Karen Lynn Vidra, The Texas Tornado, click
here to update your pages on AuthorsDen.
Paramedic Stories, Part XV: Suicide Attempt! (By Wendell P. Gilmarten, EMT) by Karen Lynn Vidra, The Texas Tornado
Monday, July 26, 2004
Rated "PG" by the Author.
A rookie paramedic tells of his most trying case involving a woman who tried to commit suicide. (She died later in the Emergency Room.)
I don't think I will ever forget her face or what happened to her. If it were not for her severe depression or her wanting to die, she might have still lived, and she would still be alive today.
She was a woman suffering from post-partem depression. She had three small kids, all under the age of five, and she just had her fourth one not even a month before The Call. She was married, and seemed happy with life, but underneath the facade and the cheerfulness of her nature lay a much darker, much sinister side that few people knew about. She was prone to bouts of severe depression, and there were times where she wanted nothing more than to kill herself or one of her children because she couldn't handle the demands of the kids or their constant need for attention. She was tired and mentally exhausted, and she wanted nothing more than to have a break from her home and from her family.
There would be days where it would be a struggle for her to get out of bed each and every morning because she was dog-tired, and it seemed that the very sight of her kids would send her into a torrent of tears on more than one occasion. Yet, she tried her best to raise her kids, and she tried her best to function, even under the most dire of circumstances.
I remember that day when the Call had been made. A man, obviously very distraught, had called 9-1-1 to report that his wife had been found lying on the ground, not moving, and she was unconscious. An open bottle of pills lay by her head, and he couldn't get her up. Whereupon, we drove our ambulance/rescue vehicle over to the residence, and we soon started tending to the stricken woman who still lay on the floor while her husband tried to deal with the kids, who were obviously very upset at the devastating sight of seeing their mother lying on the floor.
The woman's color was a sickly blue-grey color, and she appeared to be more dead than alive. Her eyes were closed, and when we peeled her eyes open, so as to check for a response, they were rolled back into their sockets, showing only the whites. She was limp and incredibly flaccid, with no apparent reflexes. We shook her, shouted her name over and over, and even rubbed her chest, but she continued to lie there, unresponding to our commands. She was barely breathing, and she looked like she was on her way out.
I tried to get an oropharyngeal airway down her throat, but then the woman started vomiting and choking, so I had to quickly suction her out before I attempted to reinsert the airway. Once I got it in (it was difficult at best), I attached an Ambu bag to it and started to manually breathe for the woman, and Pat, my partner, hooked her up to an EKG monitor. Her heart was barely beating, and it looked like it was going into V-fib, which told us that she was in big trouble. Pat started doing CPR on her by ripping her shirt open and started to pump her chest with both hands in a rapid, rhythmic manner, while I continued to breathe for her. Kendall started an I.V. line going, and we soon put the woman onto the stretcher, and we quickly took her outside, to the back of the ambulance, where we then loaded her in, still doing CPR in the process.
We got to the hospital in less than ten minutes. The woman was still asystole, without breath, without a pulse, and all we could do was continue to work on her until she was in the safety of the Emergency Room staff, where hopefully, they could revive her. For now, things did NOT look at all good for the woman, and it was completely out of our hands and up to God above if this woman was to survive or not.
******************************************************************************
The woman did not make it. She never responded to the treatment that the E.R. staff gave her, and after an hour of continous CPR and other resuscitative measures, the woman was pronounced dead. She wanted to die and she apparently got what she wanted. It was a sobering, hard-hitting look at how desperate some people are, and how some people can't cope with what is going on in their lives. To think of a young woman leaving a grief-stricken young husband and four tiny children behind made me sick, and even now I still have been plagued with nightmares. This woman could have been somebody, but she was so wrapped up in her own problems she saw no way out, so she decided to end her life in one of the worst ways possible.
A page-turning novel about a relationship between best friends that is interrupted because of betrayal , deceit, sexual promiscuity and pregnancy happens!
Rovella is a beautiful woman with a cold heart whom blames herself for an unfortunate old family secret that is literally ruining her life. This secret impedes a gorgeous woman from having happiness in her childhood, and throughout her life. Dark sec
I don't think I will ever forget her face or what happened to her. If it were not for her severe depression or her wanting to die, she might have still lived, and she would still be alive today.
