She Died Before I Got There. Then She Spoke to Me Anyway.

The address came through routine.

Elderly female, unresponsive, no CPR in progress.

The kind of call that doesn’t make your heart race anymore.

You just… go.

We rolled up in silence.

No crowd.

No chaos.

Just the family out front with blank stares and trembling hands.

You know the look, they’ve already said goodbye.

They just want someone in uniform to confirm it.

We stepped in.

She was cold.

Not the kind of cold you try to reverse.

The kind that tells you you’re too late.

I didn't feel much.

Not then.

It wasn’t my emergency.

We weren’t the first crew.

We weren’t the last hope.

We just had to document it.

But That’s When It Started.

As I sat in the rig writing the narrative,

something strange happened.

I couldn’t stop hearing her.

Not out loud.

Not in some Hollywood whisper from the beyond.

But in my head, as if the chart was being narrated by a voice that wasn’t mine.

“She was in pain before anyone came.”

“You would’ve seen it if you looked at her hands.”

“She wasn’t ready to die.”

“She called you in her head but no one came.”

Line after line,

I tried to focus on the facts

What we found.

What we did.

What we didn't do.

But that voice kept pushing in.

Gentle. Sad. Accusing.

Not a ghost.

Not a hallucination.

Just... me.

I Realized What I Missed.

I hadn’t noticed the bruising on her upper arm.

I hadn't asked the family how long she’d been like that.

I hadn’t looked at the medicine bottles on the kitchen table.

Because she was already gone.

And yet, she was still teaching me something.

Some part of me was screaming for closure,

begging for meaning,

trying to rewrite the narrativenot with lies,

but with context I had ignored.

EMS Doesn’t Haunt You the Way People Think It Does.

It’s not always the trauma scenes.

Not always the screams or sirens or lost pulses.

Sometimes it’s the silence that gets in your bones.

The still calls.

The ones where no one was fighting.

No one was trying.

The ones where you're just there to clean up the story

but your gut tells you the story isn’t finished.

The Voice Wasn’t Her.

It Was Me.

It Was My Conscience Filling in the Gaps.

It was the medic in metrying to make sense of what didn’t make it into the chart.

Trying to build a bridge between what I saw

and what I should have seen.

And I think…we all hear that voice.

Eventually.

Some ignore it.

Some drown it out.

Some lose themselves trying to silence it.

But maybe we shouldn’t.

Maybe that voice isn’t a ghost.

Maybe it’s the best part of us

the part that still gives a damn.

Even after the call is over.

Even when the outcome can’t be changed.

Even when it hurts to listen.

What if the voice in your head isn’t a ghost

It’s your gut trying to make peace with what didn’t get charted?

__________________________

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