I’m listening to The Doors. One of the first non-metal bands to captivate me in my adolescence. My middle son broke his arm yesterday on the trampoline. Instant panic when I saw the deformity in his distal humerus walking to the trampoline. We splinted his arm to his body He was casted and sent from our local hospital last night to the downtown childrens hospital to have pins inserted to hold the re-aligned bone in place. My wife stayed at the hospital with him, and spent the night downtown with him. I’m at home. The father and paramedic in me are both writhing over not being there with him, but I accept that me going down there and getting all panicky would help nothing. It still hurts though. This is one of those difficult self-talk moments.

Still being a paramedic technically it’s hard not to feel demoralized when my wife has to take the lead in a family emergency. She is completely capable and then some, that’s not intended to be slanderous, it’s just that that was my area of expertise. I shouldn’t have to have someone reminding me to be calm. I shouldn’t be failing my family like this. I shouldn’t think that way.

The music has shifted to Hypocrisy. Everything went well and he is awake now and feeling ok. He’ll be home this evening if all remains stable. One of the nice changes that comes with better acceptance of my injury (besides not putting myself down referring to it as anything else) is not completely shitting on myself. I wasn’t entirely useless yesterday; I helped in the ways that I could. Putting myself down hasn’t helped me heal one bit. Where once it motivated me to perform better it now causes me to give up and feel useless and hopeless. When those thoughts came I let them go. I didn’t fail anybody by staying home and making sure my other kids were looked after during all this. I still can’t help feeling some disappointment in the paramedic in me, but I’m injured. No worse than if I was physically hurt and couldn’t perform. I don’t know how well it will heal, or if it will at all beyond where I’m at. I’m placing that disappointment on the injury now though, not myself. Getting injured doesn’t make me a disappointment even if the nature of the injury is mental illness that carries a stigma in the world at large. I won’t change anyone else’s attitude about that until I change my own. Now on to Sepultura.