Nobody Called It Avoidance. I Called It My Coping Skill.

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Nobody ever called it avoidance. They called it decompressing. Unwinding. Having a couple. Taking the edge off.

I worked EMS in a rural county outside Albuquerque. My old service used to tell us nobody dies in the ambulance — the reasoning being that you go offline for a few hours on protocols. So nobody ever did. It wasn't until years later that I found that a strange thing to be told by administration. At the time I just did my job.

One call still sits with me. This episode starts there, and then takes apart the thing I did afterward that I called coping.

00:00 The call — a rollover outside Albuquerque 02:59 Alcohol, GABA, and why it works 06:49 Don't stop cold on your own 08:07 What it does to your sleep 09:26 The part I don't tell people 12:03 What actually helps — and the dropout numbers 14:36 One thing, tonight

Episode zero of Trauma in Transit. First responder mental health, from the parking lot.

Season: PTSD, trauma, addiction, withdrawal, recovery, treatment.

Nurse Jules. Explicit.

#firstresponder #ernurse #paramedic #ptsd #shiftwork