I've walked through people’s piss and blood, their shit and brains violently slapped across asphalt like melting pieces of jello while sizing up a situation and determining what my part in it will be.
I've ignored their cadenced, brain-stem driven breathing while
what’s left of them waits to die to get to the ones I can actually help.
After scraping up messes and saving or extending the lives we could we'd go back to our stations to eat our meals or whatever, joking about shit nobody should see or experience, the horrified looks on normal peoples’ faces, maybe talking about the weather and what our plans are for the next day and that’s pretty much it.
The tables turn a bit when I see someone I love experience some sort of event
that I know can truly cause them harm, real harm.
My psyche quakes and I involuntarily feel ragged ice move through me.
Watching her smile at me while posing for a picture, slipping fast, wedging that upper leg between two tree trunks and me, waiting for the sound of a snapping femur that I know is just a second away.
And then the pain.......
In those split seconds my mind is a firefighter's. I am already thinking of keeping the wound clean and isolated from the jungle it if is open. Making a traction splint out of branches and discarded rope to lesson the pain of a mid-shaft femur break. The extrication to our car which is a mile away through cow pastures all with two sets of nine year old twins in tow.
She is shaken and sore, but fine.
My psyche quakes and I involuntarily feel ragged ice move through me.
Watching her smile at me while posing for a picture, slipping fast, wedging that upper leg between two tree trunks and me, waiting for the sound of a snapping femur that I know is just a second away.
And then the pain.......
In those split seconds my mind is a firefighter's. I am already thinking of keeping the wound clean and isolated from the jungle it if is open. Making a traction splint out of branches and discarded rope to lesson the pain of a mid-shaft femur break. The extrication to our car which is a mile away through cow pastures all with two sets of nine year old twins in tow.
She is shaken and sore, but fine.
The event continues to haunt me in the quiet of the night, keeping me awake and,
because I know what can really happen, the fear of loss cuts me hard.
Love mixed with a bit of PTSD.
Echoes, man…….
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