked me upside the head when I first heard it. Then as now I wasn’t sure of myself. Back then I wasn’t supposed to be though. Being a teenaged weed-loving metalhead left me feeling like an outcast among my ranks for wanting to become a paramedic. Outside of the outsiders. I wasn’t one of the kids who were supposed to pursue jobs like that. I disregarded all of that and here I am. Everyone is the same in a uniform. Nowadays mental illness seperates me from the herd. Like an animal that can smell the touch of a human on their young so too will my coworkers sense the change if I return. I get ahead of myself often. All I have to deal with tomorrow is tomorrow.