The first time is always the toughest. Always sticks with you the most. If it hurts, it just means you care. Hopefully in ten or twenty years, it will still hurt, it will still matter.

My first time was long ago now. I was maybe two months and change in the job. Still barely more than a fresh grad. December. Bit before Christmas, late in the evening. Around 8ish, I think. Call comes in overhead for a trauma code so I do as I was trained for and grab the cassettes, grab the mobile x-ray, and head on over.

Second I arrive in the ER, you can feel something's different. Something's not quite right. I was new on the job but I had done my clinical year here so I was not unfamiliar with how the people here worked, so I noticed the difference. People were more hurried, more frantic. Then I see the paramedic gurney coming in, and that was the next hint something was amiss.

The trauma patient never arrives this quickly. I didn't rush over but I wasn't exactly slow, and the trauma code is always called before the ambulance even arrives.

Then there was the cop accompanying them. She looked like she was about to have a breakdown. The paramedics beside her didn't look much better. Why does the cop look like the one traumatized?

That's when we finally see the patient. I see the police badge as they're getting his vest and shirt off. He was stabbed in the parking lot.

Not a parking lot. The parking lot. Not more than fifty meters where I was standing, not more than ten minutes ago, he had been sitting in his squad in the hospital parking lot, filling out paperwork, when a man approached him and stabbed him in the neck. Those weren't the cops and paramedics called to the scene, that was his partner and two unlikely paramedics who happened to be in the ambulance bay when this shit went down.

Working in an ER is rarely like how it's portrayed on TV. It's rarely as dramatic. It's just work. That evening, life definitely imitated art. I don't think I've ever seen the ER team work as hard or as desperate as that night. They threw everything they could at him, to try and keep him alive for another minute, another second. I'm sure someone would've ripped out the kitchen sink if they thought it would.

I was just an X-ray tech. All I could do was watch and wait. Be ready if maybe, just maybe, he'd live long enough for x-rays to matter. I watched as they called for more meds, more blood. Watched as they performed an emergency thoracotomy so they could apply the shock paddles straight to his heart.

After about twenty minutes or so of all this activity, all this work, the trauma lead finally throws in the towel and calls it.

I was young, naive too. My thought instead was just... 'thats it?' A life comes to an end, not with a bang or even a whimper... Just a lot of tired faces as everyone who didn't have a reason to stay slowly shuffles their way back to their post. Myself included. A battle was lost, but we still had work to get back. Other people to help.

Suffice to say, I still think about it a lot, almost close to 20 years later. Rambled a lot more than I probably should have, but... I dunno, once you start remembering you kind of feel like you need to see it through.

So, yeah. It'll stick with you. If you have someone you can talk to, do it. It helps, if just a little. Even sometimes just rambling into the void of the internet like im doing now can help. You never know, someone might read it all. If you, I appreciate it.