‘Finally, I knew what was happening to me’

Photo by Whitehorse Star

Michael Swainson’s final straw came on a Monday afternoon in March 2007.

The veteran medic was working in the Whitehorse ambulance station when a call came in at about 1 p.m. A young snowmobiler had been struck by a van as he tried to cross the Takhini Hot Springs Road.

“Even before I went out the door, I knew it wasn’t something I wanted to see,” Swainson said, recalling that day during an interview Thursday.

It wasn’t as if the senior medic hadn’t been to a tragic scene before.

After two decades as an emergency responder, he had been on more than 5,000 calls, but this one would prove to be his tipping point.

Swainson drove the ambulance to the scene. Today, his voice is still full of relief when he says there were two other attendants in the back of the vehicle, which allowed Swainson to stay back from the 16-year-old victim.

“My one son was 15 and the other was 17 when that happened, “ he says. “It was too close to home.”

The young man died, and Swainson filed the experience away with all the others he’d gathered during his time as a medic.

“I kept it to myself. I put it in my backpack of calls .... Every call you go to, you put another rock in there.”

But this last rock was too much.

Swainson found himself rambling in conversations, disconnected from what was happening around him.

When he could sleep, it would only ever be for a couple of hours – never a full night’s rest. He was disconnected from his wife and his boys.

“I was emotionally numb,” he says.

Eighteen months after the crash that killed the young snowmobiler, Swainson went in to his doctor’s office because something was very wrong. He couldn’t work, he recalls.

“I had a complete inability to cope with anything.”

Everyday situations filled him with stress and anxiety, a drastic change in a man who had built his career on staying calm in the most difficult of scenarios.

His doctor ordered Swainson off work, and scheduled him for a number of physical and psychological assessments.

In the weeks following that doctor’s appointment, Swainson first heard the words that would give him his life back: Post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

“I knew what PTSD was, but I never put it into the context of emergency workers,” Swainson says.

He had heard of the condition in the context of soldiers, who watched their friends die in combat, but it never occurred to him that seeing a boy his son’s age die would have the same effect.

In fact, there are three types of calls which have been identified as triggers for PTSD: Ones in which a child or young person is involved, especially if the responder has kids; ones where the victim is known to the responder; and failed rescues.

Swainson has experienced all of those. Most emergency responders have, and they are rarely talked about, he says.

“We’re supposed to be bullet-proof,” he says of ambulance attendants, firefighters and police officers.

Shortly after visiting his doctor, a trip to Vancouver confirmed the disability assessor’s suspicion and Swainson was diagnosed with PTSD.

“You know what I felt when I heard that?” he asks. “Relief! Finally, I knew what was happening to me. Finally I could do something.”

The first thing Swainson’s doctor did was prescribe medication and a regime of exercise and healthy eating.

Last May, Swainson said, he wanted to go back to work, but first he wanted to go to a treatment centre, one which specializes in helping emergency responders cope with post traumatic stress.

The West Coast Post-Trauma Retreat in Inverness in California was tailor-made for people like Swainson. Last July, he entered a five-day treatment program along with two other medics, two police officers and a dispatcher.

Although dispatchers do not actually go out on calls, Swainson said being on the other end of a phone can be just as stressful as being on the scene.

“It’s like herding cats,” he says of the co-ordination dispatchers are responsible for, all the while knowing precious seconds are ticking away on a person’s life.

At the California treatment centre, Swainson and his five cohorts were supported by for health professionals and a team of 16 peers who had all been down the PTSD road themselves.

Through group therapy sessions, education and even Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, Swainson and the others started on the road back to normalcy.

“When they said we were going to an AA meeting, I said, ‘Why do I need to do that?’” When he arrived, he learned that many of his fellow PTSD sufferers tried to drown their pain in alcohol.

Hearing other people’s stories was part of what helped Swainson climb back up from the numbness of PTSD, as was pinpointing the calls which affected him the most.

One woman couldn’t even speak without breaking into tears the first two days, Swainson recalls, and by the end of the week she was carrying on normal conversations.

“It gave me my life back,” he says of the experience.

Now Swainson wants to share the help he received with other emergency workers, many of whom he believes have no idea about the effects of their job on their psyche.

“Out of about 400 emergency responders, full-time and volunteer, in the Yukon, I am the first to stand up and say, ‘I have PTSD,’” he says.

One of the problems is that emergency responders don’t talk about their calls, he says. “We’re supposed to be bullet-proof.”

And in a small community such as the Yukon – especially for volunteer responders – the likelihood of coming upon a situation where people you know are involved is very high.

So Swainson is training to be a post traumatic stress peer counsellor.

He will never work in an ambulance again, he says – “That was never an option,” – but he wants to work with emergency personnel to identify the signs of the disorder before it gets out of control.

And even before he has completed the five core courses needed to accredit him as a peer debriefer (he has already finished one – suicide prevention), he hopes that by talking openly about his experience, he will help others come forward.

“I won’t be surprised if after this article is published, my phone rings and it’s someone saying, ‘This is how I’m feeling.’ .... I don’t have a problem with that at all. That’s what I want to happen.”