When Your Partner Dies

In paramedic school, somewhere between atropine and zygomatic arch, there needs to be a chapter on death and dying. For all the years I taught paramedics, I made sure that we at least touched on the whole Elizabeth Kubler-Ross death thing. However, most of us learned to deal with death by taking cues from the veterans on the department. We all brought our own belief systems to the job, but when it came to dealing with death and tragedy, we wanted to be like everyone else. If we cried, we did it alone; if we became depressed, we left it at home; and for the sake of saving face and being "one of the guys," we suffered in our self-imposed silence.

For the most part, we survived and came out on the other end with most of our emotional parts intact. We knew going into this business that there would be accident victims who were DRT (dead right there); that some heart attacks would not respond to aspirin, oxygen and morphine; and, for that matter, most codes were a lost cause. We worked like hell and pulled out all of the stops, literally emptying our drug box and sending someone back to the truck for more.

After a year or so, we all learned the drill and came to terms with our own ways of coping. But what happens when the next big loss is the person riding next to you in the front seat of the rescue? What happens when a fellow medic dies, a person who you just finished a shift with or who had a part in making you the medic you are today? People you laughed with, cried with, fought with, loved and hated, all within a 24-hour period. Just like family, no matter how strained things got, the minute the bells went off you knew your partner had your back. The death of a fellow medic is a scenario not covered in the books.

Pat and I were kindred spirits. We were both quirky and a little geeky and just about a half-beat out of step with most others, but we connected on a very basic level. We were driven by good patient care. Her gold lieutenant bars and training officer's badge did not get in the way of our sharing more than a few "aha" moments. She was always a receptive ear when I brought up some new twist on how we had always done things. We were like two school kids as we poured over journal articles or some obscure textbook we had found as we went digging for pearls of wisdom. I remember the night I told her about using lactated Ringer's for eye irrigation and how it was reported to be more comfortable for the patient. Pat later passed this pearl on to other medics as they rotated with her through training.

Pat and I became fast friends. I discovered her life partner was a nurse I had worked with years earlier when I had a part-time job at a local hospital. I liked her too. Pat was proud of the home she and her partner had built together. There were always conversations about the newest home improvement project the two of them were taking on. During some of our shifts together, the new swimming pool plan came up for brainstorming. We talked about designs and shapes and every other bit of minutia related to pools. Up until that point, the only thing I had known about pools was that I loved to swim in them and that their drain suction could be dangerous.

A couple of shifts later at dinner, I asked where the pool project was, and she said they were stuck on a final decision on the shape of the pool. We laughed and kidded around about how it should be in the shape of a caduceus or a QRS complex. The next shift, she told me they decided on the shape by tracing circles from the bottom of a drink glass.

The news that Pat had cancer hit me like a Sonny Liston left jab. Most of my experience with cancer came at 4 a.m. when a terminally ill cancer patient took his last breath and the panicked family dialed 9-1-1. I saw cancer as a death sentence, and from my 4 a.m. vantage point, it was a painful one. I feared for my friend's life. I wanted like hell to spend time with her talking about what she was going through and what I could do to help, but she had secluded herself during the initial phase of her diagnosis and treatment.