Fuck, I don’t even know for sure.

I think it was for a patient back in the early to mid nineties. I’m dubious on which patient, and whether or not that was the first time or just the first I remember.

If it’s the one I think, the guy had a stroke, and I knew pretty much right away what was going on, so I was dialing before I got to him (this was pre-cell phone ubiquity, so it was a cordless phone via landline). It’s kinda muddy in memory now, what with about two decades of other patients in similar situations, but I recall thinking “fuck, fuck, fuck” a lot while I was moving to him, and my heart pounding with the adrenaline of it.

Dude survived, and even partially recovered before another took him out.

However, it’s possible he wasn’t the first, and I’m mixing things up. But I’m mostly confident that I had never needed to use the service until I was working home health. Those early years blur really hard nowadays. I used to remember most of the patient’s names, stories they told, etc, but there’s rarely been opportunity to call on those memories, so they’ve faded.

Until I started having health issues of my own in my late thirties, I had never called 911 for anyone but a patient that I can recall. Even when I would witness something like a car wreck, someone else was already calling by the time I’d have been able to.

Generally though, since it was on the job, I was mostly focused on giving clear, concise information to expedite a fast and appropriate response. You default to training and let things go on autopilot so you can handle both the call and whatever help you’re providing. Like, you can’t think through CPR while also giving info to a dispatcher, monitoring the patient, and stuffing the emotional side of things down. There’s no room for thinking in any appreciable way.

I did have the fucking Beegees running through my head at one point though lol. Caught myself almost singing underneath the panting I was doing while trying to keep the pace up because all the instructors back then would use “staying alive” as the perfect rhythm for chest compressions.

That was still better than the first time I ever had to do CPR, but that’s a different subject.

Anyway, yeah, that’s what it was like that time, and I think it was the first.

I also remember the dispatcher having to ask me to repeat things because CPR is hard fucking exercise lol.

Thing is, most of the times i had to call 911 on the job were kinda dull? Heart attacks, falls, strokes, when you’re following procedures and are providing the kind of care you trained for, it doesn’t hit the same as when something is outside your training. Something like a plane crash, I’d have no clue what to do, so I expect I’d be wound up like a stolen watch. But basic first aid, CPR, that kind of thing, there’s not usually a reason to get worked up. It’s one of those things where the knowledge and familiarity really do make something that’s a major event on one hand just another day at work. You do the job, you do CPR and get EMS on the way, and then you go home.

There’s stuff that happened on the job that I never even mentioned when I’d get home because why would I? It was “just” another bad thing that got handled and was over. My best friend, it was only a few weeks ago that I mentioned having had human flesh fly in my mouth and get swallowed. You’d think I’d have had a story to tell when I got home, but nope. It happened, it was over, and I just wanted to chill and watch some tv, or play some d&d.

It’s fucking weird how my brain compartmentalized/s stuff like that. There’s this section that got labeled “weird work shit” that would only get pulled out when story time happened, and that wasn’t very common by that point.

It took really heavy shit for me to get home and want to talk about it. And by the time I was doing home health I had burnt out once or twice already in the nursing homes, so my threshold for heavy had shifted. You see enough death and misery, you don’t really get het up over a heart attack or stroke. So I don’t have many clear recollections of the 911 calls on the job.

Now, some of the other ones? Like when my parents had their heart attacks, or when I thought I was, those hit different. Mind you, I still compartmentalized the fuck out of it during the event, but I broke down hard once things were out of my hands. The 911 calls though, I was icy as fuck.

Tangential, but in the ER when a nurse was taking me back to my dad, she said that I seemed to be handling it really well because I cracked a joke of some kind. I didn’t even think, and said I was faking it until I could fall apart, which was the truth. I had crammed all the fear and worry down into a box in the corner so I could handle shit. And handle shit I did.

Then I went home and fell apart lol.