With 58 injured survivors and 12 fatalities, the Paramedics who responded to the Aurora theatre on July 20, 2012 were dealt a chaotic scene. The professional job in front of them was immense, to say nothing of how they must have been feeling on a personal level.
(Photo: Karl Gehring/The Denver Post )
To get some perspective on what an event such as this is like for a Paramedic, I headed to our Top Fire & EMT Blog: Rescuing Providence. Rescuing Providence is run by Captain Morse, is a Rescue Captain in Providence.
On his site site, Captain Morse has posted his thoughts and responses to Aurora, speaking as an EMT. I’ve included a few particularly poignant excerpts here, but head to Rescuing Providence to read the text in full.
When sorting through the bodies, and separating the living from the dead, then prioritizing those who survived, and those who probably will not, focus is key. Having a job to do, one that years of training and experience has prepared you for makes the images and sounds manageable, work to be done, wounds to heal, lives to save.
Moments such as those in Aurora, Colorado will never happened to the vast majority of people. These are isolated incidents, pockets of madness that crept up on some other people. But those people do exist, and they are no different from you or I, had no warning, have no answers and will live the rest of their lives flashing back to those pivotal moments.
Now that the shooting is over, and the healing begins, people will look to the police, medics, nurses, doctors and firefighters who responded to the scene for direction. How we act, and how we cope, and how we get on with our lives is of vital importance to those poor souls drowning in an ocean of grief.
There is always more work to do.
To read Captain Morse’s post in full, click here.
Our sincere Thanks to Captain Morse for allowing us to reproduce parts of his post in this blog posting.
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